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Order this writing in the 2009 book Crawling Through the Dirt

The Toboggan

Adam Graupe

    During winters growing up I tobogganed with a friend on a hillside shadowed by pine trees, and he always gave excuses discouraging me to visit his house. What I remember best was how acne covered his face and his parents refused to purchase anything to treat it. He applied toothpaste to his face to dry up the pimples, and sometimes he forgot to clean it off before stepping onto the school bus.
    Ten years later, I held a package to deliver to his childhood home address. I pulled the delivery van up to the end of the driveway and gazed at his last name painted in yellow on the mailbox. I hesitated. I felt embarrassed about how the last moment I saw him, the night of our college graduation, we both had promise for the future and now here I sat in an idling delivery van with a parcel. He was probably well to do and either he or his parents might answer the door and ask some embarrassing questions about how I ended up a courier.
    I tried to see his house from the street but a grove of pine and birch blocked my view. I sped the van over a mile up the driveway and twenty feet to my left I noticed a bearded man in a white robe, and he carried a wooden cross as he strolled through a pasture. “Who the hell was that?” I wondered as I sped through a curve, and then I caught the first glimpse: there were at least forty junked cars surrounding the house.
    I steered past a pile of car tires stacked higher than my delivery van, and as I stepped out several rats scurried out at my boots—-I didn’t realize what they were at first and now I wonder how I had never seen a rat before that moment. Hundreds of whisky bottles littered the sand in front of the house. A grown person’s poop sat in a pile on the front deck, and underwear with brown stains the width of bicycle tires hung over the doorknob. I looked around the deck at various objects and noticed my friend’s old toboggan. My stomach recoiled, and my index finger trembled as I pressed it against the doorbell and braced myself.

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