There’s a very special place in Sinktown called Hidden Valley. It’s not far from the elementary school that Mehrzad attended. He’d heard of it a number of times before he ever saw it. He imagined that it must be in a deep, narrow ravine, easy to miss because of the overwhelming flatness of the Sink, not unlike the Underground Gardens in Fresno that he’d recently seen on a school field trip. In the Sink, something as ordinary as a hole in the ground could seem like a violation of the laws of Nature—an affront to God; hence wildly mysterious.

Mehrzad had a schoolmate named Seamus who lived in the neighborhood of the school. Sometimes Mehrzad would go to Seamus’ house after school to watch him torture his cat, wrestle a vicious German shepherd, or light a fire in a trash can. One day, after Seamus returned to school with stitches in his scalp from the German shepherd incident, he invited Mehrzad to go fishing with him at Hidden Valley. They dropped by Seamus’ house so he could pick up his .22 caliber rifle, then they cut through an orchard toward Hidden Valley.

Hidden Valley, it turned out, was not a valley at all, but a rather a city park drawn out across a shallow flood course, featuring a shallow, brownwater reservoir that seemed to be impersonating a pond, holding irrigation water from the adjacent Peoples Ditch. Only in Sinktown could this be called a park. As for the name, whoever came up with it must have had a chuckle.

Mehrzad looked down into the murky shallows as Seamus popped little yellow capsules into the water. Before long, pale carp carcasses began to float to the top of the motionless surface. Mehrzad concealed his horror as Seamus enumerated his success. When Seamus realized he was hogging all the fun, he offered up the rifle to Mehrzad. Mehrzad thanked him and declined. Once Seamus was out of shells and had completed the final tally, they turned back to his house. Mehrzad continued home from there, internalizing the anticlimax and the massacre.

© 2008 Dan J. Jensen