The Wood

   As children, we'd always spent our summers playing in the wood.  Two scrawny boys could hide behind many a tree.
   Our father didn't see much harm in it, but he and mother would bicker and on occasion scream and holler over our being in the wood. 
   Whenever we could make out the words they were shouting at one another, we would run farther into the wood.  It may not have been the brightest idea, given what lay hidden in the deepest parts of the wood, but we were too young to be frightened and not old enough to be wise.
   On the days that it rained, we would stay indoors.  Father would read the paper, and mother would grin into her needlework.  When she would look over to us, on the floor and bored with our card game, she would smile with all of her teeth and then go back to grinning at her needle and thread.
   On one of those rainy days, father grunted and ruffled his paper.  It was something that he had done often, but he had never folded up the paper in a hurry and told mother to follow him like he did.
   We'd heard their bedroom door close, but try as we did--we couldn't hear what they were saying.  We looked at one another, and with that look we both thought, at least they're not yelling.
   They never told us what they'd talked about, but we were never allowed to go into the wood again.