Medford is a total drag.
I don’t know what I was thinking moving here. Getting a job. Buying a house. After the initial rush wore off, after I had cramped my writing hand signing 8,000 papers, I picked up my keys, organized my (admittedly sparse) material items into some semblance of hominess and ordered a pizza for my inaugural new house dinner. I was looking out my tiny kitchen window when a rusty truck with tinted windows cruised past. The driver saw me and gestured something I hoped meant ‘hello,’ but considering the fingers and tongue involved probably meant a lot more than ‘hello.’ Hello, and get fucked, new girl. In that quiet moment, as I gnawed on a too-tough pizza crust, I realized with a sinking feeling that moving 700 miles away from home on little more than a whim was pretty foolish.
Of course, admitting as much to my close-knit, conservative family back in SLC was not happening. I’d been so convinced that all I had to do was move west to one of the blue states to escape their clutches. They were equally convinced that I would go running back to the protective embrace of mommy and daddy – even though Mommy and Daddy couldn’t stand that their little girl had shaved her head and begun dating other girls as teen and showed no signs of slowing down now that she was pushing 30. Surely it was just a phase, after all. So here I was. 700 miles from home. Alone in a two-bedroom ranch style house in east Medford, Oregon, looking out my kitchen window at the suburban neighborhood I would call home for the foreseeable future. It was blistering hot out, and a chocking haze was settling into the valley from a nearby fire. In the distance sirens warbled.
This was a mistake.
In that moment I had no idea how big a mistake it was, but I was about to get a lesson I wouldn’t soon forget.
I finished off a few more slices of the pizza – it wasn’t the best pie I’d ever had, but it also wasn’t the worst – and settled in on the couch with my laptop to watch some old SNL skits on YouTube. It was my go-to bedtime routine.
In the middle of a marathon of The Californians, just as I was beginning to nod off, there was a light tapping at the front door. I started awake. Had I locked the door? I pushed the laptop onto the couch and stood up, the strangeness of my new home hitting me hard in this suggestible half-awake state. The tapping continued.
Tiptoeing to the door, I realized once I got there that it had no keyhole to look out of. Shit. I moved to the bay window to see if I could get a look at the late night visitor. What time was it, anyway? I poked at my fitbit – it was after 11pm. Too late for anyone I didn’t know to be visiting – and I didn’t know anyone here.
I looked out the window at the porch. The porch light was on (thank god), but there was nothing there. The tapping continued. Then I realized that there was something there – but whoever (or whatever) it was, they stood so close to the front door that I could only just see the edge of their outline when awkwardly craning my neck and pressing my cheek to the window. They didn’t shift away. Dammit. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, or a damn werewolf for that matter. Whoever it was, they were quite tall.
Then I heard a voice behind the door. It was muffled, but it sounded like a woman’s voice. I shot back to the door. “Hello? What do you want?” I sure as hell wasn’t going to open up, but if they needed help maybe I could make a phone call. The voice responded, but it was indecipherable.
“Do you need help?”
The tapping continued.
“Hey. If you need help, I can call 9-11, but I don’t know you.”
The muffled voice spoke again. I almost spoke back, but something stopped me. The voice was different than before. Lower. Was it the same voice?
“Can you move away from the door, please?”
The tapping strengthened, became a steady knock. Whoever it was wasn’t giving up.
“I think you have my place confused with someone else!” Obviously, they had me confused with someone else. But my shouting didn’t seem to phase them – the knocking continued. I moved back to the window again. Maybe I could get a look this time.
Pressing my cheek to the cool glass, all I could see on the porch were a few moths circling the light and a pool of yellow spilling over the grass in the front yard, turning it a sickly yellow. Or maybe that was the persistent drought. It was hard to say. Twisting my neck, I again caught a glimpse of my visitor. They were still pressed up close to the door. Only their back and shoulders were clearly visible, and they appeared to be wearing all black. I slid back, hoping to see more, and that’s when they turned and looked my direction. I caught myself staring into a pair of coal black eyes peering out of a stark white face that was longer and thinner than any face I’d ever seen.
I gasped and jerked away from the window. It had seen me. Whatever it was. It knew I – me – was in here. The knocking came more powerfully now, and the voice rose again, deep and gravelly. I still couldn’t understand what it was saying, but one word became clear: Jenny. Jenny. That’s my name.
Scrambling past the couch, I ran back to my room and began pulling boxes out of the sizable bedroom closet. Living alone for years as a gay woman in a red state had taught me the unfortunate necessity of being armed and ready. I pulled my gun out of hiding, slid a few bullets into the chamber and unlocked the safety. No way was I dealing with the freaking boogeyman without my trusty Dorothy.
Stomping toward the front door, I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Motherf***er, you better piss off before I blow a hole in the damn door!”
Something slammed hard against the door, hard enough to shake it in the frame. I cocked the gun and aimed. “I’m gonna blow a hole straight through you!”
The door rattled again as something large and heavy hit it, and a blood-curdling howl erupted on the other side. I screamed, lifted the gun, and fired.
I have never fired a gun inside a house before. I was not prepared for the explosive pop that left my ears ringing and my hands tingling. The gun was hot in my hands – so hot I dropped it to the ground. I climbed behind the couch and waited. All was quiet. Whoever it was – whatever it was – had stopped knocking. With my ears still ringing, I snuck over to the bay window to have a peek. The porch was empty. Apart from the moths, the only thing I could see were the neighbor’s porch lights turning on one by one as the neighborhood I’d just joined looked out into the night, no doubt wondering about the gun blast so close by.
I didn’t sleep that night. I curled around Dorothy and watched the dawn light climb down my bedroom wall until I decided it was time to actually open the front door and see what I could see.
Which wasn’t much. As I stepped out onto my porch, one neighbor across the way stared me down with derision. An old man in a bathrobe, likely wondering what this weirdo was dong in his neighborhood. No long-faced, black-eyed vampire creature awaited me. Nothing at all out here – except when I turned around and looked at my door. The bullet hole was there – I’d have to fix that, obviously – and so was a bunch of writing. Most of it was indecipherable, in some kind of code I didn’t know. But right around where the spyhole would be if there were one was a phrase written in clear, plain English that chilled my blood.
“Welcome to Dreadford, Jenny.”
I looked around in shock. The elderly neighbor was still there. When I caught his eye, hoping he would offer something, help, comfort maybe, he only stared back with an icy gaze. Then he lifted one gnarled old finger to his throat and ran it slowly from one side to the other.
Medford sucks, man.