Small Town Southern Gothic
• There’s a thickness in the air. It’s cloying. The humidity makes it feel like the air itself is sticking to you. The sweat pours down your face and into your eyes.
• You drive by the same houses every day. The same people sit in their front porch swings. They have a vacant look in their eyes. They’ve been here for as long as you can remember. Sitting. Watching. Waiting.
• No one goes into the woods on the edge of town anymore. We try to forget the disappearances. We try to normalize the dismembered animals. The folks on the edge of town deny that when they take their dinner scraps out to the woods at night it’s actually an offering. Feeding stray animals, they say. But we all know. The woods are hungry. The woods don’t forget. They will take.
• Your neighbor’s farm animals have been falling sick. Those that make it long enough to mate give birth to babies that are… wrong. Stillborns. Extra limbs. Concave heads. Some even coming out with no eyes. When they leave their mother, they come out screaming. Even the stillborns. Even the ones that barely make it past their first breaths. They all scream. They don’t want to exist here.
• A car passes through every once in a while. Someone taking the scenic route. Everyone watches. A twinge of what looks like jealousy in their eyes. Those people get to leave. We aren’t so lucky.
• We’ve been issued a warning for a drought. It hasn’t rained in weeks. Maybe months. Maybe years. We don’t know anymore. We don’t remember what rain feels like. The air is thick with moisture, large bruised looking clouds hanging over head. Taunting. Threatening a downpour, and never delivering. You’re starting to doubt that what you’re hearing is thunder, but there’s still lightning.
• The weather channel spoke of a full moon tonight. You don’t get your hopes up. This town hasn’t seen the moon in a long time. The moon and stars turned their backs on us long ago.
• The darkness coupled with the incessant screaming of the cicadas can be disorienting at night. It’s easy to lose your way. The town looks different at night. Almost unrecognizable. Almost like you’re somewhere else. Almost. But we know that can’t be true. No one ever leaves.
• Everyone has a hunting rifle in their home. Sometimes people leave with them, but where do they go? We don’t go to the woods anymore. What are they hunting? They always come back with sunken, shell shocked eyes and dirty knuckles. Many of them never speak again. People stopped asking questions long ago.
• The graveyard behind the church has overgrown with weeds and gnarled branches. No one has been buried there for a long time. The ground is bad, so the older folks say. They don’t elaborate, but you don’t ask them to.
