River City Bones
Like all creatives I am currently fighting for my damn life against the robots that have stolen my job. I've been ghost writing the last few years, and turns out that's an area that's ripe for the taking. Rather than cry about it, I've opted to start a Patreon and write about my own ghosts.
Here in the Sunshine State, everything casts a darker shadow.
"Write what you know," they say to me. "It makes it authentic."
This is where I begin:
Stand on the porch in the summer, weak boards under your feet. Above you the sky is a crackle of thunderhead that refuses to spill. There's a mango tree the size of an apartment block out the back, full of bats stuffing their guts, and a lawn that you'd swear grew a foot overnight. Termites and mosquitoes and blackfly and the air is wet and alive. Everything is rotting. Everything is growing. Nothing ever dies.
Everyone has a story here, something that no-one from beyond the floodplains would understand. Weird noises in the night, echoes of footsteps of feet unseen. Big cats in the yard peering over five foot fences, black water witches and old gods headed south to retire. There's angry ghosts under the tarmac and the high rises. Thin fingers of mangrove weave through spilled secrets and forgotten memory. You see shit, out in the swamp-lands, and it doesn't matter that they've long since been paved over. The river remembers.
We'll call it fiction. But I bet you know better.