DEAD MAN’S HILL
ALM No.93, September 2026
SHORT STORIES
On a bright, cloudless morning in the summer of 1994, Bobby Timmons made a decision.
He would think of it, years later, as the defining moment of his life. The moment from which all other moments seemed to flow. He never spoke of it because he worried that people wouldn’t understand what it meant to him, and that saying it out loud would somehow diminish it. And when he grew old, when his heart began to fail and the doors of time were closing shut, it wasn’t memories of graduations or weddings that came to him in the long, quiet nights. It was that summer morning, on the day he conquered Dead Man’s Hill…
#
Light was coming. The summer sun had yet to rise, but a thin seam of red lined the horizon, and light was coming.
Bobby Timmons, just ten years old, was walking his bike down the street. He wore a helmet, jeans, and his lucky red T-Shirt, the one with Ken Griffey Jr’s signature on the back right shoulder. The neighborhood was quiet except for the buzzing of the fluorescent streetlights overhead and the chirping of crickets in the grass. Every house was dark, every window curtained.
I could turn around, he thought. I could go back home right now and no one would know.
But he, Bobby, would know. Would not be able to look himself in the mirror if he chickened out again. His fingers tightened around the handlebars, the knuckles bleaching white, and he marched onward.
The bike was an old Schwinn. His dad had bought it from an estate sale for ten dollars, and it showed. The seat was ripped and pocked with teeth marks where the previous owner’s dog had mistaken it as a chew toy. Dime-sized flakes of blue paint were peeling from the frame. The chain was rusty and squealed like an injured animal whenever he got going at a decent clip. But he loved it just the same because it was his bike. His. And on it he was Jeff Gordon at the Daytona 500. Wyatt Earp riding down a dusty street at high noon. Marty McFly pushing eighty-eight miles per hour in a DeLorean, barreling through time toward the future.
And what would that future look like? he wondered.
He walked until the road, flat so far, suddenly inclined, then stopped dead in his tracks. He stood there for a long time, staring up at the steep wall of asphalt before him, rising into the sky like the first climb of a rollercoaster.
This, he and every other kid within a five-mile radius knew, was Dead Man’s Hill.
His mouth went dry. When he swallowed it felt like his throat was full of sand. He imagined he could hear all the shouts and raucous laughter of all the kids who had come to this hill, here in Babson Park, since it had been added to the neighborhood back in the early eighties. He tilted his head to one side, listening. Most of these ghostly voices, he realized, belonged to his peers, and they were speaking like jackhammers on pavement, taunting him.
“Quit being a scaredy-pants…Just do it already…Chicken!…What a wuss!”
“I’m not a wuss,” he answered firmly, clenching his jaw. “I’m not.”
Then he started pushing his bike up Dead Man’s Hill.
If he had a dollar for every time he’d made this climb, he’d be a mighty wealthy boy today. He’d certainly have a lot more money than the $12.73 he had stashed in his piggy bank back home. But that was alright because he got a good monthly allowance, and what he was searching for, in the pre-dawn light of early August, could not be bought, traded, or sold.
It could only be earned.
But sometimes that price was paid in tears and blood. Back in June a girl named Susan Collins had broken her arm here, and on the fourth of July it had been Connor Kabes who’d lost control and skidded across the pavement like a hockey puck over ice. And those were just the crashes he’d personally seen. How many other souls had met unlucky fates here? Fifty? A hundred?
Connor lived just across the street from the Timmons’s. Bobby remembered his mom’s lecture the night after she’d seen Connor limping home like a war-tested soldier.
“I don’t want you anywhere near that hill,” his Mom had said, tossing a salad at the dinner table. “Too dangerous. Someone’s going to get killed one of these days. Just you wait and see.” She looked to his Dad for some input but his eyes were focused on the living room TV. The Reds were playing and the race for the wild card was tight. She nudged him and said, “A little support would be nice.”
“Your mom’s right,” he said lazily, eyes still glued to the TV. “Can never be too careful out there.”
But after dinner, when Bobby was cleaning dishes and his mom was downstairs with the laundry, his father came up beside him. He glanced over both shoulders, as if making sure the coast was clear, then said in a low voice, “I’m going to tell you something, but I need you to keep it between us, okay?”
Bobby stopped scrubbing: “Okay.”
“All that stuff your Mom said about that hill? I think you should ignore it.”
Bobby blinked. “What?”
“Well, not all of it. She wants you to be safe, and so do I. But I also think a young boy needs a little risk in his life. A little adventure.”
These words stirred something in Bobby. He felt a flicker of heat deep in his chest. “You want me to go down Dead Man’s Hill?”
Through the floorboards, they heard the metallic clang of the dryer door closing shut. His dad crouched, meeting him at eye level. “I’m not saying I want you to. I’m saying that if you want to, you have my permission. Just don’t get caught.”
Footsteps, coming up the stairs.
“You think I can do it?” Bobby asked.
“No,” his father said, and Bobby’s heart sank…but only briefly. Because a second later his father added the words Bobby would carry with him like a talisman for the rest of his life. “I know you can.”
The basement door opened, and they both rushed to grab a plate and start scrubbing. Bobby, who was practically allergic to trouble, knew how guilty they looked, and his cheeks flushed red.
“What’s going on over there?” Mom asked, hamper in her arms, eyes narrowing.
Dad nodded toward the TV. “Reds hit a grand slam.”
When she turned to confirm this, his dad glanced down at Bobby and winked.
Now, a month later, Bobby trudged up the hill, pushing his bike against gravity’s strong pull and noting every pot hole and crack so he could avoid them on the way down (if I even make it down, he thought). His hands were trembling. He felt nervous, but not terrified. That alone was a small victory; he’d thought for sure he’d be scared enough to pee his pants. Then again, it wasn’t time yet. Oh no, not yet.
Finally he made it to the top. The climb had taken a toll on his legs and lungs so he leaned on his bike to catch his breath. Surveying the land below, he saw the tops of trees, thick and broccoli-like, and the roofs of houses. A few windows glowed now, and birds had begun to call, politely but firmly informing the crickets that the night shift was over. He stared down the long slope of the hill, and felt a shiver of fear on the nape of his neck.
Today was the last day of summer. Tomorrow the school would chime its bells and open its doors on another year. He would show up wearing the same backpack, same shoes, same uniform. He would probably sit at the same lunch table and fill his notebook with the same careless doodles.
But he would not be the same Bobby.
In years past, he’d hovered at the edge of the playground while games of tag burst and scattered around him. In the classroom he’d kept his eyes down, hands folded, praying the teacher wouldn’t call his name. Some days the only word he spoke was “here” during roll call, and other days not even that. It wasn’t that he had nothing to say. Quite the opposite, in fact. When a kid asked if he wanted to play, or a teacher called on him, he could feel something in him surge upward, fast and hopeful like a diver kicking for the surface. But then fear would seize him and drag him back down into the cold, icy depths. That fear followed him into the night. Lying in his bed, staring at the long shadows on his ceiling, he wondered if he would ever conquer it, or if he was simply born afraid and destined to feel silent and small forever.
For everyone in Babson Park, it had been the driest and hottest summer on record. But for Bobby Timmons, wrestling with his worries, it had been the darkest. At least until —
“I know you can.”
Now the line of red at the horizon had softened to a deep orange. The sun hadn’t yet risen, but the light, he knew, was coming.
Bobby’s palms were wet. He wiped them on his jeans. Then he flicked a cicada off his chewed up bike seat, swung a leg over, and gripped the handlebars tight.
Am I really doing this?
A sullen breeze blew through the trees, and Bobby imagined he could hear the leaves laughing at him.
“Scaredy-pants…Chicken!…Wuss!…Killed one of these days!”
He clamped his eyes shut and squeezed them tight. The ghostly voices quieted, just wind again, but inside him a new battle was being waged. His mind showed him the hill, clear and sharp as a photograph, and fear unlike he had ever felt closed around his chest like an iron fist. He could hear his pulse pounding in his ears. There was no way he could do this. No stinking way. He would have to climb off his bike and take the walk of shame back down the hill. No one would know, that was true. But it didn’t matter because the ghost voices were right. His dad was wrong. He couldn’t do it. The fear lived inside him, would always live inside him, and he would never —
He screamed.
It burst out of him like a geyser, a raw and primal AHHHH! that echoed through the empty streets. He beat his chest once, twice, like the mighty silverbacks he’d once seen at the Cincinnati zoo. His hands tightened on the handlebars. He twisted his grip and swore he heard the bike answer with a low, grumbling purr. Then he opened his eyes, and before his fear could grab hold again, he pushed off. Instantly the front tire dipped. The world tilted forward. And in no time at all he was speeding down Dead Man’s Hill like a freight train, faster than he’d ever gone, wind roaring in his ears and tearing tears from his eyes. His rusty chain squealed like a stuck pig. Trees blurred past him in long green streaks. Then for one terrible instant his exhilaration turned to panic. He was going too fast, far too fast, losing control. The bike struck a rock, wobbled, fishtailed. He nearly overcorrected and went toppling just like Connor Kabes, but he managed to maintain his balance, find his line. And now that he had it he knew he would not lose it again, and suddenly laughter tore out of him as he clung tight and the road blurred beneath his wheels.
And this was the time for living.
All thought vanished. There was nothing in this world but him and his bike, him and the road, him and the fierce, bursting feeling in his chest. Joy broke loose inside him like water from a dam, pure and unfiltered, the kind of joy that is the exclusive domain of children and summer mornings. He whooped. He howled. He felt himself flying. And when the steep hill finally leveled out and the bike thumped hard, he did not brake. He rode on, still somehow gaining speed, heart hammering and tires thrumming while his neighbors were brushing teeth and pouring coffee and never knowing that something important was happening just beyond their windows. Never knowing that in that moment, he really was Marty McFly, barreling toward the future — a new school year and a thousand unknown days beyond it — and knowing, for the first time in his life, that he could meet it head on. That he could conquer it. That he already had, on a hot, breathless August morning in the summer of 1994, on Dead Man’s Hill.
To his left the sun finally crested the horizon, and the light came. It poured through the trees in shimmering beams, bathing Bobby Timmons and the long stretch of road ahead of him in golden warmth.
Brandon Cook studied neuroscience and psychology at Indiana University before attending medical school. He has been reading and writing since he was a boy, heavily inspired by the works of Ray Bradbury. His other interests include backpacking with his dog, Cooper, landscape photography, and gardening. Currently he works as a specialist in cardiac rhythm medical devices, spending his days in the operating room and his nights writing fiction.
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