Prologue

The circle of fire spun incessantly in his mind. From then, until now.

He looked on as the flaming orange tire extinguished itself on the white snow. They all stood on the pond, laughing their guts out, as each one took their turn riding through the wall of flames. The small boy, then seven years old, watched in awe as his fearless older brother made another pass at the fire with his bike. Again, the tire caught fire from the gasoline that had been aimlessly poured onto the thin ice. He didn't know where the red gas can had come from. Maybe one of the neighborhood kids stole it from someones garage. Or maybe it was found among the other castaways in the junkyard that surrounded the pond.

He never thought about how or why a place like this existed until later in his life. As a boy, it was just another part of his limited reality. The ponds were in the external zone. It was the outer limit of where his parents would let him go. Although the parents knew the place existed, they thought that their instructions not to go there would be enough to stop their two young boys. For their youngest boy, it was a place of interdiction. The place to break rules.

The first time he had gone there with his brother, they had followed the small creek that ran throughout the middle of their subdivision in order to find its source. At the banks of the creek were large weeping willow trees. The long branches and vines of leaves canopied the small creek with shade. In the trees, they had played for hours and hours, always finding new adventures. The creek traversed a golden field of grass. When the creek reached the road, it passed below a large metal culvert, a large steel tube they could walk through. They threw rocks in the tube to hear the strange echoes it made and had braved through spider's webs filled with suspended insects. In the Winter, the creek would freeze and they walked and skated on the frozen waters. In Spring, they searched for tadpoles and frogs, pushed each other into the water to get "soakers" or wet feet, and even started an annual Mud Day. The melting snow flooded the field on both sides of the creek, leaving it the perfect place for the young boys to ride bikes and get really dirty. They'd ridden through the muddy creek waters and screamed with laughter. It was their playground. It belonged to them.

The Willow Creek cuts directly through the Lynndale Farms subdivision. At the highest hill in the company of homes, you see the creek meandering through the golden field, protected by the Willow tree guardians. It was a beautiful image to see coming home each day. But, just beyond the thicket of forest, in the back corner of the subdivision, was the source of this beauty, the ponds.

It had been some sort of junkyard. Old abandoned train cars were scattered tragically around the murky ponds. Farm equipment, tainted orange from years of rusting, deteriorated wooden crates, scrap metal, and curious metal barrels, unmarked and filled with something, had been strewed in all directions. Some of these barrels were seen peaking out of the dark waters of the pond, like an evil creature lurking in its lair.

The kids from the neighborhood never talked about the barrels. What was in them? How did they get there? They didn't care because it was all just part of the playground. How many times had the small boy put his little hands into the water grasping at frogs? How many times had he accidentally fallen into the deep lair of the silent barrels?

Years passed, the boys grew up and the ponds were forgotten. Then, their names had risen out of the murky depths onto the lips of the boy's mother. Perhaps this is why I got breast cancer? Maybe there was something that contaminated the drinking water? The ponds were close to the house. Their family hadn't known why or how she had gotten cancer and died. It was only after the boy himself had also gotten cancer that he thought that there was a connection between the two illnesses and the ponds.

The boy, now a man, had thought incessantly for nearly a decade about his illness and possible causes of it. Circling, circling in his mind like the flaming tire, burning across the pond.