The Pricker Boy by Reade Scott Whinnem Page A

bristle. He doesn’t realize that he just stepped smack-dab into a tar pit that will gum him up for the remainder of the evening.
    “Uncle Stan!” Robin barks. “Girls like to do those things too!”
    “Sometimes I just cannot believe that I married this man,” my mother says, her hand slapping her forehead.
    “I was just saying …,” Dad starts, desperately searching for an explanation to retreat to. “I was just saying that boys, generally speaking now, not all boys mind you, I mean, not all girls don’t, but more boys like the woods than girls do. Just generally.”
    “Right,” my mother says. “Girls, you see, like to play with dolls and have tea parties.”
    “Well, more so than boys, yes,” my father says sheepishly.
    “Uncle Stan!” Robin says.
    I smile. I love my family’s hunger for debate. This argument could carry us safely through the end of the meal and across dessert, and surely my father will still be trying to defend himself as the dishes are drying in the rack.
    Nana blinks her eyes and looks up and down the table. “Where’s the Morgan boy?” she asks again.

W e all stand together for a moment next to the Widow’s Stone, the sentinel that marks the boundary between our land and the land that belongs to our spiked bogeyman. Before us, nets of intertwining thorns stretch off into the distance, broken only by the occasional stone wall or lonely tree. Our first destination, the Hawthorns, looms ahead. Their dying branches reach up toward the sky with open, brittle fingers. Their roots tangle in the dirt with those of the pricker bushes. Between us and the Hawthorns, a ragged path cuts through the brush.
    Emily takes the lead. As she goes, she plucks at the long thorn branches that loop across the path, passing them back to the next person, who in turn passes them to the next. I look around at the thorns. They really do seem endless.
    The Hawthorns are like three old women, frail andbarely breathing. Ancient and silent, the trees have never borne many leaves, but they sprout just enough to stay alive each spring. Parts of them are rotted, just waiting for the next hurricane to come along and shake the dead pieces to the ground. Other parts are clearly alive, flowing sap, but slowly, as if asleep. Each tree is covered with three-inch spikes. The Hawthorns sit about twenty feet from each other, and if you were to draw lines between them they would form a perfect triangle. In the middle of the triangle sits a granite boulder, about waist high with a flat top.
    Vivek touches a spike on one of the trees, then immediately jerks his hand away. “Sharp as they look,” he says, shaking his hand in the air.
    “Hawthorns are sometimes called witch trees,” Ronnie states. “In folklore, it was believed that hawthorns were witches that had turned themselves into trees. And … uh …”
    “Yes?” I prod him, already knowing the rest.
    “Well, according to what I’ve heard …”
    Emily breaks in. “According to legend, if you find several of them growing together, it’s best to stay far, far away. It’s said that only carnivorous insects will fertilize the flowers, and because of that, the flowers smell of death and murder.” She reaches out and plucks a clump of small red berries from the branches. “The fruit are called thorn apples and are believed to be poisonous. In one story, a mother applied the juice of the apples to her nipples to kill an unwanted baby.”
    “That’s ghastly,” Robin says. “Are you making this up? Because if you are, you can stop now.”
    “She’s not making it up,” I say. “And if you knew a flower from a fungus, you might know about hawthorns too.”
    Vivek bursts out laughing. “‘A flower from a fungus?’ You sound like you were raised in Munchkinland.”
    Emily clears her throat. “The fruit and the sap of the tree were supposedly used in witches’ potions. The tree is also very unlucky. You should never, ever bring a sprig or flower of the