by and not try to catch you and capture you and put you in
the cage.
*
Everyone wanted to be caught and was terrified to be caught.
The cage was wooden and had pieces missing and broken. The
rope was just a piece of heavy rope one of the boys found
somewhere or sometimes even just a piece of clothesline stolen
from a backyard. You could hang there for as long as an hour
and the boys would threaten to leave you there and all the
girls would come and watch. And you would feel ashamed. To
be caught or not to be caught. *
When we played witch it was always the boys against the girls
and the boys always chased the girls and it was a hard chase
and we ran places we had never seen before and hid in places
we were afraid of. There was the street with the row houses
facing into it and then there were the back ways behind the
houses, and the distance between the back ways and the front
street connected by an occasional alley between the row houses
was enormous to a girl running. But we never went out of
these bounds, even when we reached the end of the boundaries
and a boy was right behind us. The street was long and at
each end it was bounded by another street and we never crossed
those streets. We never went past the two back ways on to
streets parallel to our own and we never went into foreign
back ways not behind our own houses. In this neighborhood
everyone had their block and you didn’t leave your block. Our
block was white and Jewish. The block across the street on
one end of our street was Polish Catholic. The block across
the street at the other end of our street was black. Even when
we played witch, no matter how hard you wanted to run and
get away, you never left the block.
*
I would play witch, racing heart.
*
I would play witch, wanting to be chased and caught, terrified
to be chased and caught, terrified not to be chased: racing
heart.
*
I would play witch, running, racing heart: running very fast,
running away, someone chasing: realizing: you have to slow
down to get caught: wanting to be caught: not slowing down.
*
I would play witch, already slow, barely chased, out of breath,
hiding, then wander back to where we had started, then wander
back to where the wooden cage was and see the girl hoisted in
the wooden cage, see the clothesline or rope tied to something
and the boys standing there looking up, hear the shrieking.
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