Trader joes queen anne

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Hey everyone,
Unfortunately I am giving up my beautiful room just south of campus. If you’re looking for a single room, with a great view, for a cheap cost, I would love to potentially refer you to my landlord!
5 minute walk to UC Berkeley 10 minute walk to Downtown Berkeley 10 minute walk to Trader Joe’s
You will have to get internet wired (the $800 cost is what I paid total in rent + utilities + internet).
I can provide photos and references to those who message me with interest and background information!

This post is aimed to help users find new litrpg content on a month-to-month basis by constructing a list of new releases. This post will be updated based on multiple sources, including posting in this thread. This post is not meant to replace those submissions but to make it easier for users to find them.
The title should bring you to the relevant Reddit posting (if any) for comments, while the link column should bring you to the relevant content.

• Top comments should only be promotion. Any discussion about it should be in the comments below the promotion. If you notice an error, send me a direct message rather than post.
• When linking to an outside store use a plain link, affiliate links will be removed.
• Cross-promotions for progression fantasy without any gamelit elements are not included.
• Promoted Webseries are included only once every five months. If your Webseries does not include a significant number of chapters or pages at the time of promotion, I might delay inclusion until it does.

If you missed all the content from May, there were a record 76 ebook releases, 60 audiobooks (!!), 30 promoted webseries, 2 novella-sized releases and 5 omnibus releases of series.
Note: Some entries for May may have been noticed too late, in which case they are included on top for this month's list.
Here's what the new month brings you!
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Note: Given the enormous content released, I am now using three categories: new ebooks, simultaneous ebooks+audiobooks and audio releases of previous ebooks.
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Ebooks:

Title	Author	Link
Freshman Drive (Shoot #1)	Xander Boyce & Ryan DeBruyn	AMZ
Trials (Eternal Dominion #19)	Bern Dean	AMZ
Dawn of the Void #2	Phil Tucker	AMZ
Fortress Assault (Bonded Summoner #2)	JJ Bookerson	AMZ
Nova Era (Magidex Academy #1)	Alix Roche	AMZ
Recursion (Temple of Lycauges #1)	Ann Yann	AMZ
The Labyrinth (Voice of the Gods #5)	S.D. McKittrick	AMZ
A Harsh Welcome (Systemic Lands #1)	Mister Vii	AMZ

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​

Title	Author	Link	Date
Shattersoul (Ripple System #4)	Kyle Kirrin (Narrated by: Travis Baldree)	AMZ & AUD	6/2
Everyone's a Catgirl #1	DoubleBlind	AMZ	6/2
The Raging (System Dilemma #2)	DoomApricot 1402	AMZ	6/2
Ice Lord	Andrew G. Wood	AMZ	6/2
Safety in Numbers (Exiled Ascendants #1)	Ken Lange	AMZ	6/6
Reforged (Tower #2)	Seth Ring (Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin)	AMZ & AUD	6/6
Dungeon Delver (Victor of Tucson #2)	Plum Parrot (Narrated by: Robb Moreira)	AMZ & AUD	6/6
Empire of Cards (Convoker #1)	Andrew Karevik (Narrated by: Graham Halstead)	AUD	6/6
The Architects (A Student Wants to Live #2)	Boris Romanovsky (Narrated by: Nick Mondelli)	AUD	6/6
Monster Farmer #1	DB King (Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin)	AMZ & AUD	6/6
Dungeon Delving For Loot and Levels #3	M.E. Thorne (Narrated by: Katana Jones & Jonathan Waters)	AUD	6/6
A Wild Fey Has Appeared (Fantasia #1)	unice5656 (Narrated by: Diana Richardson)	AMZ & AUD	6/6
Star (Rise of the Last Star #4)	L.E. Miranda (Narrated by: Michael David Axtell)	AUD	6/6
The RPG Apocalypse #3	Jeremy Chambless (Narrated by: Maks Daniels)	AUD	6/6
Collect the World #1	Cameron Milan	AMZ	6/7
Primal Hunter #6	Zogarth	AMZ	6/9
Traitor GIT (Traclaon Armageddon #2)	Alex Kozlowski (Narrated by: Peter Berkrot)	AMZ & AUD	6/13
All the Skills #2	Honour Rae (Narrated by: Luke Daniels)	AMZ & AUD	6/13
Grand Skill (Salvos #6)	V.A. Lewis (Narrated by: Tess Irondale)	AUD	6/13
Reunion (Electrified #2)	J.D. Olson (Narrated by: Grace Rolek)	AUD	6/13
Apocalypse Comedy (Gravity and Divinity System #1)	Hunter Mythos (Narrated by: Zeno Robinson)	AUD	6/13
Making Friends (Apocalypse Parenting #2)	Erin Ampersand (Narrated by: Laurie Catherine Winkel)	AUD	6/13
Science (Erryn's World #4)	Cathfach (Narrated by: Peter Kenny)	AUD	6/13
War's Toll (Tower of Damnation #5)	Tristan H. Brown (Narrated by: Christopher Boucher)	AUD	6/13
The Portal of Altameda (Invasion #3)	Vasily Mahanenko	AMZ	6/14
Heroes of the Final Frontier: The World of Waldyra #5	Dem Mikhailov	AMZ	6/15
The Merchant System #5	Cobyboy	AMZ	6/15
Law of Consequences (Four Laws #8)	David Burke	AMZ	6/19
Origin (A Summoner Awakens #1)	Kerberos (Narrated by: Jeff Hays)	AMZ & AUD	6/20
Between a Rock and a Carapace (Chrysalis #4)	RinoZ	AMZ	6/20
Voidwalker (My Best Friend is an Eldritch Horror #4)	Actus	AMZ	6/20
Horde (I Don't Want to be the Hive Queen #2)	ValetheHowl (Narrated by: Michael Braun)	AUD	6/20
Crab On! (Twelfth Cataclysm #3)	Valerios	AMZ	6/20
Dawn of the Void #1	Phil Tucker (Narrated by: Tom Taylorson)	AUD	6/20
Solo Leveling #7	Chugong (Narrated by: Ki Hong Lee)	AUD	6/20
Humble Beginnings (Village Manager #1)	Andrew Karevik (Narrated by: Stewart Crank)	AUD	6/20
Divine Invasion (Resonance Cycle #1)	Aaron Renfroe	AMZ	6/20
Condemned (Lord Valesvky: Last of the Line #2)	Vasily Mahanenko	AMZ	6/21
Island Blues (Foodstuffs #5)	Arthur Stone	AMZ	6/21
Axe Druid Omnibus	Christopher Johns	OMN	6/21
On a Throne of Lies (Bad Guys #10)	Eric Ugland	AMZ	6/22
Origins (Rekindle Project #1)	Aqib Ali	AMZ	6/23
Chaos' Game #1	Alexey Svadkovsky	AMZ	6/26
Death: Genesis #3	Nicholas Searcy (Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer)	AMZ & AUD	6/27
Falling with Folded Wings #3	Plum Parrot (Narrated by: Christian J. Gilliland)	AMZ & AUD	6/27
Of Slicing Men (Good Guys #14)	Eric Ugland (Narrated by: Neil Hellegers)	AUD	6/27
Age of Steel (Rise of Mankind #4)	Jez Cajiao (Narrated by: Neil Hellegers)	AUD	6/27
System Error	Aaron Shih	AMZ	6/27
Tree of Aeons #2	Spaizzzer	AMZ	6/28
Hack, Slash and Burn #3	Todd Herzman	AMZ	6/30

So I’m not really sure what to think of this interaction and I haven’t been able to shake it off. The empathetic part of me just wants to believe this lady has some serious issues and is down on her luck. I was walking by the Trader Joe’s in Chelsea on 23rd when a dirty blonde, heavy set woman walked up to me. The first thing she asked is if I’m from around here and I said yes. Upon looking at her I noticed her face was swollen. She then told me that her boyfriend beat her up badly and she needed money to go get food and go to the shelter. I told her I didn’t have cash but was on the way to the grocery store and offered to buy her a meal. She got very weird with me and I don’t quite remember what she said exactly (this was a few months ago, in like January or February) but she basically refused my offer and started again telling me how she is trying to go uptown to a shelter and needs help getting there. At that point I felt a weird feeling in my gut, said I’m sorry and continued on with my day. I felt very guilty afterwards as my mother is a victim of domestic violence and this interaction disturbed me deeply. Flash forward to this past weekend, on Memorial Day. I am walking by Washington square park by myself and the same exact lady from months ago approached me again. Her face was red and swollen like last time, and she approached me saying “hey can you please help me out with” and then when we made eye contact, I kept walking forward and didn’t say anything. it almost seemed as if she recognized me as well and stopped mid sentence. I continued walking away from her but I am just very curious if this is scam. My imagination has been running wild and I hope this woman isn’t being beaten up and pimped out by some sicko. If anyone has had a similar interaction or knows the lady I am talking about please comment about your experience

Hey all,
I was brought on as a crew member a few months ago and recently my captain inquired on if I had any interest in pursuing the mate role. The one thing I was confused on was regarding the promotion ladder within Trader Joes, I’m not sure if this is something that varies by location and I imagine I’ll get more hard answers when I sit down with them but figured I’d ask here to.
Mainly I don’t understand how the positions past being a baseline crew member work? Things like section leaders, section orderers and CE leaders. What kind of a pay increase can one expect for taking on those responsibilities and how long do you normally have them before moving onto mate?
Was also curious on availability and what kind of shifts are expected from that kind of change up as I’ve heard some people talk about waterfall schedules which sound kind of dreadful to be honest.
Thanks!

Weird? Stupid?
"To the mystery person at Trader Joe's - it's been over a week since we last made eye contact, twice actually, both times longer than normal. This is crazy as I've never done anything like this but this encounter has been on mind...a lot. I know nothing about you yet

There are instincts that you develop when you’re a parent. If you don’t have any children it might be a little hard to understand. If you have a toddler, for example, and they’re in the other room and silent for more than a few seconds, there’s a good chance they’re up to no good. I take that back, most of the time they’re doing nothing, but you still have to check. You feel a compulsion to check. I don’t think it’s a learned skill, I think it’s an actual instinct.
Paleolithic parents who didn’t check on their toddlers every few minutes, just to double check that they weren’t being stalked by smilodons were unlikely to have grandchildren and pass on their genes. You just feel you need to check, like getting goosebumps, a compulsion. I suppose it’s the same reason little kids are always demanding you look at them and what they’re doing.
I think that instinct starts to atrophy as your kids grow. They start learning to do things for themselves, and before you know it, they’re after their own privacy, not your attention. I don’t think it ever goes away though. I expect, decades from now, my own grown kids will visit and bring my grandkids with them. And the second I hear a baby crying in the earliest morning hours, I’ll be alert and ready for anything, sure as any old soldier who hears his name whispered in the dark of night.
I felt that alarm just the other day. First time in years. My boy came home from riding bikes with a couple of his friends. I’m pretty sure they worked out a scam where they asked each of their parents for a different new console for Christmas, and now they spend their weekends traveling between the three houses so they can play on all of them.
We all live in a nice neighborhood. A newer development than the one I grew up in, same town though. It’s the kind of place where kids are always playing in the streets, and the cars all routinely do under 20. My wife and I make sure the kids have helmets and pads, and we’re fine with the boy going out biking with his friends, as long as they stay in the neighborhood.
You know, a lot of people in my generation take some weird sort of pride in how irresponsible we used to be when we were young. I never wore a helmet. Rode to places, without telling any adults, that we never should have ridden to. Me and my friends would make impromptu jumps off of makeshift ramps and try to do stupid tricks, based loosely on stunts we’d seen on TV. Other people my age seem to wax nostalgic for that stuff and pretend it makes them somehow better people. I don’t get it. Sometimes I look back and shudder. We were lucky we escaped with only occasional bruises and road burns. It could have gone so much worse.
My son and his buddies came bustling in the front door at about 2 PM on a Saturday. They did the usual thing of raiding the kitchen for juice and his mother’s brownies, and I took that as my cue to abandon the television in the living room for my office. I was hardly noticing the chaos, by this point, it was becoming a regular weekend occurrence. But as I was just leaving, I caught something in the chatter. My boy said something about, “... that guy who was following us.”
He hadn’t said it any louder or more clearly than anything else they’d been talking about, all that stuff I’d been filtering out. Yet some deeper core process in my brain stem heard it, interpreted it, then hit the red alert button. My blood ran cold and every hair on my skin stood at attention.
I turned around and asked “Somebody followed you? What are you talking about?” I wasn’t consciously aware of how strict and stern my voice came out, yet when the jovial smiles dropped off of their faces it was apparent that it had been so.
“Huh?” my son said, his voice high-pitched and talking fast, like when he thinks he’s in trouble and needs to explain. “We thought we saw somebody following us. There wasn’t though. We didn’t really see anybody and we’d just spooked ourselves.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Nothing? We really didn’t see anybody! Honest! I just saw something out of the corner of my eye! But there wasn’t really nobody there!”
“Yeah!,” said one of his buds. “Peripheral! Peripheral vision! I thought maybe I saw something too, but when I looked I didn’t see anything. I don’t have my glasses with me, but when I really looked I got a good look and there was nothing.”
The three boys had that semi-smiling but still concerned look that this was only a bizarre misunderstanding, but they were still being very sincere. “Were they in a car?”
“No, Dad, you don’t get it,” my boy continued, “They were small. We thought it was a kid.”
“Yeah,” said the third boy. “We thought maybe it was Tony Taylor’s stupid kid sister shadowing us. Getting close to throwing water balloons. Just cause she did that before.”
“If you didn’t get a good look how did you know it was a kid?”
“Because it was small!” my kid explained, though that wasn’t helping much. “What I mean is, at first I thought it was behind a little bush. It was way too small a bush to hide a grown-up. That’s why we thought it was probably Tony’s sister.”
“But you didn’t actually see Tony’s sister?” I asked.
“Nah,” said one of his buds. “And now that I think about it, that bush was probably too small for his sister too. It would have been silly. Like when a cartoon character hides behind a tiny object.”
“That’s why we think it was just in our heads,” explained the other boy, “That and the pole.”
“Yeah,” my son said. “The park on 14th and Taylor?” That was just a little community park, a single city block. Had a playground, lawn, a few trees, and some benches. “Anyway, we were riding past that, took a right on Taylor. And we were talking about how weird it would be if somebody really were following us. That’s when Brian thought he saw something. Behind a telephone pole.”
“I didn’t get a good look at it either,” the friend, Brian, “explained. Just thought I did. Know how you get up late at night to use the bathroom or whatever and you look down the hallway and you see a jacket or an office chair or something and because your eyes haven’t adjusted you think you see a ghost or burglar or something? Anyway, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned there wasn’t anything there.”
“Yeah, it was just like sometimes that happens, except this time it happened twice on the same bike ride, is all,” the other friend explained.
“And you’re sure there was nothing there?”
“Sure we’re sure,” my boy said. “We know because that time we checked. We each rode our bikes around the pole and there was nothing. Honest!”
“Hmmm,” I said. The whole thing seemed reasonable and nothing to be concerned about, you’d think.. The boys seemed to relax at my supposed acceptance. “Alright, sounds good. Hey, just let me know before you leave the house again, alright?” They all rushed to seem agreeable as I left the room, then quickly resumed their snacking and preceded to play their games.
I kept my ear out, just in case. My boy, at least this time, dutifully told me his friends were about to leave. He wasn’t very happy with me when I said they wouldn’t be riding home on their bikes, I was going to drive them home. The other boys didn’t complain, but I suppose it wasn’t their place, so my boy did the advocating for them, which I promptly ignored. I hate doing that, ignoring my kid’s talkback. My dad was the same way. It didn’t help that I struggled to get both of their bikes in the trunk, and it was a pain to get them back out again. My boy sulked in the front seat on the short ride back home. Arms folded on chest, eyes staring straight ahead, that lip thing they do. He seemed embarrassed for having what he thought was an over-protective parent. I suppose he was angry at me as well for acting, as far as he knew, irrationally. Maybe he thought he was being punished for some infraction he didn’t understand.
Well, it only got worse when we got home. I told him he wasn’t allowed to go out alone on his bike anymore. I’d only had to do that once before, when he was grounded, and back then he’d known exactly what he’d done wrong and he had it coming. Now? Well, he was confused, furious, maybe betrayed, probably a little brokenhearted? I can’t blame him. He tramped upstairs to his room to await the return of his mother, who was certain to give a sympathetic ear. I can’t imagine how upset he’ll be if he checks the garage tomorrow and finds I’ve removed his tires, just in case.
I wish I could explain it to him. I don’t even know how.
Where should I even begin? The town?
When I was about my son’s age I had just seen that movie, The Goonies. It had just come out in theaters. I really liked that movie, felt a strong connection. A lot of people do, can’t blame them, sort of a timeless classic. Except I wasn’t really into pirate’s treasure or the Fratellis, what really made me connect was a simple single shot, still in the first act. It’s right after they cross the threshold, and leave the house on their adventure. It was a shot of the boys, from above, maybe a crane shot or a helicopter shot, as they’re riding their bikes down a narrow forested lane, great big evergreen trees densely growing on the side of the road, they’re all wearing raincoats and the road is still wet from recent rain.
That was my childhood. I’ve spent my whole life in the Pacific Northwest. People talk to outsiders about the rain, and they might picture a lot of rainfall, but it’s not the volume, it’s the duration. We don’t get so much rain, it just drizzles slowly, on and on, for maybe eight or nine months out of the year. It doesn’t matter where I am, inside a house, traveling far abroad, anywhere I am I can close my eyes and still smell the air on a chilly afternoon, playing outdoors with my friends.
It’s not petrichor, that sudden intense smell you get when it first starts to rain after a long dry spell. No, this was almost the opposite, a clean smell, almost the opposite of a scent, since the rain seemed to scrub the air clean. The strongest scent and I mean that in the loosest sense possible, must have been the evergreen needles. Not pine needles, those were too strong, and there weren’t that many pines anyway. Douglas fir and red cedar predominated, again the root ‘domination’ seems hyperbole. Yet those scents were there, ephemeral as it is. Also, there was a sort of pleasant dirtiness to the smell, at least when you rode bikes. It wasn’t dirt, or mud, or dust. Dust couldn’t have existed except perhaps for a few fleeting weeks in August. I think, looking back, it was the mud puddles. All the potholes in all the asphalt suburban roads would fill up after rain with water the color of chocolate milk. We’d swerve our BMX bikes, or the knock-off brands, all the way across the street just to splash through those puddles and test our “suspensions.,” meaning our ankles and knees. The smell was always stronger after that. It had an earthiness to it. Perhaps it was petrichor’s lesser-known watery cousin.
There were other sensations too, permanently seared into my brain like grill marks. A constant chilliness that was easy to ignore, until you started working up a good heart rate on your bike, then you noticed your lungs were so cold it felt like burning. The sound of your tires on the wet pavement, particularly when careening downhill at high speed. For some reason, people in the mid-80s used to like to decorate their front porches with cheap, polyester windsocks. They were often vividly colored, usually rainbow, like prototype pride flags. When an occasional wind stirred up enough to gust, the windsocks would flap, and owning to the water-soaked polyester, make a wet slapping sound. It was loud, it was distinct, but you learned to ignore it as part of the background, along with the cawing of crows and distant passing cars.
That was my perception of Farmingham as a kid. The town itself? Just a typical Pacific Northwest town. That might not mean much for younger people or modern visitors, but there was a time when such towns were all the same. They were logging towns. It was the greatest resource of the area from the late 19th century, right up until about the 80s, when the whole thing collapsed. Portland, Seattle, they had a few things going on beyond just the timber industry, but all the hundreds of little towns and small cities revolved around logging, and my town was no exception.
I remember going to the museum. It had free admission, and it was a popular field trip destination for the local school system. It used to be the City Hall, a weird Queen Anne-style construction. Imagine a big Victorian house, but blown up to absurd proportions, and with all sorts of superfluous decorations. Made out of local timber, of course. They had a hall for art, I can’t even remember why, now. Maybe they were local artists. I only remember paintings of sailboats and topless women, which was a rare sight for a kid at the time. There was a hall filled with 19th-century household artifacts. Chamber pots and weird children's toys.
Then there was the logging section, which was the bulk of the museum. It’s strange how different things seemed to be in the early days of the logging industry, despite being only about a hundred years old, from my perspective in the 1980s. If you look back a hundred years from today, in the 1920s, you had automobiles, airplanes, electrical appliances, jazz music, radio programs, flappers, it doesn’t feel that far removed, does it? No TV, no internet, but it wouldn’t be that strange. 1880s? Different world.
Imagine red cedars, so big you could have a full logging crew, arms stretched out, just barely manage to encircle one for a photographer. Felling a single tree was the work of days. Men could rest and eat their lunches in the shelter of a cut made into a trunk, and not worry for safety or room. They had to cut their own little platforms into the trees many feet off the ground, just so the trunk was a little bit thinner, and thus hours of labor saved. They used those long, flexible two-man saws. And double-bit axes. They worked in the gloom of the shade with old gas lanterns. Once cut down from massive logs thirty feet in diameter, they’d float the logs downhill in sluices, like primitive wooden make-shift water slides. Or they’d haul them down to the nearest river, the logs pulled by donkeys on corduroy roads. They’d lay large amounts of grease on the roads, so the logs would slide easily. You could still smell the grease on the old tools on display in the museum. The bigger towns had streets where the loggers would slide the logs down greased skids all the way down to the sea, where they’d float in big logjams until the mills were ready for processing. They’d call such roads “skid-rows.” Because of all the activity, they’d end up being the worst parts of town. Local citizens wouldn’t want to live there, due to all the stink and noise. They’d be on the other side of the brothels and the opium dens. It would be the sort of place where the destitute and the insane would find themselves when they’d finally lost anything. To this day, “skidrow” remains a euphemism for the part of a city where the homeless encamp.
That was the lore I’d learned as a child. That was my “ancestry” I was supposed to respect and admire, which I did, wholeheartedly. There were things they left out, though. Things that you might have suspected, from a naive perspective, would be perfect for kids, all the folklore that came with the logging industry. The ghost stories, and the tall tales. I would have eaten that up. They do talk about that kind of thing in places far removed from the Pacific Northwest. But I had never heard about any of it. Things like the Hidebehind. No, that I’d have to discover for myself.
There were four of us on those bike adventures. Myself. Ralph, my best friend. A tough guy, the bad boy, the most worldly of us, which is a strange thing to say about an eight-year-old kid. India, an archetypal ‘80s tomboy. She was the coolest person I knew at the time. Looking back, I wonder what her home life was like. I think I remember problematic warning signs that I couldn’t have recognized when I was so young, but now raise flags. Then there was Ben. A goofy kid, a wild mop of hair, coke bottle glasses, type 1 diabetic which seemed to make him both a bit pampered by his mother, who was in charge of all his insulin, diet, and schedule, and conversely a real risk taker when she wasn’t around.
When we first saw it…
No, wait. This was the problem with starting the story. Where does it all begin? I’ll need to talk about my Grandfather as well. I’ve had two different perspectives on my Grandfather, on the man that he was. The first was the healthy able-bodied grandparent I’d known as a young child. Then there was the man, as I learned about him after he had passed.
There was a middle period, from when I was 6 to when I was 16, when I hardly understood him at all, as he was hit with a double whammy of both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's. His decline into an invalid was both steep and long drawn out. That part didn’t reflect who he was as a person.
What did I know of him when I was little? Well I knew he and my grandmother had a nice big house and some farmland, out in the broad flat valley north of Farmingham. Dairy country. It had been settled by Dutch immigrants back in the homesteading days. His family had been among the first pioneers in the county too. It didn’t register to me then that his surname was Norwegian, not Dutch. I knew he had served in the Navy in World War II, which I was immensely proud of for reasons I didn’t know why. I knew he had a job as a butcher in a nearby rural supermarket. He was a bit of a farmer too, more as a hobby and a side gig. He had a few cattle, but mostly grew and harvested hay to sell to the local dairies. I knew he had turned his garage into a machine shop, and could fix damn near anything. From the flat tires on my bicycle to the old flat-bed truck he’d haul hay with, to an old 1950s riding lawnmower he somehow managed to keep in working order. I knew he could draw a really cool cartoon cowboy, I knew he loved to watch football, and I knew the whiskers on his chin were very pokey, and they’d tickle you when he kissed you on the cheek, and that when you tried to rub the sensation away he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.
Then there were the parts of his life that I’d learn much later. Mostly from odd passing comments from relatives, or things I’d find in the public records. Like how he’d been a better grandfather than a father. Or how his life as I knew it had been a second, better life. He’d been born among the Norwegian settler community, way up in the deep, dark, forest-shrouded hills that rimmed the valley. He’d been a logger in his youth. Technologically he was only a generation or two from the ones I’d learned about in the museum. They’d replaced donkeys with diesel engines and corduroy roads with narrow gauge rail. It was still the same job, though. Dirty, dangerous, dark. Way back into those woods, living in little logging camps, civilization was always a several-day hike out. It became a vulgar sort of profession, filled with violent men, reprobates, and thieves. When my grandfather’s father was murdered on his front porch by a lunatic claiming he’d been wronged somehow, my grandfather hiked out of there, got into town, and joined the Navy. He vowed never to go back. The things he’d seen out in those woods were no good. He’d kept that existence away from me. Anyways…
Tommy Barker was the first of us to go missing. I say ‘us’ as if I knew him personally. I didn’t. He went to Farmingham Middle School, other side of town, and several grades above us. From our perspective, he may as well have been an adult living overseas.
Yet it felt like we got to know him. His face was everywhere, on TV, all over telephone poles. Everybody was talking about him. After he didn’t return from a friend’s house, everybody just sort of assumed, or maybe hoped, that he’d just gotten lost, or was trapped somewhere. They searched all the parks. Backyards, junkyards, refrigerators, trunks. Old-fashioned refrigerators, back before suction seals, had a simple handle with a latch that opened when you pulled on it. It wasn’t a problem when the fridges were in use and filled with food. But by the 80s old broke-down refrigerators started filling up backyards and junkyards, and they became deathtraps for kids playing hide-and-seek. The only opened from the outside. I remember thinking Tommy Barker was a little old to have likely been playing hide-and-seek, but people checked everywhere anyway. They never found him.
That was about the first time we saw the Hidebehind. Ben said he thought he saw somebody following us, looked like, maybe, a kid. We’d just slowly huffed our way up a moderately steep hill, Farmingham is full of them, and when we paused for a breather at the top, Ben said he saw it down the hill, closer to the base. Yet when we turned to look there was nothing there. Ben said he’d just seen it duck behind a car. That wasn’t the sort of behavior of a random kid minding his own business. Yet the slope afforded us a view under the car’s carriage, and except for the four tires, there were no signs of any feet hiding behind the body. At first, we thought he was pulling our leg. When he insisted he wasn’t, we started to tease him a little. He must have been seeing things, on account of his poor vision and thick glasses. The fact that those glasses afforded him vision as good as or better than any of us wasn’t something we considered.
The next person to disappear was Amy Brooks. Fifth-grader. Next elementary school over. I remember it feeling like when you’re traveling down the freeway, and there’s a big thunderstorm way down the road, but it keeps getting closer, and closer. I don’t remember what she looked like. Her face wasn’t plastered everywhere like Tommy’s had been. She was mentioned on the regional news, out of Seattle, her and Tommy together. Two missing kids from the same town in a short amount of time. The implication was as obvious as it was depraved. They didn’t think the kids were getting lost anymore. They didn’t do very much searching of backyards. The narratives changed too. Teachers started talking a lot about stranger danger. Local TV channels started recycling old After School Specials and public service announcements about the subject.
I’m not sure who saw it next. I think it was Ben again. We took him seriously this time though. I think. The one I’m sure I remember was soon after, and that time it was India who first saw it. It’s still crystal clear in my memory, almost forty years later, because that was the time I first saw it too. We were riding through a four-way stop, an Idaho Stop before they called it that, when India slammed to a stop, locking up her coaster brakes and leaving a long black streak of rubber on a dry patch of pavement. We stopped quickly after and asked what the problem was. We could tell by her face she’d seen it. She was still looking at it.
“I see it,” she whispered, unnecessarily. We all followed her gaze. We were looking, I don’t know, ten seconds? Twenty? We believed everything she said, we just couldn’t see it.
“Where?” Ralph asked.
“Four blocks down,” she whispered. “On the left. See the red car? Kinda rusty?” There was indeed a big old Lincoln Continental, looking pretty ratty and worn. I focused on that, still seeing nothing. “Past that, just to its right. See the street light pole? It’s just behind that.”
We also saw the pole she was talking about. Metal. Aluminum, I’d have guessed. It had different color patches, like metallic flakeboard. Like it’d had been melted together out of scrap.
I could see that clearly even from that distance. I saw nothing behind it. I could see plenty of other things in the background, cars, houses, bushes, front lawns, beauty bark landscape.. There was no indication of anything behind that pole.
And then it moved. It had been right there where she said it had been, yet it had somehow perfectly blended into the landscape, a trick of perspective. We didn’t see it at all until it moved, and almost as fast it had disappeared behind that light pole. We only got a hint. Brown in color, about our height in size.
We screamed. Short little startled screams, the involuntary sort that just burst out of you. Then we turned and started to pedal like mad, thoroughly spooked. We made it to the intersection of the next block when it was Ralph who screeched to a halt and shouted, “Wait!”
We slowed down and stopped, perhaps not as eagerly as we’d done when India yelled. Ralph was looking back over his shoulder, looking at that metal pole. “Did anybody see it move again?’ he asked. We all shook our heads in the negative. Ralph didn’t notice, but of course, he didn’t really need an answer, of course we hadn’t been watching.
“If it didn’t move, then it’s still there!” Ralph explained the obvious. It took a second to sink in, despite the obvious. “C’mon!” he shouted, and to our surprise, before we could react, he turned and took off, straight down the road, straight to where that thing had been lurking.
We were incredulous, but something about his order made us all follow hot on his heels. He was a sort of natural leader. I thought it was total foolishness, but I wasn’t going to let him go alone. I think I got out, “Are you crazy?!”
The wind was blowing hard past our faces as we raced as fast as we could, it made it hard to hear. Ralph shouted his response. “If it’s hiding that means its afraid!” That seemed reasonable, if not totally accurate. Lions hide from their prey before they attack. Then again, they don’t wait around when the whole herd charges. Really, the pole was coming up so fast there wasn’t a whole lot of time to argue. “Just blast past and look!” Ralph added. “We’re too fast! It won’t catch us.”
Sure, I thought to myself. Except maybe Ben, who always lagged behind the rest of us in a race. The lion would get Ben if any of us.
We rushed past that pole and all turned our heads to look. “See!” Ralph shouted in triumph. There was simply nothing there. A metal streetlight pole and nothing more. We stopped pedaling yet still sped on. “Hang on,” Ralph said, and at the next intersection he took a fast looping curve that threatened to crash us all, but we managed and curved behind him. We all came to the pole again where we stopped to see up close that there was nothing there, despite what we had seen moments before.
“Maybe it bilocated,” Ben offered. We groaned. We were all thinking it, but I think we were dismissive because it wasn’t as cool a word as ‘teleport.”
“Maybe it just moved when we weren’t looking,” I offered. That hadn’t been long, but that didn’t mean anything if it moved fast. The four of us slowly looked up from the base of the pole to our immediate surroundings. There were bushes. A car in a carport covered by a tarpaulin. The carport itself. Garbage cans. Stumps. Of course the ever-present trees. Whatever it was it could have been hiding behind anything. Maybe it was. We looked. Maybe it would make itself seen. None of us wanted that. “OK, let’s get going,” Ralph said, and we did so.
I got home feeling pretty shaken that afternoon. I felt safe at home. Except for the front room, which had a big bay window looking out onto the street, and the people who lived across it. There were plenty of garbage cans and telephone poles and stumps that a small, fast thing might hide behind. No, I felt more comfortable in my bedroom. There was a window, but a great thick conical cypress tree grew right in front of it, reaching way up over the roof of the house. If anything, it offered ME a place to hide, and peer out onto the street to either side of the tree. It was protective, as good as any heavy blanket.