⛦𝔅𝔦𝔱𝔠𝔥𝔠𝔯𝔞𝔣𝔱⛦

Kahla

Little Fly Eater ,2022

The function of a growl is as a warning. It is a communication that violence is available as a tool, but is not preferred. Other outcomes, besides your death, are available and should be considered.

But the creature that wants to kill you will not growl.

If your death is the goal, then growling will only serve as a delay and may result in your escape, which runs counter to the goal. There will be no growl, no warning. There will be no snarl or hiss or bluster. The creature that bares its teeth with the intent to kill only does so to bring closer its fangs to your demise.

The creature that growls does not want to kill you, but will if it must.

Not me, but my mom.

In 1972, she ran away from home. She was gone for several months, and when she got home my grandmother started shaking her and screaming about how someone had told her my mother had no shoes and my grandmother was sure it meant my mom was dead.

She finally calms down, and they piece it together: my grandmother had gotten a phone call from someone who breathed two or three times, said “Cathy’s in bare feet,” and hung up. Except that’s not what they said–my grandmother had written the date in on her calendar, and on that date my mother was in Bare Feet, Arizona. She knew definitively that she was in Bare Feet because on that date she called home to talk to my grandfather, who told her Uncle Jim had died–“got himself shot”–and that she had missed the funeral. Ready for the glitch in the matrix part? Here we go:

–My grandfather had no recollection of the conversation–which would have been a strange conversation indeed, since Uncle Jim was still alive and, in fact, didn’t die until 2009, eight years after my grandfather. However, my mom did miss the funeral, thanks to a delayed flight. Cause of death? Supposedly, it was suicide, but there were enough indications for the family to believe that was a pile of horseshit, not least that shooting himself in the head with the rifle indicated would’ve been near-impossible.

–My mom was going by the name Patricia Danko when she was on the run–she had a fake ID and everything. She hadn’t called herself “Cathy” since leaving home and nobody knew she was traveling under an alias.

–According to my mom, she never gave a name for herself–either Patricia or Cathy–when she was in Bare Feet, and she would’ve had no reason to. Bare Feet had maybe a hundred people in it, and they were just stopping for food and gas.

–This isn’t just an account from my mother–my dad was with her at the time, and he remembers both the phone call and the truckstop.

But that’s not the weirdest nor the creepiest part, which is this:

–I’ve been trying for three years to find Bare Feet, Arizona–on the Internet, on old maps, by talking to old Arizona cowboys, and there was never a Bare Feet, Arizona. My mom convinced my dad to drive “through Bare Feet” on the way back from Texas in 2013 and there was no town anywhere along the highway, not even the abandoned bones of one. I’ve looked for Bare Feet, Barefeet, Bear Feet, Bare Feat, Bare Foot, Barefoot, and Bear Foot. None of these exist.

I’m starting with this one because it’s not really a creepy thing but more just weird? So, like I live in a small town. Literally, was just a truck stop, the doctor’s office, the post office, and the schools. That was it. Within like a year, the town like tripled in size. And no one really remembers the construction?

I went to this one churn a couple times as kid, but stop going because my mom thought it was creepy. A bus came and picked you up and took you to the church. It was a “children’s church”, so parents weren’t allowed. I liked it cause they had a fancy park? But they were kinda weird and I didn’t really believe in the things they were saying so I didn’t care that I stopped going. I heard later it got shut down, but a year or so ago I got to talking about it and realized I didn’t even know where the church was or why it shut down (beyond just being creepy). There’s no record of it? My friend who went there asked her parents and they don’t even remember it. Anyone who was an adult at the time doesn’t remember, and no one knows like anything about it?

One of the weird things about Arizona is that if you grow up here, you don’t realize these things aren’t normal? This became very obvious to me when I was driving at night with a friend who was from the east. There are weird lights in the sky sometimes, they’re all kinds of colours. They move around a bit, blink, bounce around, change size. All kinds if things. As kids, me and my sisters thought they were great, ufos and stuff. It never occured to me that they were anything but a joke. Until I’m driving along with my friend, and theres one of those lights doing it’s thing, and my friend goes whats that. I immediately responded with a UFO and when she asks again I was real confused and just said it was light. My ignorant butt didn’t think anything of it, and she starts losing her shit. Because apparently that is not a normal thing?

Was driving along one night, jamming. Out of nowhere, a guy appears in front of me and I slam on the brakes. I stop real hard, but he’s gone. The car that had been coming the opposite way had stopped as well, and she gets out asking where he went. We looked, to make sure he wasn’t hurt, but there was nobody.

There’s a broken, old prison in the desert near my house. Like old, and there’s nothing left but the foundation and a couple cell doors laying in the dirt. Sometimes the neighbors will report hearing an alarm or siren coming from the desert.

My brother’s friend got attacked by something. He said it was a chupacabra, but I just thought he was joking and trying to scare me. Then he showed me a video of a thing. Not quite a coyote, and it more sat in a kind of squat than anything else. My mom tried to play it off as a feral dog, but I’ve never been convinced nor do I think was she.

There’s a hotel in the next town over that has the darkest history. People die there, a lot. They rename the hotel almost every time, but I swear the place is cursed. They shut down about a year ago, but there was recently a car accident that resulted in a death right outside the building.

The convenience store closest to my house swears that the store fixes itself

Cows appear out of nowhere

Street names seem to randomly change? Like everyone will thing a street is called one thing, and it turns out thats not what its called, and no street named that exists.

Theres a house that burns down every so often, no one lives in and no one has ever seen it being rebuilt. It seems to just appear again just to be burnt down again.

Theres supposedly an old abandoned internment camp up on the mountain that no one has been able to find.

There are several stories of hikers going missing, and being found massive distances away that they could not have traversed in the time they were missing.

“I was just dreaming of this.”