A soft whirring hummed through the four in the morning silence. Two bicycles, lights extinguished, rolled through the inky Virginia neighborhood.
The fat, smiling moon – a waxing gibbous for those who care about such things - had abandoned the June sky hours earlier. Off to the east, light pollution from the DC suburbs bleached the horizon. Here in Loudoun County, porchlights hinted at oversized houses on ten-acre lots, each home the size of a village church. Sycamores sprouted from shadowy dells. They were the sole remnants from the days when Holsteins polka dotted the land and filled the air with the tangy scent of their manure. The cows were long gone, but the wide-open sky remained.
A few muscular pumps at the pedals brought Sam’s bicycle atop a rise. On the downslope, captured air ballooned his jacket. Malik wheeled in his wake, skinny legs pushing the bike furiously forward. Malik’s pulse dropped a few beats with each rotation of his wheels as he became more and more confident of his escape from home.
“Looks like we did it, Malik,” Sam said, coasting with a backward peek. Neither boy wanted their parents to shut down this clandestine adventure. Especially not Malik. His parents believed Sam to be a bad influence. Or at least, that’s what his mother said after what happened on Halloween. His dad just gave him The Look, potent with unspoken and ominous power.
To Malik, Sam’s inventive ideas counteracted the boredom of rural life and the monotony of high school. Sam made Malik laugh. Sam took the world like a Rubik cube and twisted it around, changing Malik’s perspective. Malik knew Sam. His parents didn’t. Sam was cool. Sam was Malik’s best friend.
Five minutes later, the two bikes broke free from the subdivision and turned onto a narrow road. The darkness of hovering overhead tree branches, of bushes crowding the berm, and of the asphalt road forced Malik and Sam to slow down and flip on their lights.
Malik heard the vehicle’s engine before its lights flooded the pavement. A ratty black truck drove up beside the friends. Braking his bike to a stop behind Sam, Malik’s heartbeat sped back up. Three young men in denim jackets crowded the bench seat. A fourth worker grinned from his nest amid bales of straw piled in the pick-up’s rear.
“You doin’ OK?” said the man closest to the passenger side window. A smoldering cigarette dangled from his hand.
“Yes, sir,” said Sam. “We’re just fine. Thanks for asking.”
“OK. Be careful,” he said with a finger wag, then laughed. Malik saw he was missing a front tooth. The truck sped off, a hand lettered “Farm Use” sign swinging from where other vehicles displayed license plates.
“Whew,” said Sam. “At least it wasn’t one of the neighbors. Just farm guys.”
“My parents will have a total fit if they find out we did this, Sam.”
“We’re fine. This is a once-in-a-year opportunity. Let’s get going.”
Within ten minutes, paving gave way to gravel and dirt.
At first, the bikes wheeled easily but it didn’t take long for the bottom to fall out. A downhill trajectory emerged. Gravel grew scarce. Rocks the size of Malik’s fist coupled with long rut-like potholes and threatened the bike tires.
“Almost there, Malik.”
“Yeah. Oh, there’s the shack up ahead.”
They hopped off their bikes. The boys rolled them behind the outbuilding, away from the eyes of anyone else foolish enough to be on Indian Mound Road in the dead of night.
“I can smell the Potomac, can’t you, Sam?” Malik pulled an army blanket and water bottle from his bike’s panniers.
“Yeah. You bring your flashlight? I’ve got mine.”
“It’s right here. I think we’re all set. Left my phone at home just like you said.”
“Thanks. Just don’t want a text alert spoiling the vibe. If I’m right, this’ll be proof that those two little hills are really Native American burial mounds,” said Sam.
“I admit. I’m a doubter, but if they line up with the sunrise today, you win the bet. What was it we bet again, Sam?”
“Tickets to a Baltimore ball game.” Sam shone his flashlight around the clearing.
“Sounds good. And Sam, what was it you call today – some weird name. You say so much, Mr. Smarty.”
Sam gave a soft punch to his friend’s shoulder.
“Summer solstice, the longest day of the year. Com’on, we gotta go. Can’t miss sunrise.”
Sam led off toward a narrow footpath through the woods. A few days earlier, he and Malik had walked the trail as a rehearsal for this night-time excursion.
“Sam, this is, uh, different from before.” Malik turned to look back at his bike.
“Not having second thoughts, are you, Malik?”
“Oh, no.”
“It is creepy at night, though. If that’s what you’re thinking.” A rustling in the undergrowth made Sam’s flashlight jump.
“Just a fox or something, Sam.” Malik felt almost brave for a minute or two.
Malik’s mind turned back to the time his parents took the family to Luray Caverns. At one point, the guide turned off the lights so the tourists could experience total darkness. Tonight seemed just that dark to him, under the trees of the old farm woodlot. After a halting walk along the worn trail, the darkness thinned. The boys broke through into a large clearing.
The bluff lay high overlooking the Potomac River and sheltered two small hillocks near its lip. During their daytime visit, Malik and Sam saw Maryland farmland on the opposite shore, beginning behind a fringe of trees which hid the C&O Canal ruins. Tonight, in the dark, only a deep blackness between the sky and river hinted at Maryland’s landscape. To the right, the lights on top of the Pepco power plant in Maryland blinked off and on, ruining any imaginings of olden times.
The hillock closest to the river reached nearly twenty-five feet. The closer one, fifteen feet. Both were symmetrical domes, shaped like a basketball half or maybe, Malik thought, maybe flatter, like a grapefruit. A scrubby tree, shorter than Malik, sprouted out the side of the smaller mound, like a whisker missed by a razor.
The boys spread out their blanket on the ground, behind a slight rise. They stretched out on their bellies. Their view directly aligned with the midpoint of the two hills.
“Exactly right,” said Sam. “This is going to be great.” He pulled a palm-sized camera from his jeans. “Without our phones, need something to record this. You know, in case there’s any dispute. There’s a date and time stamp on it, too.”
A rustle came from the brush at the edge of the clearing.
“Maybe that fox or raccoon. Or possum – a little friendly possum,” said Malik. “Nothing to worry about. Right?”
“Right.”
Sam and Malik gossiped about high school. Sam struggled with calculus. Malik’s girlfriend was acting weird. Graduation couldn’t come soon enough.
Sam pulled out two snack bars.
“Want one? Chocolate and almonds, your favorite?”
“Sure.”
After munching down the snack, Malik couldn’t remember ever getting up at four in the morning. Maybe staying up until two or three, but not waking up at that horrible four o’clock hour. Malik pulled up the neck of his sweater. The ground under him lost its chill. He dozed off.
He roused, mumbling. Someone was shaking his shoulder and saying “Shh” at the same time. Confused to awaken on a blanket in the dark, his mind quickly cleared.
A pearly gray lightness could be seen over the top of the two mounds.
Sam’s smile glimmered at Malik.
“Get ready, buddy. Looking good so far. It’s coming,” Sam whispered.
The air split with the rumble of hoof beats, the cracking and snapping of branches, and the crash of bodies pushing through undergrowth. Malik and Sam’s heads swiveled upriver, like weathervanes in a storm. A herd of white-tailed deer burst from the western edge of the woods, to the boys’ left. A hundred or more does, bucks, and yearlings flowed into the clearing. Behind the eight-point leading stag strode an elegant doe with twin spindly-legged spotted fawns.
Malik, round-eyed, turned to Sam.
“Don’t ask me, man,” whispered Sam. “We better be quiet and just stay put here.”
Clustering around the mound, the deer blew, grunted, and sneezed in a cacophony of crowd noises. Every so often, one of the fawns bleated. Malik thought they acted like a theater audience waiting for the curtain to rise.
In the east, the horizon grew lighter. The eight-point buck slowly walked up to the top of the larger mound and turned east. A black smudge, silhouetted against the now-silver Potomac, grew larger, its movement emerging as flapping wings and pumping talons.
Sam’s slack-jawed mouth gaped. Malik stared.
An enormous white-headed eagle circled over the bunched deer. Light grew along the eastern horizon. The background hum of the deer evolved into the sound of people whispering.
Like a thunderclap (or maybe there was a thunderclap), the eagle alit onto the mound, beside the stag. In the blinding light of the rising sun, centered precisely in the midline of the mounds, the two became human as did the crowd of deer. Drums beat. Clothed in hides, their skin gleaming in the dawn light, the Native Americans chanted and danced. From the top of the large mound, first the shaman – his headdress of eagle feathers accenting every move – chanted a prayer as the chief, antlers on his headdress, offered a sacrifice of food in a woven basket.
The meaning was clear. The longest day of the year marked a critical time in the life of the Native Americans. Though they no longer lived in these lands, they remembered them and returned to honor the powers that made their life possible. They marked the cycles of the sun and moon with their yardsticks of earthen mounds.
With a staccato riff of drumming, the blessing ended and the Native Americans evaporated into thousands of glittering motes of dust.
Drumming, loud drumming, thudding thudding. Beating on his bedroom door.
“Malik, it’s nearly noon. C’mon, son, get going. You gonna sleep your life away? Today’s the longest day of the year in case you didn’t know. Don’t waste it.”
“OK, Dad, OK. I’m up.” Malik sat up on the edge of his bed, clearing the fog of sleep.
Snatches of Native American chanting, an eagle on the wing, Sam on his bike.
He’d have to ask Sam about the mounds. Maybe. Or maybe not. Probably just a dream. Sam would think he was a fool if he asked…
Remember Readability
A simple, yet critical step, in self-editing
A conscientious writer tailors their writing to their target audience. Let’s look at the above story as an example.
In “Indian Mound Road” I sought a YA readership. To make it acceptable to the adults who monitor youngster’s reading, I excluded foul language, sex, and violence. The one transgressive behavior is that the boys did sneak out at night. I believe most teens can identify with that behavior, even if they never do it.
The main characters are the same age as my target audience. This allows the young readers to slip with ease into the characters’ imaginary lives.
I kept the boys’ ethnicity and religion open. I did this to make the story welcoming to a range of readers.
I did not include skin color or racial characteristics. I steer away from such descriptors as one small effort to move away from categorizing people by the color of their skin. I don’t find it necessary and believe doing so can lead to stereotypical writing and thinking.
Then, after I finished, I took an easy, yet important, step. I checked the short story’s readability score.
Readability scores indicate how easy a bit of writing is to understand. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Flesch Reading Ease scores are the gold standard for American English. They were developed in the 1970s as a way to assure Navy personnel could understand written instructions. Since then, they have become incorporated as standard practice for many written communications and even required by law for certain documents.
Both scores are numerical. The Flesch Reading Ease score indicates how comprehensible a passage is. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand. The usual top score is 100. My short story rated “80.5” which satisfied me.
The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level assesses what American school grade level of education would be required to understand a passage. My story rated a “4.3” which means a child in the fourth grade should be able to understand it. So, for a YA story, “Indian Mound Road” should be okay.
Writing at lower grade levels and higher reader ease is appropriate for younger audiences, “fun” reading, and also for critical messages. As a public health physician, my goal was a sixth grade reading level for letters and press releases to the general public about serious health matters. I wanted to be as clear as possible when explaining to a person that they may have been exposed to the deadly disease of rabies. Other important communications have been required by law to be written at specific readability levels. For example, Pennsylvania requires automobile insurance policies be written at no greater than a ninth grade reading level.
On the other hand, when I am writing for a niche audience or a highly educated audience, lower readability ease and higher grade level scores may be appropriate.
To check your work’s readability, you can find free Flesch-Kincaid tools online and also in grammar software packages such as Grammarly and Microsoft Word. In Microsoft Word, the Flesch-Kincaid scores are part of the “Review” tool. Users may need to activate it as an option.
Once you have your score, you can tweak your writing until it is at the desired readability level. If the readability needs improvement, check for long, convoluted sentences and high falutin’ words. Simplify sentence structure. Shorten sentences. Use shorter, more common words. Then, recheck the scores.
Some readability information — for example, Microsoft Word — includes the percent of passive sentences. When writing for clarity, try to keep this number low or zero.
Did you notice any of these techniques as you read “Indian Mound Road?” What else did you observe? What decisions have you made for your writing to meet your audience’s needs? Have you included readability scores in your routine editing? We’d love to hear from you in the Comments Section.
Quickening
The unplanned lessons of childhood
Bored, I went to my bedroom,
reached in the peanut butter jar,
holes punched in the lid,
and grabbed the chrysalis.
Its papery husk felt like corn silk in my palm
as I watched TV with my brothers.
I felt life for the first time, fluttering inside.
Dreamed of the colorful butterfly growing within
and gingerly replaced it in the jar.
Another day and off the bus I raced
to check on my baby butterfly.
I found instead a dead brown moth,
its large wings crumpled in the glass prison.
It would be twenty years before
I felt that fluttering again
in my own belly.
But, I had learned,
and you survived.
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