Nocturnal Emissions by Jeffrey Thomas Page B

illusion of warmth against the season’s chilly edge, and the ear-stabbing cracks of discharge seemed to carry more crisply.
    Jeremy jumped nimbly over a small brook, which had once been spanned by a board that partying teens had probably laid there. His landing heel sank in rich mud, and he was reminded of stories his parents used to tell him in a vain effort to keep him out of the swamp—that there was quicksand in there, and that some people who had ventured deeply into that state-protected wetland had never returned. If quicksand didn’t work, parents had other weapons to resort to.
    Indistinct ghostly lights had been glimpsed through the trees, and Allen himself, while smoking weed in Pine Grove with their cousin Jim, had witnessed a ball of light floating above the grass among the headstones…though nowadays he was inclined to think that it had been ball lightning or, more likely, a will-o’-the-wisp caused by marsh gas. At the time, in their teens, he and Jim had bolted out of the graveyard in a drug-heightened panic.
    To this day, Jeremy didn’t know how many of the stories he had heard about the swamp were believable, how many of its purported dangers were real…but with his own eyes he had seen a huge, dead snapping turtle as a boy, which other children had stoned to death when they found it crawling along a back road that bordered another edge of the swamp. That was a tangible enough bit of scariness. Mostly, however, Jeremy figured it was the swamp’s oasis of wilderness, its resistance to change or eradication in the heart of this town, that intimidated its inhabitants into building upon it with their imaginations if in no other manner.
    Jeremy crunched deeper into the woods, a blend of coniferous and decid-uous trees, their combined canopy blotting the sun as if the trunks were columns upholding the roof of a living cathedral. He found his eyes scanning the ground more carefully now, alert for snapping turtles lurking in moist shadows. As if an imp of the perverse sought to make him even more wary of the indigenous fauna, Jeremy recalled schoolboy whispers of pterodactyls dwelling deep in the swamp…and once when they were small and playing Frisbee in the graveyard, Allen had cried out and pointed into the air, but the great flying animal they saw—with its serpentine head cocked back—revealed itself after an astonishing few minutes to be a still impressive but not quite so terrifying blue heron. When he was older, and jogging Pine Grove’s paths, Allen reported seeing a deer standing at the edge of the forest. And only last year, on his way to work, Jeremy had seen a coyote run across the road in front of the town dump, which also bordered the swamp. On quiet nights, sometimes Jeremy could hear a chorus of coyotes howling distantly like a clan of anguished banshees.
    The sight of one such wild and potentially dangerous animal, prehistoric when compared to the dogs he had always owned, had exhilarated but vaguely unsettled him. Most of all, he had felt sympathy. Recently, a black bear had been treed and shot by police in the nearby city of Worcester , of all places. It was the fault of humans—all that over-development—driving these creatures from their secret hiding spots…out into the open.
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    There was a high metallic trill of cicadas, the swish and rustle of the brush and branches he pushed through, and the clink of the spent soda cans in the plastic bag he’d brought along, but the interior of the swamp muted all outside sound. No more lawnmowers, sirens, throbbing bass of car radios. It was all locked out by the sheer primeval weight of this forest with a swamp as its nucleus, which in fact Jeremy had never ventured in far enough to actually see.
    Though not really wanting to admit any anxiety to himself, Jeremy couldn’t help but wonder if he were still on the right path. Again, he and his brother had mostly come in the fall, and since he’d left the brook behind him his