Early one morning, you notice in the nearby swamp a huge cypress tree, almost completely covered with Spanish Moss, uproot itself and shamble away. As it moves deeper into the swamp, it leaves bits of Spanish Moss on the young cypress trees it brushes past. So, that's how it works, you think to yourself.
Walking through a park, you come upon an old woman feeding ducks. As you move closer, you realize they are not like any duck you've ever seen before. These ducks look somewhat...demonic. You turn to ask the woman about them, but before you can speak, she shakes her head and gestures for you to leave. Some of the ducks notice you and begins waddling forward while hissing. As you back away, you notice one of the woman's feet are chained to the ground. You quickly retreat and decide it best to avoid the local ducks. Or whatever they are.
You awaken one morning after a severe Florida thunderstorm to find strange chunks of greenish goo spread about your yard, slowly dissolving into the earth. Within moments, the goo is gone and you wonder if you really saw it, or just imagined it. When you return home from work later that day, you find that your house is completely covered in vegetation that has grown impossibly fast. Twisted within the vines and branches are human bones brought up from the ground. You try to clear the vegetation, but it oozes that same green goo you saw in the morning, and the vines grow back right before you eyes. You manage to pull the bones out, and after reburying them in your back yard, decide that's good enough.
There is a foreboding dirt road near your home that leads off into the swampy wilderness. Sometimes. Other times, it is not there at all, just an unbroken wall of woods. You see vehicles drive down this transient road from time to time, but you've never seen one return.
When driving by a local cemetery, you notice several graves and wrought iron fences within are severely damaged. It doesn't appear that someone was trying to get in, but that someone, or something, was trying to get out.
While doing microfilm research for a college assignment, you stumble across a 30-year-old newspaper article regarding a young couple wanted by police for multiple homicides. The photo is of your parents when they were teenagers.
The Ghost Hunters have visited Florida about half-a-dozen times. Of particular interest are their excursions to the St. Augustine Lighthouse and the Cuban Club in Tampa's Ybor City - both infamous in supernatural circles. Although I have yet to visit the lighthouse, I have been to the Cuban Club a couple of times and it is indeed delightfully creepy (although I've not encountered any ghosts there...yet!)
This is truly frightening. GQP Big Brother is trying to control the thoughts and speech at universities in Florida. They are horribly twisting the idea of “diversity” to try to force universities to hire more conservative thinking faculty and staff.
Who else knows what the GQP will do with those lists. Will they try to blackball progressive faculty, staff and students?
This feels like the McCarthy era all over again. The courts must strike this down.
Every year, dozens of people vanish in the Florida swamp, but no one talks about it. You're worried if you mention it to someone, you might disappear into the swamp as well.
Something in the nearby swamp is eating the alligators. Something big.
You see abandoned cars on the side of the road but notice they never get towed away. The further off the main roads you go, the older the cars get. You mention this to a coworker one day in casual conversation. The next day, all the abandoned cars are gone.
One morning you wake to find a dozen black vultures waiting in a tree in your yard. However, you don't see anything dead in your yard. You notice the vultures watch you intently as you move from window to window. You decide it best to stay inside for the day. It's now been three days, and the vultures are still waiting...
It occurs to you one day that you've never seen the same employee at Publix twice. You think it might just be your imagination, but you start to pay more attention and have become convinced that you are correct. You've noticed the employees at Publix have started to take more interest in you as well. You decide it best to stop paying so much attention to these things...
A sign at the local gas station reads, "Do not drink directly from the nozzle!" The sign is only there at night. You closely inspect one of the gas nozzles and notice what appear to be large teeth marks on the end of it. You only get gas during the day, now.
Sound echoes in the alley way behind your house. You can hear when someone enters from one direction, pinpoint where they are as they walk through, and know the moment they leave. Except today. Except for that one man that walked into the alley way - you heard the cart he was dragging along. The noise stopped halfway through and never started again. When you look over the back gate, the alley way is empty.
I was out hiking where the trail ran alongside this river that was moving pretty fast, but a couple miles in it just disappeared.
The river was gone. It just stopped, like someone had snipped it in half and taken away the rest.
So I stopped and stared at it a while, trying to figure out what the heck was going on, because the water was flowing very rapidly, but the river had abruptly ended.
Finally, this old man in a pair of worn overalls stopped next to me to watch as well, before leaning over and asking
“First time seein’ it?”
I responded “yes”, and he continued:
“It goes underground here, pops back up some three miles west. Not the best swimmin’ spot, for obvious reasons, though that don’t stop people from tryin’.”
So I asked him what he meant and he said,
“Lots of dumb folk with no regard for God’s nature die out here every year. Scientists, usually.”
We talked a little more and eventually went our separate ways, but when I got home I decided to look in to what happens to the river when it plunges underground like that.
It turns out it submerges and travels through a complex cave system for a few miles, and millions of gallons of pressurized water travels through there each day.
It gets cooler though!
Apparently, when water levels were low enough during a drought, researchers were able to send divers and probes through the cave system and found both animal and human remains, some of which included mastodons, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats and more. The human remains date back to about 7500 BC.
Anyway, Florida is weird and we have deadly underground rivers filled with cool prehistoric animals I guess.
I had a dream that the king and the queen of a small country had a daughter. They needed a son, a first-born son, so in secret, without telling anyone of their child’s gender, they travelled to the nearby woods that were rumoured to house a witch.
They made a deal with that witch. They wanted a son, and they got one. A son, one made out of clay and wood, flexible enough to grow but sturdy enough to withstand its destined path, enchanted to look like a human child. The witch asked for only one thing, and that was for their daughter.
They left the girl readily.
The witch raised her as her own, and called her Thyme. The princess grew up unknowing of her heritage, grew up calling the witch Mama, and the witch did her very best to earn that title.
She was taught magic, and how to forage in the woods, how to build sturdy wooden structures and how to make the most delicious stews. The girl had a good life, and the witch was pleased.
The girl grew into a woman, and learned more and more powerful magics, grew stronger from hauling wood and stones and animals to cook, grew smarter as the witch taught her more.
She learned to deal with the people in the villages nearby, learned how to brew remedies and medicines and how to treat illness and injury, and learned how to tell when someone was lying.
Every time the pair went into town, the people would remark at just how similar Thyme was to her mother.
(Thyme does not know who and what she is. She does not know that she was born a princess, that she was sold. She only knows that one night after her mother read her a story about princesses and dragons, her mother had asked her if she ever wanted to be a princess.)
((Thyme only knows that she very quickly answered no. She likes being a witch, thank you very much, she likes the power that comes with it and the way that she can look at things and know their true nature.))
The witch starts preparing the ritual early, starts collecting the necessities in the winter so they can be ready by the fall equinox. Her daughter helps, and does not ask what this is for, just knows that it is important.
The witch looks at Thyme, both their hands raised into the air over a complicated array of plants, tended carefully to grow into a circle, and says, sorry.
They sit to high in the sky like a thin dusting of frost, catching the brittle sunlight and scattering it over the ghostly streets. The local residents huddle indoors with their coats and steaming cups of coffee, staring out the window with hollow eyes, no more than dusty wraiths.
A bitter wind tugs at the limp palm fronds, the dry rattle of their leaves echoing across the bayou.
'it's not supposed to be like this,' whispered someone down the alleyway, their voice as lifeless as bone.
The dream had been stripped away; only the reality of the lie remains.
Such dreams need maintenance to keep their shine and luster. In the meanwhile, rest easy.
The chill in the wind is more natural than the stacks of oranges in Publix.