"Where the Marigolds Wilt"

The endless rows of hollowed-out orange and wicked gourds grinned their jagged grins at me as I left behind the city’s polished façade. Out where the sidewalks surrendered to gravel and asphalt gave up to sunbaked dirt, it was different—grittier, lonelier. The county lines weren’t drawn with rulers here; they were sketched by time and neglect.

This wasn’t the part of town you saw on postcards, no tree-lined boulevards or corner cafes. Just long stretches of empty fields and the occasional truck kicking up a cloud of dust. Out here, people walked farther to catch the school bus, drove longer to fill their gas tanks, and waited twice as long to see a doctor. If you can call it that. You don’t want to read the online reviews of their slapped-together medical portables.

 Grill stops and fried convenience kill more people than gang violence ever could, though that’s not what the sheriff’s constituents want to hear, especially with election season creeping in. They don’t vote for cholesterol warnings; they vote for bogeymen. It’s easier to blame the shadows lurking in alleyways than the slow, relentless clogging of arteries at the local diner.

And tonight’s call? It just handed them the perfect scapegoat, tied with a bloody bow. 

There’s a movement behind the thin blue line, especially out here in the heartland of America, where the land stretches wide and the opinions run deep. Believe me, California might have its bustling capitals and sun-drenched beach cities, but step outside those postcard-perfect scenes and you’ll find a state that’s more kissing cousin to Montana and Oklahoma than anyone in Los Angeles would care to admit.

Here, the sheriff isn’t just law enforcement; he’s a king in his own little fiefdom.

Out here, the badge carries weight—more than it should, sometimes. The sheriff isn’t just a public servant; he’s the face of law and order, the voice at the town hall, the one shaking hands at the church potluck.

He’s the guy who sends deputies to pick up your cousin when he’s had too much to drink or looks the other way when the farmer down the road stretches a little too far into his neighbor’s irrigation rights. It’s all about control, about keeping the peace while keeping the balance of power firmly in place.

And that thin blue line? It isn’t just a motto—it’s a banner.

Out here, it’s embroidered on jackets, flying from flagpoles, painted on pickup trucks. It’s a statement, a defiant nod to the idea that the world beyond the county line doesn’t get it, doesn’t understand what it’s like to live where the roads aren’t paved and the only thing standing between you and chaos is the sheriff’s department.

But the line between protector and ruler is thinner than most folks realize. The sheriff’s power isn’t just about enforcing the law—it’s about shaping it, bending it to fit the needs of the moment. Election season brings it into sharp focus.

The bad guys have to be out there, somewhere, because without them, there’s no need for the tough talk, the promises of safety, the sound bites that reassure the locals that their sheriff has it all under control.

And when the sheriff wants something—a new budget, a bigger jail, or just another term in office—he knows how to get it. All it takes is one bad night, one headline, one “bogeyman” to rally the community and remind them why they need him.

The sheriff’s star shines brightest in the darkest times, and he knows it.

California likes to sell itself as the land of progress, but out here in the fields and foothills, it’s a  I don’t even need to hear the details yet; I already know how this will go.

A press conference full of tough talk, promises of swift justice, maybe even a new task force. The sheriff will wear his best Stetson, lean into the microphone, and talk about “sending a message” to the bad guys.

The townsfolk will eat it up, just like they do the heart-stopping combo meals that keep the ambulance drivers in business.

But out here, the real killers aren’t the ones with guns and knives. They’re the slow, quiet ones—the kind that creep up on you between shifts at the plant, or after another night of fast food dinners eaten in a parked car under fluorescent lights. The kind you don’t see coming until it’s too late.

And me? I’ll be the guy left holding the bag, staring at crime scene photos long after everyone else has gone home.

Because for all the noise about gang violence and turf wars, the truth is quieter, messier, and infinitely harder to pin down. Tonight, though, they’ll get their bogeyman. And I’ll get another sleepless night.

The air was heavy and thick with the faintly sweet rot of overripe fruit left to die on the vine. A tractor coughed to life in the distance, but it might as well have been miles away.

The isolation settled into your bones, slow and insidious like rust eating through metal.

Every mile past the city limits felt like I was shedding another layer of the world I knew. The streetlights disappeared first, then the sound of traffic, then even the faint murmur of life humming through the wires.

the only company I had were the hollow-eyed faces carved into the pumpkins and the road kill.  They reminded me of my own morality.  But at least animals don’t create a grand story.

the echoes of my own thoughts rattling around like loose change.

An old farmhouse sagging under its own weight, its porch swing creaking in the breeze like a tired exhale. It was the kind of place where dreams didn’t just die—they got buried, forgotten, and plowed under with the next harvest.

The road stretched out in front of me, straight as a bad decision, and just as unforgiving. Out here, the world felt stripped-down, reduced to its bare essentials: earth, sky, and the long, endless line of the horizon. And somewhere in the distance, hidden behind the rows of grinning gourds and golden stalks, was a truth I wasn’t sure I wanted to find.

'

But I kept driving because that’s what you did in places like this. You kept moving forward, even when every sign told you to turn back.

 I followed more purple into the fields. Maybe "follow" wasn’t the right word. It was more like a siren’s call on dry land, a pull I couldn’t resist no matter how much I tried to convince myself I had a choice. The air hung heavy, bone-dry, carrying with it the faint scent of dust and decay.

The cracks in the earth beneath my boots told a story of greed—overproduction for luxury crops, almonds and cherries, sucking the water table dry like a dying man wringing the last drops from a canteen.

This wasn’t just a field. It was the threshold of something older, darker. An entrance to a haunted house with no walls, where the spirits didn’t need doorways to walk among the living. Halloween had ended, but the real specters were just waking.

Today was Los Días de los Muertos.

The Protestants fear the dead—afraid of ghosts, afraid of memory. But the Vatican had taken those spirits and wrapped them in rosaries, offering them to saints and martyrs. It had made the haunting its own. 

No one could see her but me. She—or they, I should say—had become my shadow, my dirty little secret. I can’t tell my wife. It’s not what she thinks, though I can already imagine the hurt in her eyes if she knew I was holding something back.

I can’t tell the department-appointed shrink either. The second I mention this, they’ll take my badge and stick me behind a desk to rot. Filing reports, processing evidence for younger officers who don’t know what it’s like to be followed—truly followed—by the ghosts of your work. She’s not the only one. There are more. And I have to remember to edit these parts out when reporters come sniffing around.

The ghosts of unsolved cases follow me like the paper trails I’ve spent years trying to untangle. They haunt the corner of my mind as serial numbers and stats in PDF files, as the photographs I can never forget. But to someone out there, each of these files was a child, a friend, someone’s lost laughter at Christmas, someone’s absence at a wedding.

Most in this line of work manage to keep the ghosts at bay. It’s just a job, after all—a career you grind through for twenty years of overtime until you make rank or retire with a pension. But that was never me. I wanted more. At least, I thought I did.

I grew tired of the grey towers poking above the fog on the coast, the salty taste of the tides that had lost their luster. The city had grown too crowded with its own ghosts.

So, I requested a transfer to the Sheriff’s Department in the Central Valley, to the Rural Protection Unit. The dust bowl of the West, the bottom of nowhere.

The commute was nonexistent, and the hours were regular. At least, on paper. I told myself this was the fix, the way to keep my marriage from floating off into the abyss. But why do we crave security when it’s the danger and excitement that keeps our hearts alive?

Here, marijuana was legal—at the state level, anyway. People moved out to the Valley to escape urban crime, thinking fields of green and golden sunsets would save them.

What they didn’t realize was that the fields had their own secrets, their own dangers.

Drug murders were still happening at the borders, and overdoses were a staple of the streets in San Francisco. But here? Here it was quieter, subtler.

Joe America would complain at town hall meetings that there used to be one homeless man in the back alleys, and now there were dozens. They thought they could escape, but they brought the problems with them.

The farms couldn’t make their payments, the land cracked open like witches’ hands in the endless drought. It became too easy to look the other way when organized crime offered desperate people a roof over their heads in exchange for silence.

I thought it would be easier here. But it wasn’t.

These cases could pad your resume, sure, but they’d also gut your soul. I’d promised my wife that this new position would make things different, but it hadn’t.

She stood there, that first victim. No one else could see her but me. She shook her head, her bruised neck and the faint marks of a needle haunting me.

Her ghost lingered at my side, unshakable.

Her story was the same one I’d seen before—a mountain of secrets buried in the valley.

She’d been kicked out by her mother after coming out as queer. People like to think things like that don’t happen in blue states, but they do. She’d found herself on the streets, the shelters too full to take her. When survival meant entertaining the wrong men.

He killed her. Whether it was rejection or his own bigotry, he left his mark on her. 

The tunnel was relic from the days of bootlegging, hidden just off South-99. The valley doesn’t have vast woods, and even the orchards aren’t dense enough to provide real cover. But down here, beneath the parched ground, isolation felt complete.

The entrance was marked with makeshift crosses fashioned from straw, wax-covered prayer cards bearing the Holy Virgin and saints, their faces cracked and faded. At first, it seemed like a clumsy attempt at warding off evil.

But the deeper I went, the more I realized this was a sacred space, twisted into something unholy.

The air grew heavy, reeking of old blood and incense burned past its time. I saw the faint glyphs carved into the walls—ancient marks of warning, symbols even the most desperate vagrants obeyed. Black arrows pointed deeper into the darkness, where the stench of decay was strongest.

At the center of it all, in a makeshift mausoleum, lay the victim. Her pale, fragile body was surrounded by burned effigies and melted candles. The skull atop the altar was charred black, its marrow seeped with wax. It would take weeks for forensics to determine what accelerant had been used.

The Aztec priests had ripped out hearts under the blazing sun, offering blood to Tonatiuh to keep the world alive. The Catholic priests had lit their own fires, burning witches and heretics in the name of salvation.

Here, those fires had met.

The altar bore scars of both traditions. Aztec spirals etched in ancient precision overlapped with crude Catholic crosses, painted in desperate attempts to control the power simmering below. But the forces didn’t cancel each other out.

They merged, creating something neither faith could have ever imagined.

This wasn’t devotion—it was a threshold.

The ghost beside me pointed to the walls. In the faint light of my flashlight, I saw the faint outline of a priest in a feathered headdress, plunging a dagger into an offering. Above him, a Catholic cross loomed, and below, the earth cracked open, fire and smoke pouring forth.

It wasn’t just about the murders anymore. The valley’s cracked soil, its desperate people, and its ghosts all seemed to be crying out for something.

A reckoning.

I realized I was going to be late for dinner. Again.

And it wasn’t just me coming home tonight. The ghost followed, as they always did, a silent guest I could never explain.

As I walked back to my car, I felt the pull of the fields behind me, like they weren’t done with me yet. The altar, the symbols, the victim’s broken body—they were all pieces of a puzzle I wasn’t sure I wanted to solve.

The rosary in my pocket felt heavier than it should, its beads warm against my skin as if it had absorbed the heat of the fire.

.The hum of the cavern seemed to follow me as I made my way back to the surface, my boots crunching over the brittle, blackened soil. The air grew lighter, but the weight on my chest didn’t lift.

The images of the altar, the burned effigies, the ghostly figure of the victim—they clung to me like shadows that wouldn’t fade in daylight.

The pale doll walked beside me, her translucent form flickering faintly under the dim light of the valley moon. She—the victim, the ghost, the haunted echo of this latest nightmare—was my silent dinner guest.

Her face, pale and bruised, still bore the marks of her final moments, but her expression was unnervingly calm. Like she had accepted something I couldn’t begin to comprehend.

“You know they’ll ask questions,” she/they said, her voice quiet but cutting through the stillness.

“Your wife. Your department. What are you going to tell them?”

I didn’t answer. What could I say? That the cases were starting to follow me, literally? That the ghosts of unsolved murders were now my companions, their presence seeping into every corner of my life?

The drive home was a blur, the road unfurling endlessly before me. She sat in the passenger seat, silent now, her gaze fixed on the horizon. The weight of her presence filled the car, heavier than the air in the cavern.

By the time I pulled into the driveway, the house was dark except for the warm glow of the dining room window. She’d waited for me, as always, even though she knew I wouldn’t keep my promise. The victim got out of the car first, her movements fluid, almost graceful. She lingered by the porch, her form flickering faintly against the warm light spilling from inside.

“You can’t keep me out,” she said softly.

My hand trembled as I unlocked the door, the familiar creak of the hinges sounding impossibly loud in the silence. My wife appeared in the doorway to the dining room, her face a mix of worry and frustration.

“You’re late,” she said, her tone weary.

“I know. I’m sorry,” I said, avoiding her gaze as I stepped inside.

But she didn’t move aside. Her eyes widened, her face paling as she looked past me.

“Who is that?” she whispered.

I froze. I hadn’t expected her to see.

“She’s…” My voice caught in my throat. “She’s a victim no a guest.”

The woman—the ghost—stood just inside the doorway now, her bruised face illuminated by the soft glow of the dining room. My wife took a step back, her hand flying to her mouth.

“She’s not leaving,” I said, my voice hollow. “None of them are.”

The victim walked past me into the dining room, her bare feet making no sound on the polished wood floor. She sat at the table, her form flickering like a dying flame, and looked at the empty plate across from my wife’s. Both of them watched me stare at the altar for loved ones no longer with us.

May they give me answers. The protestants called it ancestor worship.

“You always leave room for someone else,” they said, her tone almost amused. “I guess tonight, that’s me.”

My wife stared at me, tears brimming in her eyes, and for a moment, I thought she would scream, demand answers, demand that I make it stop. But she didn’t. She just sank into her chair, her hands trembling as she picked up her fork.

“Will she always be here?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. She was dead-naming the dead.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

The reports were a part of me, as inseparable from my soul as my own shadow. The altar, the rituals, the fire—they had opened something inside me, a threshold I couldn’t cross back over.

And now, the ghosts were coming home. One by one. We better break out the good tequila.