I'm writing this short entry regarding my imaginary friends when I was very young on the advice of my good friend Quad. My ability to artfully produce creative fiction is somewhat stunted (as any reader of Limbo could tell you), so this will be a non-fiction entry. In truth, I have almost no memory of these events, as they happened when I was around 3-4 years old. Almost all of this information was gleaned from my parents and relatives who told me their versions of these stories when I was much older.

As you may have guessed, I had not one imaginary friend, but three. Their names were Hobbick, Gobbick and Nordick. Nordick was a girl. They were roughly the size of small dolls (9 inches/ 23cm or so) and slept in my chest-of-drawers. My parents were under the impression that I thought they were leprechauns or gnomes, based on some books and movies that I was interested in at the time (Note to HG&N: if you guys are real, no offense was meant if you are actually pixies or something).

Mainly the four of us would play games in my bedroom, the screened-in back porch or my backyard. According to my cousins, these were often vividly wild and boisterous imagination-based games that sometimes lasted for hours. My cousin Rick remembers an entire day before Thanksgiving when he, his sister, HG&N and I dashed madly about the wooded area behind his family's farm pretending to be wolves. We would howl very loudly and run as fast as we could, zigging and zagging until we were breathless. Then we would collapse, panting as we lay motionless among the dead leaves. Once we caught our breath, we would start all over again, racing until we were sweating inside our coats in the November chill.

My cousin David still tells his children a chilling ghost story where the 2(5) of us spooked ourselves to the point of hysteria by repeatedly peeking through the tiny, filthy window of my grandmothers sun-bleached wooden storage shed. Inside, barely visible in the half-light of a summer dusk, was a deeply hooded figure draped in tattered muslin that stared back at us with emotionless and empty eyes. HG&N became so frightened that they scampered up a nearby tree and jumped onto the roof of my grandmother's house. According to everyone there (cousins, grandma, aunts and uncles), I spent the next three hours waiting outside in the darkness, trying to coax them down.

Years later, when my grandmother passed away, David and I went to clean out that old wooden shed. Even though we were both in our twenties and out of college, we were breathless as we put the old iron key into the rusted lock that windy gray December afternoon. We had been laughing about the old "ghost story" on the drive down, but I can tell you that there was no laughter in either of our eyes as I turned that key. The wind gusted, making the trees of the nearby woods shake. I've always thought that it looks like the trees are laughing when that happens. The door stuck at first, then squealed open on rusty hinges, and we both immediately steppped back, for we could see that the phantom had been waiting for us all this time - a dusty, old, nylon-covered head and torso store manequin draped in what actually turned out to be a moth-eaten bolt of some fabric too rotted to even be identified. It fell apart like ashes when we touched it.

There are only a few other weird tales of my adventures with those three, and my parents still laugh as they recount my increasingly bizarre behavior over that particular 10-12 month period. Then, at the tail end of the same summer as the "ghost story" (incidentally, the summer before my first year in public school and kindergarten), my mother was weeding the front flower bed when she saw me hanging out of my bedroom window, waving like a lunatic and screaming "Goodbye! Goodbye!". She made me close the window and then came inside to see what the hell was going on. When she asked, I told her that Hobbick, Gobbick and Nordick said that they had to leave then, and that they had asked me to open the window for them, whereupon they floated away into the sky like baloons.