“My Neighbors, The Vampires”

The summer they moved into 412 Timber Spring, the street had just been repaved.

That was the first thing I wrote down.

The road stayed black and soft for a week.

Bicycle tires left crescent marks in it.

Bare feet stuck if you stood too long.

Our parents kept telling us not to touch it, which made the road, briefly, the most touched thing in the neighborhood.

Timber Spring belonged to us in the summer.

Not legally.

Our parents paid the mortgages, watered the grass, complained about the HOA, and decided when we had to come inside.

But the street belonged to the kids.

Bikes lay sideways in driveways.

Somebody was always shouting somebody else's name from three houses down.

Capture the Flag began after dinner and ended whenever enough parents stepped outside and started calling children home.

We fought with plastic lightsabers beneath the streetlights.

We built ramps from warped plywood and bricks.

We rode to the community pool with towels around our necks and quarters in our shoes for the vending machine.

It was only a few streets away, but at nine years old, it felt like leaving town.

You knew which houses had dogs, which had trampolines, which refrigerators you were allowed to open, which mothers would feed you without asking whose child you were.

Everyone knew everyone.

Then there was the empty house across the street.

Red brick, white shutters, a magnolia tree in the front yard, a dry fountain with a stone elephant at its center, a brass knocker shaped like a moon.

The house had been waiting for several seasons.

Nothing happened there except the slow lean of the for sale sign and the ordinary trespasses of squirrels.

Then, one evening after dinner, a moving truck arrived without a name on its side.

That was the second thing I wrote down.