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Once upon a time, a boy escaped from a place called Boone.
His family had always lived in the hills and hollers of Boone County. It was a dark place; the trees grew close and wild and the air felt heavy with the oppression of an oncoming storm even on the clearest of days. Plenty before him had tried to escape. His daddy had tried. His uncle had tried. His granddaddy had tried. All had failed.
His daddy’s daddy had ran all the way to Vietnam, tried to get lost in the deep green jungles of the war. But even there, he could feel the call of Boone singing through his blood.
Boone never let them go, and every time they would try and fail they'd get meaner and meaner, until one day all that hopelessness and all that meanness broke something open inside that boy's daddy, and a monster got in.
The boy was small and life had taught him to be quick, so when his momma shook him from his sleep and told him to run, he was halfway across the back field by the time the first shot rang out.
He was in the woods when he heard the second, and when he heard the third he knew that his daddy had finally left Boone the only way he knew how, and had taken the boy’s momma and sister with him.
The boy kept running, deeper and deeper into the dark and wild woods of the holler. There was no sound except the rustle of the trees in the still air and his own harsh breaths.
He ran, and he knew he wasn’t alone.
His whole life, he’d felt Boone’s presence like an itch on the back of his neck, like ever-present fingers just about to brush against his skin.
He knew he wasn’t the only one. He knew that feeling was why his daddy drank and why his uncle's arms were pocked with dark red marks scattered like constellations across the inside of his arms and legs.
Now, deep in the dark green tangle of the woods, the boy felt that heavy presence shift toward him; he could feel it the way he could feel a thunderhead coming in over the hills, crushing and cool and inevitable.
With excruciating slowness, the presence turned and fixed its terrible gaze directly on the boy. He froze, a pit opening up in his stomach.
With a terrible, mortal certainty, he knew that for the first time Boone’s massive gaze rested on him and him alone.
The weight of it was breathtaking.
He did not move. He did not breathe. He did not think. The world fell away, and he was blind, blind as a mouse in front of a snake is blind, senses turned white with panic.
Seconds passed, hours, an eternity.
And then, incredibly, the boy felt it turn away.
It passed him by like a predator brushing past in a dark wood, titanic and silent, toward the irresistible pull of death and misery that throbbed at the end of the green black tunnel of trees from where the boy had come.
Boone passed him by, and so the boy ran.
He kept running until he got to a place that was flat and wide and dry where nothing could hide and any trouble coming could be seen from a mile away.
And so it was that the boy escaped from a place called Boone.
And when that boy grew to be a man, he never forgot the weight of Boone’s eyes on him.
He never forgot the feeling of death brushing past him in the dark.
And he never forgot that in the end, his daddy had gotten him out after all.