Chapter 1

In small towns everything is wicked. The forests are the playgrounds for the lost. Everyone knows your name and makes up stories that will follow you the rest of your life unless you break away from the shadowy fingers of the overgrown trees and the unsheathed wheat in the fields that people forgot. I watch the old sheds and barn house dilapidate over seasons of neglect until they were bulldozed over for track homes and municipal parking lots. When it rained the creek beds would swell up in spring pregnancy floating it's flotsam of broken swing sets and beer bottle wishes. I rode my bike in the dark overgrown tree canopy roads, one side destitute, the other disgusting with over indulgence. I sang into those nights trying to call for a companion and sometime one would join me galloping with paws and whiskers joining my caterwaul melodies. But still small towns are wicked, they make you pine for them when you are old, never leaving a trace behind of what they once were so you think you must have only dreamed it as so.