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SUMMARY: A young woman recollects a childhood nightmare.

She slid back into the booth, corduroy pants whispering against the smooth vinyl, and looked at me curiously. Her hair fell back over her shoulder revealing a thin white scar from clavicle to lower ear. She regarded my look, almost accusingly, and pulled her hair back towards her face, covering the mark.
"What?" I asked. The cigarette I'd been trying (I haven't smoked in two years, and damned if I forgot how) to smoke burned up the filter and scalded my fingers. I flinched and screwed it out in the full ashtray.
"You look funny. Smoking, I mean," she smiled. Not a real smile, this one only breezed past her lips.
"I, uh..." I began to explain the cigarette but she waved the words away and grabbed the pack of filtered Camels off the table. She looked inside, took a mental inventory of the three sticks and pulled one out. After she lit it she nodded and smiled approvingly. I pictured her besides an open grave. Shovel leaning against dirt smudged bib overalls. That smile gracing her mouth while she clapped the dirt off her hands.
"Did I ever tell you about my fort? The one I built when I was eleven?" she asked.
"The one your brother, step brother, sorry, kicked down? Yeah, I think you told me that one already."
"No, I don't think I ever told you about it, I've told you of it. The one I told you was in passing. This one is a little bit darker." She smirked. Her cigarette twitched over the ashtray dropping snowflakes of ash. My stomach rose and fell and I gripped the table edge, my knuckles showing white.
*
The idea came to her while in her sleep, although it was not necessarily from a dream. Walls. That was all she could think of. To build walls. Something to protect from the outside.
Two days after the big idea she marked out a patch of ground using a measuring tape and chalk line taken from her stepfather's toolbox. She had dragged three 8X5' pieces of particle board from the back of a dumped Ford. The cinderblocks that were stacked neatly behind the tin shop that served as a storage unit for old records and expired Avon products were staggered around the square using ditch sludge to form a type of mortar. Once finished the walls stood four feet high to allow for slouching room. On top of the walls the boards were gingerly tossed as not to upset the already strained structure. Two left over bricks were placed inside to act as a table and chair. A small hole was dug just inside the door for a fire pit. The final piece of board was leaned against the opening creating a make shift door. It was finished in four days. On the fifth day it rained.
When it does rain in Fallon it pours, but in three second spurts. The clouds that have been circling over the mountains for weeks finally fill the valley and put a lid on the hot skillet of the desert. The air heats up and the humidity soaks your clothes. Then the clouds break with one crack of thunder. And it pours and stops, pours and stops, pours and stops, until the clouds get tired and go back above the mountains.
It was in the storm that started on the day after the fort was completed that the strange markings were made on the walls.