- They say you can see for miles if you get up on top of the biggest hill in town. They’re right, and you immediately regret testing it. You have nightmares for weeks afterwards. You should have listened when they told you to stay away from the hill.
- A train whistle wakes you up every night at 2 am. It must be right outside your window - you can feel the bed shaking as it thunders past. But the only tracks nearby haven’t been used in over 50 years.
- There’s a small patch of mold on the ceiling above your desk. Above all your desks - school, work, even at home. You scraped off the one at home one night, and found that it had tripled in size everywhere else the next day.
- There is fog covering the low valleys in the early mornings of summer and fall. It’s so thick, you can never see the ground below, and looks almost sturdy enough to walk on. You never mention that time you saw the neighbor boy actually doing it.
- “Knee high by the Fourth of July!” They tell tourists and out-of-state-ers that it refers to corn growing. You do, too. You know that if you tell them the truth, they would leave and never return, and the crops would not be as plentiful.
- The Cuyahoga River caught fire once, back in the day. Only once, but you swear sometimes that you can smell the thick smoke and see flames dancing on water as you cross over the bridge into Kent.
- The man who works at the butcher shop claims to be from Ohio, but the accent is all wrong. Your mother says darkly that he is from Cincinnati and that you are never to turn you back on him. The meat you buy there looks less like it was cut and more like it was ripped out of the cow.
- There is a buckeye tree growing in your yard. It is in the way for the swing set you want to put up. You decide that the swings aren’t that important after all. You dare not touch the buckeye tree. Your best friend was never the same after they tried to climb the one in their yard.
- There are four Ohio State University shirts in your closet. You don’t know how they got there. You don’t know where the OSU Christmas tree ornaments came from either. All of your clothes are scarlet and gray during football season. You don’t question it.
- It is snowing. It is always snowing. You can’t remember what the sun looks like, or the grass. All there is are cloudy gray skies and snowdrifts. The ones in the parking lot at Target are bigger than your house, and every day they seem closer to the store entrance.
- A stray cat wanders the neighborhood. You were warned to never go near it as a child. They call it the Sewer Kitty. You saw what it becomes down in the sewers one time. You were scared to use the bathroom for months afterwards.
- They tell you that your graduating class is the biggest in years. You frown, thinking back to when you were younger and were told your class was one of the smallest. When you try to ask your friend about it, she shakes her head silently and refuses to look in the shadows.
- The local pizza shop is dirty and smells funny, the sauce is so much more red than any of the other places, and kids regularly go missing from the nearby local elementary school, but you can’t stop ordering from them.
- The apple orchards are lovely in the fall, all bright colors and sweet smells. You can never find them at any other time than a few weeks in October. Your mother just wakes you up one morning and announces you’re going to get apples. You pick a few on your own and tell yourself that the dark red liquid that drips down your hand from the fruit is just sap.
