Traveling Through Virginia On All Hallows Eve

Fox on the runway, buck in the headlights, police searching a dark roadside ditch with flashlights. A tiny white house in the woods. Then many more tiny white houses separated by stretches of forest. Tall trunks and limbs look white in the headbeams, foliage is dark upon dark. Expressive clouds take fanciful shapes high above the trees, apart from the half moon, and a handful of white stars.

Not an implicitly creepy forest, but trees communicate. Those roadside trees whisper that there’s nothing concerning concealed by their cover. No. Not directly behind them, but somewhere much farther off, deep in the woods where there aren’t tiny white houses, somewhere beyond the road, once upon a time, the earth was soaked with blood.

Indigenous blood, enslaved blood, soldier blood. Old blood. Only sometimes does new blood, here along the road, mingle with shattered glass and mangled steel. Maybe, sometimes, evidence of evil deeds is discovered in a ditch. Maybe. If you don’t want to see anything, don’t look into the woods. If you look, surely you will see something. So don’t look. Drive on. Follow the curves. Leave the color of the leaves for morning and sunlight, and the shiny safe present.

---

Please “heart” this post if you liked it so that more people can discover Jellied Gold on Substack. I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Oh yeah, and if you haven’t already…