Maryland Gothic

agoutirex:

Not sure how quintessentially Maryland these are, but these are incidents I remember from my Maryland childhood years.

• There’s a nameless creek that flows through the woods. If we follow it, it will take us places.
• Follow it far enough and there’s an old shack, abandoned as long as we’ve known, all rotting timbers and mossy shingles. Sometimes kids from town come out here with baseball bats and crowbars and wail on the splintering cornerposts until they shatter, just for fun. No one lives here, obviously, but someone must own it, because it’s always repaired when we return the next time. One time, someone decorated the fence in front with dead animals. We left it alone that time.
• The woods are filled with tiny overgrown graveyards, left over from colonial times or even earlier, the tombstones hardly bigger than rocks. This graveyard is weird because it’s all babies.
• You find a squirrel that snapped its spine falling out of a tree; now it lies helpless and twisted, wheezing on the ground. You couldn’t bear to look at it, so you turned your back as I put a rag over it and smashed its head in with my foot.
• The creek widened enough near the stone bridge that we could go wading and scooping for crayfish. Late in the day, someone drops something off the side of the bridge. When they see us below, they shout at us, apparently afraid we’ve got a camera and we’re filming them. It’s too dark to see their face, but from the voice, we know it’s a woman.  We shout back that we’re just looking for crayfish. She keeps shouting, but she doesn’t come down. After she leaves, we try to find what she dropped, but it’s too dark to see.
• Eventually, the creek skirts the edge of the woods, where we can see a new housing development being built. It looks exactly the same as ours; when we go down, past the mounds of dirt and woodchips and the Caterpillar bulldozers, to where the pavement begins, we see even the street names are the same. No one is living here yet, the houses are all barren and unfurnished, so why are there cars in all the driveways.
• Eventually, the creek goes into a cave and it never comes out.