We all know the story. A group of children learn of a horrible accident that left another child dead on the edge of town. With the body up for grabs, this tribe of curious kids sets out on an all-day hike to see the corpse and take one giant leap toward adulthood. Education through sweet, mysterious death.

Most of us have some variation of this story from our pasts. Me, I recall combing the woods near my house upon hearing that a kid had gone crazy after a bicycle wreck there. Word on the street was that the insane boy had a stick jabbed clean through his right hand and possibly one in his eye. He was said to be quite mad, possibly dangerous, and living like a primate in the cool darkness of the trees. Or he had died and was a feast for flies somewhere in the jungle-like woods not far from the school. It all depended on which neighborhood kid was telling the story that day.

I never found the crazed stick-boy, but the search for him shaped my future in ways I still don’t fully understand. I wanted to believe that something so chilling might be true.

I learned soon enough that death is not always the stuff of neighborhood legends. Death usually came stealthily and took the living down in ways that were cruel but short on drama. To me, that felt like a cheat. The cessation of life by itself is a powerful thing and I always felt that the circumstances should be as dramatic as a hurricane.

To the young me, death was sly and wicked and it did not play by any rules. I developed a healthy fear and respect of it, the way most of us fear and respect electricity.

I wonder how the concept of death is viewed by the kid who grows up in a calamitous inner city where its shadow falls frequently.

It was a Thursday night and I was downtown at the scene of a particularly nasty crash. A victim lay on the pavement, bleeding, unmoving and clearly damaged in mortal ways. A large group had gathered. Easily half the crowd consisted of children and they gawked at the carnage unflinchingly. They clutched skateboards or scooters and looked down upon the injured man, not with apprehension and fear, but with a certain savage curiosity that looked strange on their young faces.

It occurs to me that the kids who have grown up in the epicenter of the city probably know all about the business of an ambulance long before they can spell the word. Victims of old age or hard living are wheeled routinely from apartment house to hearse, and the swarms of young people are right there. There are knifings and accidents and brawls on the same sidewalks where kids walk to school. Why take a long, all-day hike to find one simple body next to the railroad tracks when death so frequently makes an appearance in the neighborhood?

It has to be hard for Hollywood to impress children who live in the throbbing hearts of cities. The sirens and screaming on television, many days, will be drowned out by the wailing and screeching right outside.

And where is the need for neighborhood legends, like the one about the boy with a stick through his hand, when violence and nastiness and all varieties of suffering are as easily accessed as the corner store? The downtown children do not need to make up bogeymen or invent horrible tales. Those things are as real and reliable as the ice cream trucks that roam through the downtown delivering frozen concoctions.

More times than I can count, I have found myself at the scene of something horrific, speaking to a child about what has happened. I look on at the carnage, turn to the first person next to me and ask what happened. In a cool, clear voice, a 7- or 8-year-old will describe with near apathy how the bleeding man on the grass, or the deceased woman in the mangled car, came to be that way.

I don’t propose that these early encounters with the mechanics of death are healthy or unhealthy. These children see it all before they lose their last baby tooth and for the most part, they seem uncorrupted. I can’t suggest that these kids would be better or worse off because of their experiences. It’s just another facet about downtown that makes me marvel and muse. In the inner city, reality does for children what only local lore can provide in the quieter sections of the world.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.