Deep in the rotgut of Pennsylvania there’s a world so small that even the most absurd kind of thinking seems entirely practical, a clan of vulcans ruling a small dead-end pocket of town just across the tracks, leaving only under the cover of darkness, a hitchhiker flying thumbs and otherwise naked save for the little white slip of a dress she wanders along a reservoir, begging for a lift, only to disappear into a foggy wisp midconversation, a tunnel that leaves cold greasy handprints on the windows of cars if the driver turns the lights out and taps the horn seven or eight times. All of the forests are haunted. All the gothic homes are overgrown and empty, all haunted house cliche like, but for no good reason. There’s a house with a chicken wire cage in a coal cellar with a plexiglass window where they kept the mutant chicken boy until he died. His ghost is in there now watching the world go by creeping with his ghosty bird eyes. An empty court house where people piss and write their names and other garbage on the walls and kick out hand-turned banisters and scare each other. There’s bodies under the face of every reservoir and pond. A crane at the bottom of a flooded quarry that you can touch if you dive down deep enough. A rotten Appalachian Atlantis under a lake. There’s a lookout on a cliffside where the founders of the town were boiled alive in a giant cauldron by the people who lived there first, you can hear their beating drums if you try hard enough. Everyone goes there to think, to make out, and fuck. An ancient burial ground here. A god damn pet sematary over there. A portal to the land of the lost through a tunnel dug straight through solid rock face for no reason. A desert with a forgotten town not far from the Juniata River where people go to blow shit up, light things on fire, drink warm watery beer, and fuck. There’s a midcentury ice cream stand where you can still get a cheeseburger and crinkle cut fries for two dollars. Dollar soft serve. A can of pop for fifty cents. It’s called Mr. Twistys. The people wear white paper hats and you expect them to smile, but they never do. There’s a diner with foot long hot dogs for a dollar and a whole ass breakfast for two more. The waitresses cackle like witches, calling everyone babe, sugar, honey, sweet thing, and so on. The cook lumbers over the small flattop behind the bar frying up potatoes and onions. He’s got a long wallet that doesn’t quite fit in his pocket attached to a long chain attached to his belt. He stinks. Greasy hairs on his head and on his knuckles and face. He complains to himself, “God dammit. ‘Member when we could smoke in here?” He spits a bit on that last “ess” sound, dribbling onto the flattop. No one knows anything different. A winding road leads up through a forest to an abandoned mountain zoo. It’s called the Storybook Forest or something. A sore thumb retaliating its own obvious reclamation by green things, its yellow and red circus neglected since the eighties. Its cages filled with the ghosts of mount’n lions and bears and gators, trick squirrels and opossums. Somewhere in this forest someone is cooking shitty meth. Popping dollar store pseudoephedrine out of cheap blister packs, picking at their buggy faces in the twilight. Someone else is running a still off of a natural spring, goin blind. Some kids are on a burn cruise, crammed into mom’s car fighting over seedy weed, hotboxing that shit before detailing the interior with body spray, and then their bodies with more body spray and visine. Someone else is out there shooting guns in the stark blackness, drinking beer by the light of muzzle flash and starlight, without a single fuck to give for anything beyond their periphery. Two kids fucking probably, or trying to. Fumbling around in the dark missing everything that feels good about fucking, still telling each other that feels good, that it was the best. Someone else summons demons on a tree stump altar, playing with pigs blood, weaving pentacles out of young branches, leaving them lying around, giggling like an asshole. Someone else has come to this forest to die.

I’m nineteen years old and afraid of every damn thing. Ghosts. Mutant Chicken boys. Gothic architecture. Loud noises. Sex. Rejection. Vulcans. Cops. Meth. Nuclear war. Love. The opposite of love. My selective service card. Jail. Being alone. Maybe probably being queer. The ringing in my ears. Talking to girls. Guns. Roadside ghosts. Trespassing. Cranes at the bottoms of flooded quarries touching my foot. Appalachian sand dunes and hidden cities. Dead bodies. Raw chicken thighs. Getting hooked on dope. The shadow that follows me around. Damn near pretty much everything. And so, to get the better of my fears I become my own ghost, my own myth. I drive this road set on dyin. In the dark, sure that I’m alone in the middle of the night I close my eyes doing sixty or so. The road winds. It zigs and zags. In some places if you hit it just right you get that funny feeling down there like you falling or scared shitless. I shut off my headlights for a moment at a time, holding my breath, both hoping this is and isn’t it. I open my eyes and breathe. I speak of this to no one. I am a quiet kind of ghost. For a moment I am the living dead, dressed in black rags, roaming these forest hills, both in and outside of my grave. Looking at it from the outside in and the inside out. Driving it like hell outta there on home into my trailer park bed, cradled by cardstock wood paneling. The dawn’s gross vindictive light grows, but I am made safe by the black blankets nailed tightly over the windows. I fall asleep to the sound of everything beginning to come alive again. I sleep alright, deep like but disturbed, about as well as a living dead boi does.