Mining

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She knew how to find the opening to the old mine shaft from years before, when her parents warned her to stay away, the ground may be unstable, they told her, old men once hunted for gold down there, they told her, and made tunnels and broke into caverns, they told her, as she watched their faces wrinkle with the fear of losing her, and her heart stored away this mystery for such a night as tonight, when the moon has dropped below the ridge of pine trees and this corner of the forest holds it breath, for her, a hush as she kicks through the flimsy board and turns on her flashlight, her skin now blue with the brightness of the bulb, her hand reaching backward for another hand, pulling him forward through the gloom, cobwebs against their lips and the tickle of a spider’s legs as it races away from a hand brushed across the rock wall. They tiptoe over rickety boards to the opening yawn of the old mining pit, shout down into it to hear their voices tremble through the rock, and this is how her voice comes back to her, an echo of words she has never said, words that shouldn’t belong to her but she has found, here tonight, gifts to her from the veins of mineral ores she cannot see beneath the dusty rocks, only the glint of mica in her flashlight as she races it across the dripping walls, and he stands, hands on the wire cage meant to keep them from falling into the old pit, they are trespassers protected from their own bravado, but he is falling and she cannot stop him, she can only want him back, can only promise that when they hazard their selves again out beneath the moonlight, when they quit the safety of this crumbling mine, she will not leave him right away.