Millican Lane

I was twelve.
Early fall.
On a dry, warm, breezy late afternoon school day,
I stood alone.
To my left,
a departing orange bus roared its disapproval,
to my right,
a dilapidated vegetable stand stood forlorn.
Before me,
a narrow, gravel pathway,
known for an unknown reason as Millican Lane,
ran plumb
up a steep, one hundred yard wooded incline,
from the heavily trafficked Pleasant Street
to the secluded, dirt family driveway.

Like the citified street-hawker of dubious wares,
who at the end of yet another long meager sales day,
finds his once natty, immaculate and eager suit of clothes
now disheveled, rumple and sullen,
I,
with one hand tightly clasping the sweaty handle of a leather briefcase,
and the other carelessly dangling a loosened tie,
wavered.

For half way up Millican Lane,
pacing arrthymic and vigilant by a two-story blood red house,
lurked a restive, neglected, and brutish
black Doberman.

The imminent daunting gauntlet of
sidestepping
lunges, snarls, nips, growls, barks and bared fangs,
negated the joyful release of being on my own.

In its place,
a perverse compulsion for torment arose.
The obvious solution of skipping the unmerciful, dogged hounding,
by simply walking through the woods,
never once crossed my tortuous thoughts.

I was between school and family,
but the two held fast within,
parasitical, constrictive and suffocating.

Light-headed,
I took a trembling, yet inescapable first step home.