When The Winds Start Blowing...

In my early teens, the house was often a quiet tomb of books until my cousins arrived. Three of them would descend regularly, deposited by parents chasing long work hours or errands—a rhythmic abandonment that matched my own family’s schedule. My mother commuted out of the district, and my father was a ghost in the machine of his own job, leaving me in a solitude I was happy to break. My cousins were the antidote to the silence.

We treated the neighborhood less like a suburb and more like an untamed frontier. We were feral explorers, scouring the village for trinkets, racing until our lungs burned, and crossing rivers that smelled of wet earth and decay. It was an era where latchkey children were the norm, and though our games involved the metallic clatter of airguns, the heft of machetes, and the tension of drawn bows, we remained relatively safe. We were armed, yes, but we were boys—our mischief was contained, a closed loop of energy that rarely bled out to bother the neighbors.

I remember the humidity of that specific afternoon. We were returning from the junction, balancing hot boxes of Tasconi’s pizza on our handlebars, the smell of pepperoni, cheap mushrooms and yeast cutting through the heavy air. We were doubled up on bikes, laughing, our voices competing with the hum of traffic on a road that lacked sidewalks—a reminder that this wasn’t necessarily the wealthy side of town.

Ahead of us, two dogs navigated the asphalt shoulder: a mother and her puppy. They noticed us, skittish and wary. The mother, driven by an instinct to distance her young from our approaching noise, stepped nervously toward the center of the lane.

The car appeared like a sudden violence. It didn’t brake. It tore past us with a gust of wind that slapped our faces, followed instantly by a sickening, wet thud. The bumper caught the mother’s hind legs, sending her sliding nearly a hundred meters down the grit of the road. She didn’t die immediately. She lay there like a discarded rag, squealing—a high, piercing sound that seemed to tear the sky open. Her spine was visibly shattered. The most haunting image, however, was the silence of the puppy. It scrambled toward the yelping heap of its mother, clamping its jaws on her scruff, trying desperately to drag her broken body to safety.

We rode the rest of the way in a silence that felt heavier than the heat. We pushed the bikes behind the gate, the metal clicking softly, and retreated inside. We ate the pizza, which now tasted like grease and ash, while the neon colors of Bill & Ted flickered on the television. The movie’s laughter felt jarring, screeching against the memory of the dog’s cries still ringing in our ears.

We never spoke of it. In fact, we barely spoke like us ever again. The quarterly rampages through the neighborhood evaporated, replaced by stiff family gatherings where we sat politely, ignoring the call of the wild we once shared. It is strange how a single moment can act as a partition. I know that afternoon wasn’t the sole architect of our drifting apart—adulthood has a way of dismantling childhood bonds regardless—but we masked a collective shock that day. We splintered off into our own separate lives, managing our individual traumas in isolation, yet I suspect we are all still tethered together by that shared, inarticulate anguish we left on the roadside.