Scary Verse

This is a text thread between two brothers, February 6–7. Ray gave it to me and asked me to post it. Times are as they appear on the phone. I've changed the name of the lake. FRIDAY CODY 9:14 PM made it out. ice is 14 inches at the launch, drilled 3 holes already. shanty is a mess tho, somebody left a bag of wet bait in here and it smells like a gas station bathroom RAY 9:31 PM you said saturday morning CODY 9:32 PM saturday morning everybody and their dog is out here. i like it empty. nobody yelling about their sonar. feels like i own the lake RAY 9:33 PM you own nothing. wear the bibs CODY 9:33 PM wearing the bibs mom CODY 9:58 PM lost a glove. one glove. i had two when i left the truck i swear RAY 10:02 PM check your hood CODY 10:04 PM it was in my hood RAY 10:04 PM dummy CODY 10:40 PM nothing biting. zero. heater's running, thermos is hot, i have a ham sandwich that's mostly bread. there's a couple other shanties lit up way across the lake, tiny yellow s...

Transcript excerpt, "Local Oddities" podcast, Episode 47. Guest is a homeowner who asked to be identified only by her first name, Marlene. HOST: So just to set this up for people listening — you bought a dollhouse at an estate sale, and you're telling me it's an exact replica of your actual house. MARLENE: Down to details I didn't even notice about my own house until the dollhouse pointed them out to me, if that makes sense. The crack in the porch step. The way the kitchen window doesn't sit quite square in its frame. Little things. Things you live with every day and stop actually seeing. HOST: How'd you even end up with it? MARLENE: Estate sale, out in the county, nothing special about the listing. My husband Dave's the one who actually spotted it, he's into that kind of vintage craftsmanship, old model trains, that sort of hobby. He didn't think it looked like our house at first. Neither of us did, honestly, not right away. It was pa...

I run a small blog cataloging abandoned and decommissioned transit stations in this city — closed platforms, sealed tunnels, the handful of stops that got built and then quietly dropped from every map once ridership numbers came in low. Niche hobby, small readership, mostly other transit nerds who enjoy the same kind of forgotten-infrastructure trivia I do. I've been running it about six years now, mostly weekend research trips and long afternoons in the public records office, the kind of hobby that doesn't pay anything but keeps you pleasantly occupied. About four months ago I started getting submissions describing a station that doesn't appear on any map I've ever found, any archive I've ever pulled, any decommissioning record the transit authority has on public file. I get maybe one or two of these a year normally, usually somebody misremembering a real station under a wrong name. This one's different. I've had eleven separate submissions now, from peopl...

My grandmother left me the farm outright when she passed in April, which surprised everyone including me, since my brother Julian had done more of the actual work keeping the place running the last several years while I was living three states away. She left him the equipment and most of the savings instead, split fair enough on paper, but the land itself came to me, along with one handwritten instruction folded into the will that Julian and I both read a dozen times trying to make sense of. The candle at the west fence line gets lit every October the ninth, no matter what. Whoever holds the land holds that job now. Don't skip a year. Don't look back walking away from it. Neither of us had any idea what she meant at first. Took a full afternoon of walking the property boundary before we found it — a small family cemetery tucked against the tree line at the far west edge, six generations of Ortiz relatives under simple stone markers, most of them worn close to unreadable. And ...

I bought the mirror at an estate sale back in early August, one of those sprawling multi-room sales where an entire life gets tagged with masking tape and small handwritten prices. It was a genuinely beautiful piece, full-length, dark wood frame carved with a pattern of vines that had gone soft and rounded with age, the kind of thing that would have cost real money new but was marked at forty dollars because, I assume, nobody running the sale had any real sense of what old furniture is worth. The woman running the sale, an older lady named Mrs. Pemberton who I gathered was some kind of niece or distant relative of whoever had died, didn't have much to say about it when I asked. "Came with the house when my aunt bought it, far as I know," she said. "Older than her, older than the people before her too, probably. You want it, it's yours, I've got four more rooms of this stuff to move by Sunday and no real attachment to any of it." I got it home, cleaned th...

My business partner Marcus and I bought the old Regency Theater at auction back in the spring, mostly on the strength of the building itself rather than any real business plan beyond "restore it and figure the rest out later," which in hindsight is not a business plan at all. It's a genuinely beautiful building, opened in 1911, closed on and off through various owners for the better part of forty years before finally shutting for good in the nineties. Gold leaf peeling off the proscenium arch, a domed ceiling with a mural so grimed over you couldn't tell what it depicted until we got the restoration crew up there with actual proper lighting. The seating chart came with the property records, laminated, decades old, still taped up in what used to be the box office window. Every seat accounted for except one. Box Thirteen, stage left, upper tier — small, private, the kind of seat you'd have paid a fortune for back when this place drew real crowds — marked on the cha...