I pawed at the dirt faster while fretfully looking at the patio door. My hands reached for the moist earth under the fence, pulling and pulling. Beams of light at least shone and I stopped to observe my work. And what I feared would happen did. I was discovered.

“Šta radiš?” Amina said with an angered face, fearful she would get in trouble of my accord.

“Oh… I… uh…”

I stumbled, unsure what to say.

“Well?”

I sat on the wet grass and clutched my knees, distraught my secret would be uncovered.

“Why… on earth… are you digging a hole?” she asked, pondering with every word she spoke.

“Er… I wanted to have an escape hole. I mean, one that I could have a secret world. Like Narnia. So I could fly my kite and drive my pony through the Cheyenne Plains…”

I had no such pony. I had meant it in an imaginative sense, but she looked at me quizzically. At the time, I was 8 or 9 with a broad imagination that stunned the adults.

“We can use it together,” she decided after waiting several minutes. I knew her word would be final.

My eyes brightened but then dulled. What was the point of having a secret world if we had to share it?

She kneeled and helped me to softly put the soil back, covering the now-dimmed rays.

“When you use it, you will have to tell me. I don’t wanna get in trouble because of you. In fact, why don’t we just use it together? You don’t need to be alone. Or we can take turns,” she advised.

But my thoughts were on the hole. My escape was gone; I sadly looked at her and then at the burial mound of the sun. Somberly, we went back inside.

I never dug up my secret world again.

I lost the chance when, a year a later, bull-dozers smashed my “Cheyenne Plains” behind our house to make an apartment complex.