I grew up on what I suspect is an upheaved tomb from an old kingdom out in the desert. Estacado we called it. They, we. Doesn't matter. Staked, it meant. They like to translate it as 'palisaded' cuz it sounds nice. Walled off. Fortified. So of course we dug down and of course we found wondrous treasure and of course it was haunted and of course we didn't connect the dots
I spent a lot of time, alone, wandering around in that desert. I was a weird kid, probably. Huck Finn of the High Wastes. I can say that, it was somebody else.
You'd find pits, out there in all that flat. Not big pits, ten meters across, three deep, maybe, but I was shorter then.
Some had cars, some were dumps, some were camps, some recent but were never occupied when I stumbled across them. Worn semi-truck tires and broken shopping carts and bench seats weathered to rusty skeleton chairs and spent fluorescent tubing and rusted pipes and withered blankets rotting on mesquite bushes and dead grass.
They cleaned it up, at some point, at least that little stretch prowled by me and my bicycle while Reagan won us the war. There are hotels, new ones with logos you'd recognize, slowly succumbing to the same curse that everything else is slowly succumbing to.
I went back, see, when I started to remember.
As near as I can tell when I was 25 something happened, probably a drug overdose, led to me forgetting everything. I still have almost no memories from the ages 23 to 27, when I woke up in a homeless shelter in south texas with a court appearance in two days and not so much as a social security card to my name. They only let me in the shelter because the weekend manager recognized me from 12 step meetings I had apparently attended at some point. I attended a lot of 12 step meetings for the next few years, got in touch with my family, and was able to travel back home for a few holidays.
They, family, mostly all died over the course of the next few years from the curse I was somehow able to break at the proverbial last minute but which left me with quite a mystery to solve as far as how I happened or how I survived or how I will, hopefully, continue to with all these goddamn ghosts.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
