By Amir H.

Remington, Georgia – Summer, 2000

Mykel pressed his forehead against the window of his dad’s Nissan Sentra, watching trees blur past like green smudges on watercolor paper. Somewhere between the last broadcast of DJ Foxy 109 and the next gas station, they had officially crossed into nowhere.

His Game Boy Color had died hours ago. No spare AA batteries.

The air conditioner wheezed and whined, barely holding off the Southern heat. He would’ve rolled down the window, but that meant cranking it down by hand—the old-school kind. So instead, he rolled his eyes and focused on the latest issue of Game Informer.

A feature on Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight caught his eye, but what really hooked him was the teaser for Silent Hill 2. He’d borrowed a friend’s copy of the first one, and it haunted him in the best way—foggy streets, ghost towns, that lingering dread.

That’s what this trip felt like: Silent Hill.
Except hotter.
And with more bugs.

He missed his room. Missed being at Al’s house, gaming deep into the night and arguing over who was stronger: Hiei or Inuyasha.

Mykel’s headphones were still on, though his Sony-blue Walkman D-E350 had stopped playing three tracks ago. No backup batteries there either.

“Smart, Meek. Real smart,” he muttered.

It wasn’t about the music. It was about blocking out the world.

“Almost there,” his dad said, tapping the steering wheel to the beat of his slow jam mix. Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” poured from the speakers like molasses.

“Bet you never smelled air this fresh, huh?” he added, rolling down the window to give the AC a break.

Mykel just grunted.

His dad was stationed overseas most of the year. Mykel saw him in glimpses—big, sturdy man with a laugh like thunder. A country Black man, fine-tuned by the military.

Before ATL, before the noise and corner stores, his dad had grown up in the backwoods. Raised by Mykel’s grandma in a shotgun house with chickens out back and no microwave.

“Remington’s where I learned how to be a man,” his dad said, voice softening. “Figured it’s time you got a taste of that too. Instead of bein’ locked up in your room all spring.”

Mykel didn’t reply.
No internet.
No PlayStation or Nintendo.
No cable.
No Blockbuster.
Just land, family, and a whole season of forced independence.

The Sentra turned off the main road onto a gravel path. Dust rose in lazy spirals as they pulled up to an old farmhouse, its white paint chipped and peeling under the Southern sun. A porch swing creaked in the breeze. Somewhere, a dog barked once—then lost interest.

Out back, past the tall grass and rusted garden tools, stood a tree.

It was massive. Towering. A little too still.

A willow—its long green tendrils draped like fingers brushing the ground. A small pond shimmered nearby, brown and green like forgotten glass.

Something about it made Mykel sit up straighter.

“Pretty, huh?” his dad said, catching the glance. “I used to sit under that tree every summer. Swam in that pond. Caught frogs. Swore that willow whispered secrets, if you listened close enough.”

Mykel didn’t say anything.
It didn’t whisper.
But it watched.

---

Later That Night…

They went out to eat that night. Big Mama had no plans to cook in that heat, and Mykel’s dad didn’t dare argue.

The BBQ joint had bass so loud the windows rattled. Juvenile’s “Back That Thang Up” boomed through the speakers, drowning out half the conversation. Nobody seemed to mind.

Apparently, Mykel’s dad was a local legend.
Quarterback for the Remington Red Wolves. Star athlete.
Folks lit up when they saw him—patting his back, asking how long he’d be around.

To Mykel, it felt like celebrity energy.
But even surrounded by smiles and loud voices, he still wished he was back home.

With Al.

But even if he were home, Al wasn’t around anymore. His best friend had moved to the Midwest—something about his dad landing a big tech job.
New school. New life.

Mykel didn’t blame him.
He just missed him.

Soon, his dad would be back on base, and Mykel would return to life with his mom—part of the custody agreement.

Friends weren’t something he had plenty of.
Most kids thought he was weird.
Anime, video games, manga…

Mykel wanted to be a game tester someday.
But where he came from, most kids dreamed of being rappers or doctors.

---

The Next Morning

The sun hadn’t even hit its stride, but already the Georgia heat pressed down like a warning.

Mykel stood in the tall grass, holding a pair of rusty garden shears that felt too big for his hands. His dad had already started hacking at the vines curling around the porch, sweating through his old Army tee.

“This used to be my job every summer,” his dad said, arms swinging steady. “Your grandma ain’t let nothin’ grow wild unless she meant it to. These vines? They’re disrespectful.”

Mykel wiped sweat from his neck. “She really used to do all this herself?”

“Every bit of it. Up until two summers ago. Then her knees gave out. Still tried to get out here with a cane and a rake. Had to hide her tools just to make her rest.”

Mykel smirked. “Sounds like her.”

Big Mama stepped onto the porch with a glass of sweet tea and a dish towel slung over her shoulder.

“Y’all don’t gotta clear the whole South today,” she called. “Just make sure that back path’s open. I don’t like not bein’ able to see the willow.”

Mykel glanced toward the backyard.
The grass thinned out, and the willow stood tall and strange against the morning light.
Even in full sun, it looked like it didn’t belong.

“I thought you said you don’t mess with that tree anymore,” his dad called back.

“I don’t,” she said. “But that don’t mean I like it bein’ all choked up by them vines neither. Tree’s older than all of us. Remembers things.”

“Like what?” his dad challenged with a grin.

“Yo big-headed self fallin’, breakin’ your legs, and me havin’ to whisk you to the emergency room,” Big Mama muttered, shaking her head. “Still don’t know what drove you to jump from the tree into that pond. Thank the Lord you only got away with a broken leg.”

Then she disappeared back into the house before Mykel could ask what she meant.

---

By mid-morning, the cicadas were screaming again.
Mykel’s shirt clung to his skin. His hands were stained green from ivy and red from scratches.

His dad had moved to the front to tackle a rogue magnolia.

“Take a break, Meek,” he called. “Go cool off. I’ll finish up here.”

Mykel didn’t need to be told twice.
His CD was still spinning—a homemade mix of Cowboy Bebop OST, Lil’ Wayne, and Linkin Park.
The batteries he got from Big Mama were showing two bars left.

He dropped the shears and wandered toward the back path, brushing dirt from his palms.

His mind drifted back to his Game Boy.
Maybe later he’d ask his dad to hit a store nearby for some batteries.
Something—anything—to make the day pass quicker.
If his Walkman died too, he figured he might just jump in the pond.

“It is what it is at that point,” he said aloud, grinning to himself.

He figured he’d chill by the pond, under the old willow tree.
A break.
Some shade.

---

The willow waited.

A breeze stirred its long limbs, like a wave.
For a second, Mykel thought he saw something—a flicker of yellow, like a sundress swaying through the leaves.

But when he blinked, there was only the tree, the pond, and the steady rhythm of the cicadas.

Still… something pulled him forward.
A low hum beneath the buzz.
A whisper without words.

He stepped under the willow’s shade, its leaves brushing his shoulders like soft fingers.

That’s when he saw her.

A girl, maybe his age, sitting barefoot at the pond’s edge with her back to him.
Her locs swayed gently, each one tipped with small wooden beads that clicked as she tilted her head.
She was humming—something old, something sweet.

She didn’t turn around.

“Hey,” Mykel said, voice dropping without him meaning it to. “You from around here?”

The girl didn’t answer.
Just dipped her toes into the pond and kept humming.

He took a step closer, about to speak again—when she turned.

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” she said, eyes bright. “You were loud this morning.”

Mykel blinked. “What?”

She smiled. “With the vines. You woke up the whole yard.”

Then her expression shifted.
Her head tilted, and her smile faltered slightly.

“Wait…” she said. “You’re not—? But you look like him…”

Mykel furrowed his brow. “Huh?”

The girl looked past him, as if expecting someone else to appear through the willow branches.

“A friend was supposed to meet me here,” she murmured. “We always meet around this time. They’re kinda lazy though… always late.”

Mykel opened his mouth, then closed it again.
He didn’t know what to say.
And somehow, it didn’t feel like it was his turn to speak.

He scratched at his arm, the cicadas humming louder than they had any right to.

“I don’t think I’m who you’re waiting for,” he said.

The girl blinked, then gave him a sly side-eye. “You sure?”

He shrugged. “I mean, unless you were expecting someone who hates the outdoors and sweats like a busted faucet.”

She giggled, soft and sudden. “Yeah, okay. Definitely not him. He would faint at the sight of a tiny roach.”

She stood and brushed her hands off on her sundress.
Yellow. Faded, like it had seen too many summers. Maybe more than it should have.

Mykel tried not to stare but couldn’t help it.
Something about her felt… off.
Not in a creepy way.
Just like she didn’t fully belong to the scene.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Luna,” she said, rocking back on her heels.

“I’m Mykel.”

Luna squinted.
“Mykel…”
She said it like she was trying it on, like a name from a dream.
“I like it. It fits.”

Mykel rubbed the back of his neck.
“You live around here?”

Luna shrugged.
“Sort of. I come and go.”

She pointed to a group of homes you could barely make out across the lake.

“See that yellow house with the yellow gates?”

Mykel nodded.
How could you not?
Out of the neighboring houses out here, it was the brightest and most vibrant.

Mykel had wondered once who lived there.
His dad had just shaken his head and said,
“A witch, son. Stay away from over there.”

“The witch’s house?” Mykel asked without thinking.

“Watch ya mouth now, that’s my Ma’Dear you talmbout,” Luna said, smirking.

“Oh—uh, sorry. My dad just told me it was the witch’s house, that’s all.”

She grinned wider.
“Sounds like your dad needs his head rearranged, talmbout folks’ homes like that.”

This girl in yellow gave off sweet tea and lemonade energy—bright, tart, and hard to pin down.

Before Mykel could say anything else, she turned back toward the pond.

She pointed toward the water’s edge. “See that log over there?”

Mykel followed her finger.

“Used to be a whole bench. The legs rotted out. We’d sit there for hours, me and—”
She stopped herself.

“We’d talk about ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” Mykel asked, skeptical.

Luna grinned.
“Don’t tell me you’re scared of ghosts.”

“I’m not,” Mykel said quickly. Then added, “They’re not real anyway.”

“Oh yeah?”

She crouched down by the log, tapping it twice like she was knocking on a door.

“Some folks think this whole town is haunted. Especially the lake.”

“The lake?” he repeated.

She nodded.
“It covers the old Remington. The first one. The real one. They say the water wasn’t supposed to rise that high, but it did. Swallowed it up whole. Like it was angry.”

Mykel shifted his weight, the grass squishing wetly beneath his sneakers.
The willow’s limbs stirred like a thousand whispers.

“Sometimes,” she said, quieter now, “the past doesn’t like to stay buried.”

He didn’t know what to say.
The air thickened—still and heavy.
The willow creaked above them, swaying in a breeze Mykel couldn’t feel.

Then—footsteps.
Crunching through grass.
Firm. Familiar.

Mykel turned.

His dad was cutting across the yard, a hand raised.

“Meek!” he called. “You good back here?”

Mykel looked back toward Luna.

But the spot by the pond was empty.

Just the rippling water.
Just the croaking frogs.
Just the cicadas singing their Southern chorus.
Just the willow.

Gone.

He stepped closer, heart thumping.

Then—movement.

Behind the willow, where sunlight met shadow, something shifted.
Not a deer.
Not a bird.

Something tall.
Thin.
Cloaked in darkness.

And where its face should’ve been—
just one, glowing blue eye.

Mykel blinked.
The shape vanished.

He took a step back. Then another.

His dad’s voice rang out again, closer now.

“Mykel! Come on, man. We gotta finish before the sun eats us alive.”

Mykel turned toward the sound.

But even as he walked back up the path, something told him—
don’t turn around again.
Not yet.

That Night

That night, Mykel dreamed he was Link from the Legend of Zelda games.

He was in a dimly lit basement, surrounded by piles of old knickknacks, furniture, and a maze of bagged clothes and stacked boxes.
An old AC unit rattled next to a dark laundry room, its breath the only thing keeping the upstairs cool.

Everything looked familiar, but wrong—
like it had been shaped out of crooked, glitchy polygons.

And then—the hands.

They were rooted into the floor and walls, twisting out like dead trees.
When Mykel reached for one, it grabbed his wrist—cold, unyielding.

From the shadows of the laundry room, something pulled itself free.

It moved like broken clay—
lurching forward in sick, jerking spasms.

Its flesh hung in loose sheets, sagging and dripping like melted wax.
An oversized, lipless mouth gaped across its face, full of yellowed, rotting teeth.

Pale, rubbery arms dragged behind it, while others jutted from the ground, grasping blindly at the air.

It didn’t walk.
It crawled.
It lurched.
It snapped—
a puppet without strings, dragged forward by hate alone.

“HEY! LISTEN!”

A tiny golden light flashed into existence, wings flickering like a butterfly’s, cutting through the cold dark.

Using all his strength, Mykel tore free from the hand and bolted through a side door—expecting Hyrule, expecting open fields.

Instead, he stumbled out into Remington—into the backyard of the yellow house across the lake.

The night was thick with heat.
Cicadas played their endless song under the wide, pale moon.

Breathless, Mykel turned—

—and came face-to-face with the creature.

It didn’t charge.
It waited.

Limbs jerked like marionette strings,
arms too long, dragging behind it,
that one blue eye burning like a star in its wasted face.
Its mouth opened wide—
too wide—
like a snake preparing to devour him whole.

The cicadas had gone silent.

---

The Next Morning

Mykel woke with the dream clinging to him like wet clothes.
He didn’t tell Big Mama.
He didn’t tell his dad.

Instead, after breakfast, he packed his Game Boy Color—now blessed with fresh batteries courtesy of Big Mama’s TV remote—and stuffed his Yu-Gi-Oh cards into his pocket.

Maybe Luna would be into Pokémon.
Or maybe, like Al always said, “a Shadow Game can erupt anywhere.”

He headed for the willow tree.

---

When he got there, someone was already by the pond.

A man.
Tall. Slender.
Skin dark as soil, dressed in a white tank and suspenders.
He looked like he belonged to another time—
though, to be fair, parts of Remington still felt stuck somewhere deep in the past.

The man’s head tilted as he skipped a rock across the water.
One eye was covered by a black patch.
The other—
icy blue, gleaming in the sunlight.

“How ya doing there, young man?” the man said, voice smooth as honey… but it scraped something raw in Mykel’s chest, like a wrong chord in a familiar song.

Before Mykel could answer, a soft hum drifted through the air.

Across the willow, Luna sat by the pond again, bare feet splashing in the shallows.
He hadn’t seen her arrive.
Hadn’t even heard her.
But she was there—humming that same old, sweet tune.

Mykel breathed out a shaky laugh, half relief, half something else he couldn’t name.

He grabbed his Game Boy and crossed the clearing to her.

---

Today, Luna wasn’t impressed by Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh.
She turned over the cards like they were old recipe notes and giggled at the Game Boy’s clunky buttons.

“My grandma would say all this is the work of the Devil,” she said, laughing.

They both cracked up.

They spent the morning playing made-up games, tossing rocks into the pond, daring each other to hop over fallen branches.

Summer slipped by like water between their fingers.

---

Big Mama and Mykel’s dad met Luna, too—briefly, one day when she wandered up to the porch while Mykel was getting a drink.

Big Mama’s smile faltered just a little when she saw the girl.
She pressed a hand to her chest, murmuring something under her breath that sounded like a prayer.

His dad gave Luna a cautious nod, one eye lingering on the pond.

“Y’all stay close to the house, hear?” he said, rough and low, almost like he didn’t trust himself to say more.

By Summer’s End

By summer’s end, Mykel and his dad had finished the yard work and even helped Big Mama fix up the house a bit more.

One afternoon, Big Mama sifted through an old box of photographs. She pulled out a family photo—Big Mama herself, standing among a group of children, a little girl in a pale yellow dress smiling beside her. They were all gathered in front of the bright yellow house.

Big Mama tapped the photo and began telling stories about her and her big sister, Luna. Luna had been a scrappy, feisty girl—“a little pup with Big Dawg energy,” Big Mama said, chuckling softly.

The house had once been a daycare, she explained. Run by a mother and her son.

The son, fresh back from his military tour, had suffered a mental break—and drowned one of the children.

Big Mama shook her head as she flipped to a yellowed newspaper clipping. The headline read:

Mental Break — Man Drowns Child

The worst part was, Luna hadn’t been the only one—just the last. The man had been caught because Big Mama managed to escape to a neighbor’s house and tell someone. Luna had fought, though. She fought hard, even managing to pull the man into the water with her. Some said, by a stroke of bad luck—or maybe something more—a heavy branch from the old willow tree had fallen, striking the man on the head.

The son collapsed on top of Luna, drowning her, already exhausted from her struggle.

The mother had tried to “save her only son,” never realizing the horror she unleashed by covering for him.

Big Mama’s voice grew quieter as she pointed again to the photo—the man with piercing blue eyes and an eyepatch.

The details crawled under Mykel’s skin.
He tried to tell Big Mama and his dad about Luna. About the one-eyed man by the pond. But they only exchanged puzzled glances.
Big Mama’s hand hovered over the photo a second longer, her brow furrowing as if straining to catch something slippery in her mind. Then she shrugged, muttering, “Some things round here don’t let you hold onto ‘em too long.”

Apparently, no little girl had ever come up to Big Mama’s porch.
They hadn’t seen him with anyone in a yellow sundress either.
Just Mykel, playing by the willow.
Alone.

He’d looked happy enough, they said. So they hadn’t worried.

As they rolled down the gravel road, dust trailing behind them like lazy ghosts, Mykel pressed his forehead to the window, trying to memorize the way the light caught the tops of the trees.

The car rumbled beneath him, old shocks squeaking with every dip and bump. Big Mama’s house grew smaller and smaller behind them.

“We’ll be back before you know it,” his dad said, one hand steady on the wheel, the other tapping a lazy rhythm against the dashboard.

Mykel nodded, but his mind was somewhere else.

At the pond.
At the willow.
At her.

He twisted around in his seat just as the car crested a hill—there she was.
Standing at the edge of the road, her pale yellow sundress fluttering around her legs.
Luna smiled—a small, bittersweet smile—and lifted one hand in a wave.
She was mouthing something, but somehow the words were already clear in his head:
“HEY! LISTEN!”

Mykel blinked—
—and she was gone.

He faced forward again, heart pounding, clutching his Game Boy like a tether to something real.

---

Weeks Later

Back home in the city, the days blurred together.

School.
Homework.
Friends he didn’t feel as close to anymore.

Sometimes he’d wake up at night, convinced he heard cicadas buzzing just beyond the window. Or that he caught the faint hum of an old, sweet song drifting through the concrete maze of his neighborhood.

One afternoon, while cleaning his room, he found something wedged deep in the back pocket of his jeans.

A Yu-Gi-Oh card.

He didn’t remember putting it there.

It was the Change of Heart card—an angel and devil locked together in a single image, both reaching for the same soul.

Mykel smiled.

He tucked the card onto his bookshelf, next to his Game Boy, and stepped outside into the golden late summer air.

The sky was clear, and somewhere, faint but certain, he heard the cicadas singing again—and he could only think of the little girl beneath the willow.

I’m excited to share more stories like this in my Southern Gothic horror novella, Rose Red Snow White — releasing May 24th!
Thank you for your support! 🌹
👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F3N6XW79