In the dark kitchen, I found the bucket with the snake guts, the two blind heads. Needed burying. My flashlight was drowned in Muskingum County, sunk with the crescent wrench and turkey baster, the bottles of pool cleaner and brake fluid, emptied and then filled again with rocks. But I didn’t need a flashlight. I had the moon. All the way to the back of the acreage, silver striking each leaf, I kept walking. I found the old goat path, gullied and pitted, crisscrossed with blackberry. I climbed up to the ridge. The buds stood on the dark trees, misformed elfin ears. The remnants of a peach orchard persisted below me on the coal company land. I could have buried the offal anywhere, but I kept walking. The bucket glowed white as new blossoms. I walked until the moon set, until the sky changed color on its way to morning. I wasn’t on any trail. I was looking for the right place.

PERLEY

Once I stopped taking my medicine I didn’t want to dig the portal in the gnome house anymore. Instead of digging under the ground, I wanted to go over the ground. I stood outside the gnome house and gazed nobly using my super-sensitive wolf vision to see beyond the next ridge and Altemonte came out and said, What are you looking at aren’t you going to help dig? And I said, What’s the farthest you’ve ever ranged? and he was like, You mean from my grandma’s house? This is the farthest. And I was like, I predict that we can range even farther because we have extremely strong legs, and we basically never get tired even though we stay up all night. The fact is we probably could range farther than we could dig and we could get to the elf world sooner. So Altemonte said, You want to range, okay let’s range.

So after that every night we ranged farther. The first night we made it to an ash log with oyster mushrooms on it and we picked the mushrooms for Grandma Barlow and Altemonte marked the log with a knot of joe-pye and then the next night we had our destination. Our destination was that joe-pye ash log and when we found it again we went a little farther. During the day, Grandma Barlow would say, Where did you find the oyster mushrooms and I knew that Altemonte didn’t want to lie to his grandma, so I would say, After school down by the creek, that’s where.

We ranged farther each night. Every night Altemonte tied a knot of joe-pye to a tree so we would know where we’d been and where we’d go next.