Penpal-Creepypasta

Part 4: Maps

I once asked my mom why she left it on like that. My mom seemed to search for the explanation before she said:

"Well, Sweetie, Mrs. Maggie is sick a lot, and sometimes when she gets really sick, she gets confused. That's why she messes up yours and Josh's names sometimes. She doesn't mean to, but sometimes she just can't remember. She lives in that big house all by herself so it's ok if you talk to her when you swim in the lake, but when she invites you in you should keep saying 'no'. Be polite; her feelings won't get hurt."

"But she'll be less lonely when her husband comes home though, right? How long will he be away on business? It seems like he's always away."

My mom seemed to struggle and I could see that she had become very upset. Finally she answered:

"Honey... Tom's not going to come home. Tom's in heaven. He died years and years ago, but Mrs. Maggie doesn't remember. She gets confused and forgets, but Tom's not ever coming home. If someone moved back in with her she might even think it was Tom, but he's gone, Sweetie."

I would have only been around five or six when she told me that, and while I didn't understand it completely, I was still profoundly sad for Mrs. Maggie.

I know now that Mrs. Maggie had Alzheimer's. She and her husband Tom had had two sons: Chris and John. The two had worked out payment plans with the utility companies and paid for Mrs. Maggie's water and electricity, but they would never visit her. I don't know if something happened between them, or if it was the illness, or if they just lived too far away, but they never came around. I have no idea what they looked like, but there were times when Mrs. Maggie must have thought Josh and I looked like they did when they were children. Or maybe she saw what some part of her mind so desperately wanted her to see; ignoring the images transmitted down her optic nerve and just for a little while showing her what used to be. I realize only now how lonely she must have been.

During the summer after Kindergarten, before the events of "Balloons", Josh and I had taken to exploring the woods near my house, as well as the tributary of the lake. We knew that the woods between our houses were connected, and we thought it would be neat if the lake near my house was somehow connected to the creek around his, so we resolved ourselves to find out.

We were going to make maps.

The plan was to make two separate maps and then combine them. We would make one map exploring the area around the creek near his house, and make another following the outflow from my lake. Originally, we were going to make one map, but we realized that wasn't possible since I had started drawing the map of my area so huge that the route from his house wouldn't have been to scale. We kept the map from the lake at my house and the map from the creek at his house, and we would add to each when we stayed the night with each other.

For the first couple weeks it went really well. We would walk through the woods along the water and pause every couple minutes to add to the map, and it seemed like the two maps would come together any day. We had no equipment needed for the job—not even a compass—but we tried to make due. We had the idea to impale the earth with a stick when we had reached the end of a venture so that if we came upon the stick from the other direction the next weekend, we would know we had joined the maps. We might have been the world's worst cartographers. Eventually, however, the woods became too thick near the water coming from the lake and we were unable to proceed further. We lost interest in the whole project for a bit, and reduced our explorations significantly—though not completely—when we started selling snow cones.

After I showed my mom all the pictures I had taken home from school and she took away my snow cone machine, our interest in the maps revitalized. We had to come up with another plan. Although I didn't understand why, my mom had placed what I considered to be extremely severe restrictions on what I could do and where I could go, and I had to check in frequently if I went outside to play with Josh. This meant that we couldn't stay in the woods for hours and continue to look for a new path. We thought that we could just swim when we got to the cutoff in the woods, but that clearly wouldn't work since the map would get wet. We tried going faster when we were coming from Josh's house, but we eventually ran into the same problem. Then we had a brilliant idea.