We left our toys in the yard sixty-some-odd years ago. You’d think, small as we were then, all the time since, it’d be impossible to find the old place.
I drove the avenues of childhood, past the gutted gas station, the place pop took us for soft serve on those summer days when I felt my feet cooking in my sneakers. A left turn where a magnificent camellia once dropped blooms. Only a stunted armature remained.
Dorothea murmured her doubts about the way. We shouldn’t’ve driven around the town’s tumbledown barricades in the first place, though they’d been forgotten by the local police long ago.
“Almost there,” I said, surveying yards of flat, hard earth. Plots in a communal graveyard of time. A few rusted cars remained. Tattered curtains tangled in broken front windows, yellow-white, patterns faded away.
Dorothea and I had been in the front yard when ma came out hollering with pop close behind. They scooped us up in parental arms, no time to grab so much as a change of clothes, tucked us into the back of the car to flee like everyone else. Never to return.
Back then we didn’t understand terms like first contact, impending arrival. Not us kids; maybe not the adults, either.
I didn’t remember the details anymore, the games we’d been playing, before it happened.
“Is that…?” I slowed, peering into the yard of a brick-fronted home with baby blue trim.
Bits of half-buried plastic clumped up on the near edge of the yard.
Arm hairs rose as I parked where pop used to every afternoon home from work. Dorothea peered around, patching past over present, same as I was.
She went to the eaten-through porch as though curious what had happened to furniture, carpets, potted plants. She put a foot on the first step, hesitated, then came back down the drive.
“I was here,” I said, gesturing at the front corner of yard, plastic shapes like fossils submerged in the earth. Memory started to sketch in, and I pointed across to where something had been flowering that day. Daffodils, maybe. Or gladiolus. “You were there, smelling the roses with a dolly, I think. Having a tea party?”
“Don’t think I ever did that. Brought them out for a—an expedition,” she said. Scraps of cloth and a chubby bone china arm poked up from the former flowerbed.
I knelt in the brittle dirt and dug one of those old toys from earth that had, over time, hardened like concrete.
Out came a dinosaur, anatomy warped and melted, cracked and blistered. Apatosaurus, I thought, surprised the name came so easy when I hadn’t so much as recalled its existence a moment before.
I put the dinosaur aside, then dug up another hunk of once-bright plastic. An army man emerged, followed by a stegosaur. The archaeological order became clear as I excavated.
“Must’ve been a grand battle of men against monsters,” I said to Dorothea, who leaned over to observe.
“Knowing you, the monsters were winning.”
Couldn’t argue that. She went to gather what remained among the flowerbeds.
The memory gained detail as I dug. A hazy weekend afternoon; ma sent us outside so she could clean. So she could listen to the reports of the approaching alien fleet, the imminent threat, without us overhearing. Afterward she’d call us back in, make us put our toys away, wash up for supper.
We didn’t get that far before the world crashed down in the form of a safety klaxon from the nearby weapons plant. An accident that required complete, immediate evacuation of our town, followed by a quarantine around it that had, technically, never been lifted.
Back then, I’d understood the plant as a place meant to keep us safe. Hadn’t realized it could be dangerous.
Our lives started over, hundreds of miles away. New school, new home, new toys.
I hadn’t been playing at a battle between monsters and men; not as far as I was concerned. Army men were the losing side, sure, but the dinosaurs were the good guys because they were bigger and stronger and sure to win. If our side had that kind of strength, there’d be nothing to fear, no matter who or what we were up against.
Another thing we hadn’t realized: an alien fleet brought greater dangers than war. Our all-too-human fear of the unknown, the actions we’d take to deny that fear and, at the same time, to justify it. The danger we put ourselves in as a civilization, a species, to ensure we struck first.
In the decades since, I’d convinced myself I was too young to understand at the time. And yet, those toys told a different story. Even if I hadn’t known the truth of the weapons plant on the edge of town, or why ma sent us outside when the news came on, that fear had infected me, too.
The war our planet prepared for never materialized. While most of humanity scrambled to build the deadliest weapons it could conceive of, a small faction scrambled to translate the communications the fleet sent ahead of itself. To understand, and to plead for peace.
Except there was no need to plead to the diplomatic mission they’d been from the start. No need to defend ourselves against a hand offered in friendship.
Our ruined town became a relic of fear, rightly forgotten. Better to focus on the future our two sides could forge, rather than the misbegotten past.
I dug out the last toys, arranged them around the crater. An alternating circle of good guys and bad facing each other after decades tumbled together. Maybe they could take it from the top. Try again, without words like good and bad in the mix.
Dorothea returned with a handful of cloth scraps and china shards. I gave the dinosaurs and men a last look, dusted my knees, and stood.
“Aren’t you bringing them along?” she asked.
“No need,” I said. “They’ll be fine as is.”