The Burial

Last month, before I left for Peace Camp (I'll write about that and other work soon), Moses' – a friend from my organisation – father died. I went to the burial; I was glad to be able to go, out of support for a friend, out of interest in the cultural experience, because I'd never been to a burial, a funeral, before, ever, anywhere.

Moses' father was 80-something years old, he'd been sick for a few months by then, but it's still always sad for someone to lose a parent, and I felt a little guilty about wanting to go partially just out of curiosity about the ceremony itself. But, well. (Well? I don't know. It seems fair to me; maybe I'm just insensitive though.)

The burial was in Amuria, a district bordering the north of Soroti (which, remember? [just kidding, I don't really expect you to remember], is the district that borders Ngora to the north and is the district in which the Iteso kids who came to Peace Camp live, another reason I was glad to be able to go), and we piled into my organisation's Toyota Hi-Lux pickup – I always kind of enjoy pointing out that it's a Hi-Lux because all I knew of Hi-Lux-es before coming here was that the Taliban and the, um, rebels (is that what we call them? are they still rebels if they basically run the country?) in Somalia mount machine guns in the beds of theirs, a feature that, I've since learned, does not come standard – and I was sitting in the bed of the truck with, from my organisation, Martin – my 'twin,' remember? again?, the Opio to my Odongo, because we're the same age – Peter, Cuthbert, Vincent, Scovia, Mr Oloit – whose other name I somehow still don't know, though, at least, now I know the one name: after he'd been with my org for several months, my supervisor, randomly, asked me, one day while we were eating lunch under the mango tree and Oloit came and sat down, 'Danieli, you know his name?' and I said, 'Yeah... totally... he's been here for a long time now... ha...ha...' and then she asked what it was, she told me that was what people said when they don't really know, and she was totally right: embarrassing – and, not from my organisation, two old ladies who I'd never met before, and so, needless to say, it was crowded, nine adults (and a full-sized spare tire) in the bed of a pickup. We headed out, bouncing down the dirt road, I covered my head with a pair of someone's waterproof pants during a brief, pelting rain, we bounced along up to the main highway, everyone laughed at the wind wildly whipping my hair, we flew down the tarmac to Soroti Town, through town, then maybe twenty kilometres north of town, we turned right off the tarmac onto another rutted dirt road, this one at times angled at a nearly-forty-five degree angle, and Amuria looks not unlike Ngora though it's less flat, less totally planar, there are long rolling hills, there aren't any of my favourite massive rock formations, there's more space, more empty – read: not cultivated for farming – land, vast expanses of grass, and the grass is tall, taller than in Ngora, tall like in the North, able to hide rebel soldiers, as tall as me, and we hopped out of the back of the truck while Emma – our driver, or, as they say here (and as I love that they say here), our pilot – navigated a metre-deep trench, broken concrete pipe, current of dirty water that cut a swath across the road, everyone disparaging the construction team who'd put in the concrete pipe, 'Eh! These Ugandan engineers... Tsk!' – the disparagement of their fellow Ugandans, and their fellow Africans as a whole, is an entirely different subject that I could go off on but won't here; I feel like it happens a lot, and it bothers me, makes me uncomfortable; it feels like racism that was so engrained during colonialism that they now just take it for fact; I never know what to say when, for example, they say Africans aren't as good at science as Westerners, usually I just end up stammering, 'That's not... It's... No.' But, anyway – then we hopped back in, clambering, and soon after, after two and a half hours total, we were there, Moses' family's homestead, a collection of mud-and-thatch huts.

The ceremony had just begun when we got there. We got in the back of an orderly – more orderly than any I've ever been in in any non-Western country – single-file line, we moved past the coffin, a wooden box, nailed shut, covered in a royal-hued (standard though, not actually for royalty) purple cloth, a large floral arrangement sitting on top, it would've been sitting on his stomach were the coffin open, and though the coffin was closed, nailed shut, there was a small window over his face, his eyes were closed, his expression peaceful, his skin wrinkled and aged but somehow relaxed, you could see the gauzy material the rest of his body was wrapped in, and all I could think about was Mao Tse-tung, lying embalmed in Beijing forever, for (I think?) like forty years by the time we – Sarah and I; hi, Sarah! – saw him, by the time we made a similar silent, single-file procession past his coffin – his not nailed shut, not wooden, simply a large glass box mechanically raised up from the floor each day for the, um, viewings – all I could think about was Mao because he, that, was the only dead person, body, I'd seen before – in that state anyway; I'm not including those lovely folks at the University of Washington cadaver lab, as I mostly saw their guts and, most memorably, their feet, which still had all of the skin and nails and everything – and so I looked at his face, peaceful, wrinkled, and thought of Mao, all while constantly moving slowly by, then, hurriedly, as I moved away from the coffin toward our seats, I remembered to think of a few words of consolation for Moses, his family, his late father, I didn't want to only think of Mao, and then we sat down and the ceremony continued.

The crowd that had gathered, maybe a hundred-strong, was, if not sombre, then certainly subdued, respectful, and I'm lacking another good word for it, but this subdued atmosphere was really only noticeable to me when I thought of it in relation to every other gathering I've been to here, celebratory, educational, whatever, and not when I thought of it in relation to the typical – stereotypical? – Western funeral, or Middle Eastern funeral, or Indian funeral – all of which, of course, I've only read about, seen in movies – because there was no one clad in mournful black, no black-mesh-veiled widow weeping, no stoic son's arm being clutched by a despondent wife and mother, there was no fittingly atmospheric overcast sky, no cold drizzle or autumn leaves that, in a reflection of the occasion, would lose their last grip on the branch and float slowly down in a peaceful death to land on wet cemetery grass, and there was no gnashing of teeth, no rending of garments, no funeral pyre, no screaming out to God in anger and grief, and I realize that this may be a factor not of the cultural – though, I don't know, maybe it is; but I think back to the wails of grief I heard that one night, the night my former neighbour Peter told me that the other neighbours had lost an infant to malaria, and I think not – aspect, but of the fact that it was the burial of a man in the eighth decade of his life, who'd been ill for several months, who'd been a good, successful, respected man – I think he was a deacon in the local church – and I only saw one woman – wife? widow? – let out a single cry of sadness, one that racked her whole body and almost brought her to her knees as she passed by the nailed-shut, purple-clothed, windowed coffin shortly after we'd taken our seats, but even she, like many of the other women there, was dressed in the garish, synthetic colours of a gomes – pronounced gomez; the traditional fancy dress, conical shoulders and a wide sash-like belt tied with a square knot in the front around the waist – a few men were in suits, but even Moses, though his face was uncharacteristically long, wore just a grey polo shirt and khakis, everyone else dressed in whatever they'd wear to go about their normal day after the ceremony, they've done this all before, more than a couple times, I'm sure, and even the weather, blue sky, the sun warm and bright, was less than sombre, subdued only by a handful of heavy black rainclouds gathering in the distance. So: subdued. I mean that the dancing, the music blasted from speakers at an ear-splitting volume, the happy songs and ululations, the loud chatter and louder laughter, those things that typify every other gathering I've ever been to here were absent, but the two short speeches that made up the bulk of the ceremony were more lighthearted than not, seemingly anyway, judging by the speakers' tones of voice and the – albeit, again, subdued – laughter elicited by, presumably, charming anecdotes about Moses' father, and there were these two short speeches, neither longer than five or six minutes, they were followed by the reading of a few verses from the Bible, a hymn sung by the gathered crowd, and even this wasn't mournful-sounding, just respectful, subdued, and then the coffin was lifted, carried to the grave-site, we all followed behind, walked half a kilometre through tall grass under warm sunshine, and we, everyone, gathered around the grave, the coffin had already been lowered in when I walked up, there was another speech, shorter even than the first two, another hymn sung, and handfuls of rocky red dirt were scooped up, tossed down onto the coffin – nailed-shut, purple-clothed, windowed – the dirt and rocks clattered on the wooden box, sounding like the first drops of a heavy rain on a tin roof, and, maybe five minutes after walking up to the graveside, we turned around and walked back through tall grass under warm sunshine to the homestead, the ceremony was over, I asked Martin just to be sure – Is that really it? – and it was, they served lunch, we said goodbye to Moses, hugged, and we'd only been there for barely an hour, even the length of the ceremony, relative to typically hours-long gatherings, was subdued, and we left.

It was interesting. I was glad that I got to go.

And we went back down the angled, rutted dirt road, hopped back out with Emma navigated trench, broken concrete pipe, current of dirty water, and, this time, I was sitting on the edge of the truck-bed wall, the only place to hold onto was the wall, a hand gripping the metal immediately on either side of my butt, not much – barely any – leverage, we bounced along and I tried to keep my balance, my white-knuckle grip, tried to keep the legitimate concern off my face, they'd never let me ride in the back again if I fell out, mostly because I'd probably be dead, then we flew down the tarmac of the highway again, one of my hands fell asleep and I couldn't tell if I was still holding on or not, the rain clouds were gathering again though the sun was still shining brightly as it dipped westward, a couple kilometres off the highway, I could see a column of rain, grey, silvery shafts of water coming down, clearly delineated from where it wasn't raining, maybe one square kilometre getting poured on while the rest of, well, everywhere was still dry, and we picked up two more people, and their two kids, in Soroti Town, now thirteen people in the bed of the truck, and the woman sat down in the bed, her back pushing against my legs and sliding me back so that I was hanging at least eight inches out over the tarmac, at least I'd gotten a better hand-hold on the rail running along the back of the roof, but still, lorries flew by, a metre away from tearing me in half, Emma drove the same way he'd've driven without anyone in the bed, the tarmac whizzed by beneath me, I silently cursed the woman pushing on my legs, my knuckles were white, I pretended just to be hanging off the truck like Kevin Costner in Waterworld, the sun was dipping towards the horizon, the light was golden and warm, we bounced off the highway and down the dirt road toward Ngora, we made it back, I could finally let go, my hands hurt, but I'd never felt so personally responsible to – still – be alive as I did at that moment, and I was happy, maybe inappropriately so, but the feeling was amplified by the fact that I'd been to a funeral for the first time, by the fact that I'd just looked a corpse in the face, that I'd been a tenuous grip on the truck away from the pavement and the speeding lorries, that I'm twenty-six, that I'm healthy, that my family's healthy, that I'd looked a dead person in the face and thought only of Mao because that was all that I had to go on.

Speaking of..

..ghosts, monsters, Africa, and 30 Rock: this quote from 30 Rock made me laugh and describes occasionally-eerie rural Uganda pretty accurately.

Africa's great. We have juju monsters, gum gum trees, and horsicorns, which is a unicorn with a horse's head.

All true. It's a magical, mystical place, this Africa.

Ghosts

I was lying around my house for a few days this past weekend, sick and not feeling all that awesome. I can only watch so many episodes of 30 Rock -- so many being, approximately, twenty -- in a row, and so this is what came after that.

(Please ignore all the silly British spellings in this blog post. I was finally able to download a Microsoft Word substitute after my copy expired since I lost or never had the code to enter, and, being where I am, the spellcheck is set to British English, I can't figure out how to change the default settings, and so, typing blog posts on that, we end up with everything being auto-corrected to include a u after every other o and spell maneuver manoeuvre. Oh well. Maybe it will add a certain refinement to my normal inanities. Anyway.)

People here are, well, a lot of – let's not generalise; I am in the PC, after all – people here are fairly superstitious. There are witches and wizards (no joke, they call them wizards, which is awesome), witchdoctors – though I think we're calling them 'traditional healers' these days – who, for an often-extortionate price will 'cause' a woman's female rival to have a miscarriage or – all Haha, how quaint! thoughts aside – still have been known to sacrifice – no, let's say 'murder' instead; spade a spade and all that – children for who knows what reasons. But people, and I think it'd be fair to say the majority of people, at least to some extent, still – and I say 'still' as in 'it's a belief system as old as, maybe older than, depending on who you ask, Christianity that, despite the fact that the population in the area of the belief system was always relatively small, has still persisted, in some form, to 2011 (also, still, despite missionary work by Catholics, Protestants, Muslims that sought to rid people of such 'savage' ideas; though some of those missionaries were, undoubtedly, Irish, coming from a country where some people still believe in faeries and, more commonly, banshees)', not 'still' as in 'I can't believe they, those people, them, not us, still believe such things despite science!' while using an index finger on the bridge of my glasses to slide them back up my nose (because what do I know? I'm not a potion scientist. And, while I do feel confident enough in my in-born Western scepticism that I feel like getting cursed by a witchdoctor would just be a cool story, I'm still probably not going to try my luck.) – believe in the abilities of witches and wizards, fear the curses of witchdoctors, and would be terrified to find human faeces on their doorstep or a beheaded and defeathered hen outside their hut one morning (but who wouldn't be a little freaked out by that?), and believe in the effects of potions like dokiyo, which will make you fall so in love with the person who gave it to you that you weep uncontrollably until you agree to be with them.

Phew. Now that I've claused any sense out of those three sentences and got my don't-offend-anyone, don't-generalise-everyone bases covered (right? we're good? we're PC enough?), there is a point to all of this.

The point being: I believe.

If Fox Mulder had a picture of a witchdoctor instead of a UFO on that poster of his, I would be him.

Ok, I'm mostly kidding. The part of me that says I believe facetiously is walking around town, going to the market, pretending like Goal 2 – of the three main goals of the Peace Corps: number one being doing actual work, numbers two and three being about cultural exchange – is actually work, all in the bright hot crystalline equatorial daylight. The part of me that is not kidding is running a couple miles from town – fine, let's be honest: more like a kilometre and a half; I can't run that far, I'm not one of those volunteers – deep into the village at 5:30 on a cool misty pitch-black starless moonless morning with nothing but the three-foot-wide halo of light from my phone-torch between me and the witches and wizards and beheaded, defeathered hens and ancestral ghosts swirling in and out of the mist and the darkness. Aw, yeah: this is a ghost story. It is also completely true, and all happened in the span of, like, forty minutes, because, like I said, I can't run that far.

(Note: this story may make it seem like I'm afraid of the dark. That may or may not be entirely true. If it is true, though – which it might not be, remember? – then I blame Mom – hi, Mom! – for letting us watch Arachnophobia when I was, like, seven. I also blame the cable channel TBS for letting me watch The Exorcist when I was, like, twelve. No, TBS, I don't care if it was edited for television. Also, Paranormal Activity. Enough said. I'm not afraid of the dark anyway. Don't judge me.)

I got up at 5:04 the other morning – due to my affinity for never setting my alarm for x:15 or y:30 or some time like that – to go on a run. Since I've somehow developed the World's Smallest Bladder since being in country, I had to pee like a [cliché]. I pulled on shorts and a t-shirt and, tapping the up-arrow key on my phone to switch on the torch, headed out to the latrine, stepping outside into total darkness, clouds like a black velvet blanket – is that a thing? a velvet blanket? – blocking all of the stars and the sliver of a waxing moon, tendrils of swirling mist wrapping around through into above under the stunted beam of the torch, a fine Seattle-esque mist that floated down onto exposed skin to prick up goosebumps wherever it landed, and I shivered, like someone had just walked on my grave – or like I really had to go.

Cold water from the rainstorm during the night sprayed my feet and ankles as I hurried across the grass to the long, narrow latrine structure I share with the neighbours and a breeze slowly swung one of the doors shut with a groan like an old man who's tired of waiting to die and then with a creak like a Halloween CD of haunted house noises and then, the breeze gusting just a little harder, swirling the mist just a little more, with a final emphatic slam. I rounded the outer wall of the latrine area to go down to mine, Door No. 3, and half-leapt, half-stumbled backwards – or was I pushed? – in the World's Worst Defensive Manoeuvre as a calamitous death-rattle shattered the morning's quiet from behind Door No. 4, bony fists pounding the corrugated metal begging trying to force their way out to disappear into the mist and darkness, and just as suddenly as they started, the bony fists stopped, leaving a hole in the silence, until the silence returned, somehow thicker than it had been before, echoing with the cacophony though the sound had been sucked away by a cold wind.

I didn't move. I didn't move, I just stared at Door No. 4 and shivered again. Then Door No. 1, at my back, the door to my bathing area, the one that had just groaned creaked slammed shut, groaned back open against the breeze the breeze was blowing the other way the breeze should've pushed the door shut except that the door had already been closed what the what – and I thought all of these things, a hurried stream that ran across the front of my brain in half a second until I was launched out of my paralysis by a thunderous bony-fisted punch to the metal of Door No. 4 – did that..? I swear that dent in the metal wasn't there just a second ago – and leapt to the door of my latrine as the death-rattle pounded and I deftly unlocked the padlock and swung the door open swung myself inside swung the door shut in one quick motion and the heavy silence made heavier by the absence of sound returned.

I held the torch in my mouth as I – oh, thank God – 'watered' the seething mass of cockroaches I was sure was making the ground shimmer and slither twenty-five feet below me (like, have you seen the caves episode of Planet Earth?, with that one cave where there's a hundred-foot mountain of bat guano only you can't see it because it is literally covered in cockroaches?, like that), and the silence was broken again by the insistent buzzing of a fat bluebottle fly that made strafing flights across my face, attracted to the light in my mouth – easily, easily, easily the most disgusting thing that happens to me on a fairly regular basis – and I clamped down on the phone with my teeth and shook my head to get the fly away from my mouth and then caught the fly in the torchlight again as it buzzed lazily towards the corner then buzzed insistently as it found itself stuck in a spider web and then the buzzing reached panicked levels, echoing off the metal door, off the metal roof, echoing down into the brick-walled pit under my feet, as a spider the size of a small goat – exaggeration? Maybe. But, also... maybe not! – lowered itself down from the shadows of the roof, its long, hairy legs pin-wheeling in eager anticipation, and I watched as the spider reached its breakfast and twirled the fly in circles in a macabre ballroom dance and then, satisfied that its prey wouldn't escape, it ascended, slowly, silently, back up into the shadows – stopping only so that I could give it a high-five and remind it that that's why I allow it to live.

With the reverberations of the fly's last words slowly dying down and with my bladder emptied – which, being a Guinness World Record holder like it is, only takes about five seconds, fortunate on mornings like this – I slowly pushed open the latrine door with both hands, torch still getting slobbery in my mouth, just in case I had to shove someone something away and make my escape. But it was quiet. I could see that Doors No. 1 and 2 were shut. There was only the breeze and the mist that wrapped itself around me, somehow comforting despite its chill, as I stepped outside and pushed the door shut and put the padlock back into place and began to think, again, about how cold I'm going to be in the Great PNW in December and I felt my shoulders slump a bit and relax, there were no ghosts here, no angry spirits who died in the pit latrine and now want to get out, and I squeezed the little padlock closed, not realising that the small metallic click somehow both dampened by the mist and amplified into a gunshot by the cool wind was a cue, and I leapt sprinted stumbled almost swallowed or spit out my phone as, barely missing a heartbeat – or desperately, desperately missing the feeling of a heartbeat – after the click of the lock, bony fists beat a tympanic solo on Door No. 4, thunderous and metallic and angry and desperate and beseeching, and the wind found some small aperture to whistle and howl over, and I kicked cold water off blades of grass and swung my front door open swung myself inside swung the door shut in one quick motion and was back inside, less than three minutes after getting out of bed.

I took a moment, reminded – or tried to convince – myself that I am a man, and then pulled on socks and my running shoes and stepped back outside, the swirling mist curling around the beam of the torch like fingers beckoning me to come with them somewhere I knew I didn't want to go as I closed the lock on my door with a heavy click. I walked out onto the road leading away from town. Silence whirled as thickly as the mist. The only lights I could see were the four globe fixtures at the corners of the brick wall surrounding the other white family's compound, the yellowish light reflecting, refracting, bouncing off the mist until the globes were as large as full moons. I walked for a minute to warm my legs up, away from the full moon security lights, away from the sleeping town, and as the glow of the lights surrendered to blackness, I switched on the torch and started to run, unable to see anything but the three-foot circle of road lit up at my feet and the dim silhouettes of trees where that blackness gave way to the sky's blackness, unable to hear anything but my feet pounding the packed dirt, a quick scuff as I scraped over a bump that hadn't been lit well enough by the torch, the sound of my own too-heavy breathing and too-rapid heartbeat and, in the silence all around me, these quiet sounds gathered together like a wave, a white-noise crescendo, a Sonic Youth song, or a heavy rain on a tin roof and they filled my ears and made my eyes glaze over in daydreams and suddenly I wanted to run without the torch, I wanted to see or not see how dark it really was, and, feet pounding, heart thumping, I switched off the torch and there was nothing, it was black, totally, there was nothing except me, I was running on nothing, I was running past nothing, I was running nowhere, there was absolutely nothing but the faint uneven line across the division of land and sky, the division of darkness filled with all the things you can't see and darkness filled with nothing but the absence of light, and a gust of wind swept down the road towards me and turned the beads of sweat running down my temples and soaking into the chest of my shirt into droplets of ice water and teasing out goosebumps on my arms.

I switched the torch back on with an involuntary shudder, and my heart double beat its already-quick pace, I gasped in an extra breath – two figures were lit up right in front of me on the side of the road, two figures I hadn't seen, hadn't heard, hadn't sensed, two black shapes, barely more than ripples in the darkness, and I suddenly knew that if ghosts existed this is what they would look like – shapes that move the air without moving through it, shapes that you can stare at when you see them, stare at until you can't see them anymore, until you can see them again because they never left, did they? – they had no faces but I knew they had arms and they were close enough to reach out and grab me by the arm, close enough to rake claw-like fingernails down my back, they had no faces but I knew they had arms but they didn't move as I ran past, pretending not to have noticed them, they had no faces but I felt their eyes grab onto my shoulders as I ran past, yank at my arms, pull me by the wrist into the darkness filled with all of the things you can't see, I ran past, I heard the shuffle of feet behind me as I ran past, they were gone or I was, their eyes released their hold on me, they were gone or I couldn't see them anymore, I was alone again, I told myself that I was alone again.

I told myself that I was alone again. I kept running. I sped up. I left or tried to leave the two figures, the ghosts, behind me. The pounding of my feet grew louder. My breathing grew heavier. The faint jagged line of the division of trees and sky rose up ahead of me, grew higher until I had to look up to see it. I was running through the forest. I knew it from the daylight: the forest before the flat, empty, swampy plains that continued on for another ten or twelve kilometres to the lake. I kept running. I sped up. I was running through the forest and the pounding of my feet grew louder, it echoed off the tree trunks, sent out from where my feet hit the packed dirt into the wood and back, amplified once and again and a hundred times more off of a hundred tree trunks until it wasn't the pounding of my feet, not anymore, it was a tribal drum, a hundred tribal drums, carved out of the tree trunks, thundering the start of war, thundering to call down rain or fire. I kept running. I sped up. My breathing grew heavier and the breaths escaping my lungs twisted through the branches, wound back to my ears on the mist, swirled and crescendoed and echoed until they weren't breaths, they were whispers, they were words, I couldn't understand them but I knew what they were, the murmurs of a witchdoctor in the forest, off somewhere reciting incantations, sim sala bim on his tongue – and that's not my line, I know, but I like it – sending curses on the cool breeze, bringing my goosebumps back, whispering words that I couldn't understand, words that became louder than the drums, and war and rain and fire and curses and incantations swallowed everything else and then, one more step forward, went silent. I was out of the forest. I kept running.

The drums stopped crying for war and the curses evaporated into the mist and it was suddenly flat and empty. I couldn't see it, but I knew it was completely empty. I knew I could run for miles in any direction without hitting a hill, without hitting anything – unless I kept running straight, in which case I'd end up in a lake, but still.

The silence after the drums and the whispers was the same silence that had settled in after bony fists had stopped pounding on the latrine door. It was heavy. It swallowed up the pounding of my feet and the breaths that left my lungs. There was nothing anymore except the halo of light in front of me and I ran towards the halo of light and sped up but never reached it, but I'm easily amused so it was fun to play that game for a second and my mind went off somewhere or nowhere and there was nothing except running to catch the halo of light. At this point, on this morning, in this darkness and mist and chill, I should have known that nothing would become something and suddenly. My mind was brought back from nowhere in an instant, the feet-pounding breath-escaping sounds that had been dampened came roaring back on the mournful scream of a child, the mournful screams of children, at least a dozen of them, a dozen howls, lonely and sad and just feet away from me on either side of the road, they wailed, banshees, their cries so loud and long and mournful that I could see them, I convinced myself I could see them, their mouths open, sucking in the blackness and wailing it back out, mouths open so wide their jaws unhinged as they howled as they stood half hidden in the stalks of maize and millet and watched me and reached out to me and wailed at me, to me, crying to me, long skinny bodies between tall stalks, mouths open, eyes clear and full of confusion and sadness and an anger that they felt but couldn't identify because they could only cry out, long piercing notes, howling, wailing, drowning out the sounds of my running, clear eyes and unhinged jaws, I saw all of these things like in broad daylight or at least like in the trailer for Children of the Corn, the children were wailing, my feet were pounding, the children were bleating their cries into the darkness, they were bleating, bleating – wait. Bleating? 

They weren't children. 

They were goats.

I stopped running. It was time to turn around.

I started running back towards town. I ran back past the mournful wails of the children of the corn. I ran past the thundering war drums and the whispered incantations. I ran past where the two figures had been standing at the side of the road, the ripples in the darkness, the faceless shapes with clawing eyes. I ran and formulated this blog post in my head, telling myself ghost stories until I believed them. I kept running. I sped up. I heard footsteps. I kept running. I looked behind me and there was a flash of light. Someone had switched on a torch, just like mine, then switched it off, like they'd seen me see them. But I'd seen them. I knew. They were going to follow me, they'd be faster than me, they'd run me down, I sped up, I looked over my shoulder, the torch flicked on and then off again, closer. I kept running. The torch flicked on, off, right behind me. I kept running. I looked over my shoulder. Nothing. I ran. I looked over my shoulder. Nothing. They'd given up – because I am the fastest man alive!

I kept running. My feet were still pounding on the road. I kept running, pounding, and then the earth shook, it rumbled and swallowed my pounding feet and then I was bathed in two beams of yellow light, they swallowed my torch, I was bathed in yellow light and blinded by it and I kept running, blindly. Earlier, I'd switched off the torch and ran blindly in the dark, now I was running blindly in the light. A lorry engine roared to life with the lights just behind me to my left – why was there a lorry in the middle of nowhere? in the middle of the village? just sitting in the dark? – and I knew. They were coming for me. They knew they couldn't run me down, I was too fast, faster than them, but they were coming for me, they weren't giving up yet, they had a lorry now. It swung out into the road behind me, I was running just beyond the furthest reach of the headlights, but it still made the ground rumble, the engine roared, they'd be on top of me, over top of me, in seconds, I sped up, my feet pounded the ground, the lights brushed my back, I sped up, I was sprinting now, and my foot scuffed over a rock and I pitched forward, stumbling, I stayed on my feet but I was out of control, I wouldn't stay up for long, I was bent forward and my arms windmilled at my sides, the torchlight shining erratically on the ground then the trees then the sky then the ditch then the trees then the sky and the lorry pulled closer, I found my balance and kept running, I stayed at the furthest edge of the headlights, I could feel the yellow light grabbing at my heels and my back, it was trying to swallow me, it wanted to blind me, they wanted to crush me in the rumbling earth, I ran, I could see the faint line of the horizon, the faint line separating this darkness full of everything from that darkness full of nothing, and the line took the shape of buildings, squat squared angles, and I knew I was almost there, I knew the turn for my house was coming up and I pounded the road, I ran, I sped up, the lorry sped up, the earth rumbled, the headlights burned my back, the yellow light swallowed my torch, the rumbling of the earth swallowed my footsteps, the squared angles of town grew closer, my turn was closer now, I ran, I sped up, I outran the yellow light, the heat, I outran the rumbling earth, I cut to the right and leapt over the ditch and was on my own road, and the lorry roared by, the yellow light didn't swallow my torch, they couldn't run me down, I was too fast, I was faster than them on foot, I was faster than them in a lorry, but my back was still hot from the headlights, my feet were still swallowed in the rumbling earth so I kept running, I wasn't home yet, but I knew they wouldn't catch me now, they never could, they knew it, they kept driving, farther, the rumbling died off, the yellow light of the headlights was replaced by yellow full moon security lights and fingers of mist beckoned me and this time I followed, I kicked cold water off of blades of grass and I swung my front door open swung myself inside swung the door shut in one quick motion and I was back inside, I was breathing heavily, my feet were still pounding even though I wasn't moving, I was back home, I'd outrun them all, they knew they would never be able to catch me, I was home, and I believed.

So, yeah. No beheaded, defeathered hens, and I've still never met a witch or a wizard or a witchdoctor, but I (mostly-facetiously) believe.

(The morals of the story – 1: Being chased by ghosts and children of the corn and demon lorries makes running way more fun. 2: I still have no idea what was pounding on the latrine door or who was running behind me with the torch. 3: Ok, fine, I do. It was a couple of those giant beetles battering themselves against the door, and the torch was a few fireflies that happened to light up in order so they kept getting closer. Don't you wish you didn't know, though?)