#winter hollow is my absolute favorite thing but it's not actually technically a writing project and it makes me SO SAD

[angsty-prompt-hole]

Heads Up, Seven Up

Thanks for the tag, @onthetipofmyquill!

I’m just gonna post an excerpt since my seven make absolutely no sense without context lmao. And also I have been dying to post Winter Hollow stuff on this blog and I had this little short story thing I’ve been working on involving it.

There’s an urban legend where I’m from. I’m not sure how it started or when, but most everyone in my small town knew the story. It was almost uncanny how well everyone’s different versions matched up, and I wondered for a long time whether that was because of how small our community was, or if there was something else going on here. I don’t ask myself that question anymore.

The story goes something like this:

Somewhere deep in the forest, there’s an old mining town. It’s not like any of the other old mining towns though. This town, called Winter Hollow after the founding Winterholler Mining Company, was burned to the ground in the winter of 1974. Yet, some people have reported that when they went to explore the town, all of the buildings were intact. In fact, there were even people living there. However, something seemed off, and it all got even worse the longer you stayed in Winter Hollow. You would start to see the landscape changing around you. A highway would appear going through the center of town, and the woods you had hiked through to get there were now desert plains where cattle and other livestock grazed. Some of the residents in the town would start urging you to leave while you still could, but you would catch others watching you, almost hungrily. And then…

The story can end in only one way, obviously. The townsfolk kill you, sacrificing you to their great horned god. Sometimes they would also eat you. Some people would embellish the story, giving the townsfolk names, or adding in a radio station that broadcast out weird messages that made no sense. When I was younger, the parents of the community would tell a version of the story where there were weird animals lingering in the woods, waiting to snatch you up. None of us kids ever admitted to believing it, but I know some of us were successfully scared out of solo adventures in the woods for a while.

This legend was just that for most of my life, a legend. When I hit college, though, it became much more than that.

I’d always been passionate about the outdoors, and the forest was one of my favorite places on earth, so when it came time to pick a degree, obviously I picked natural resources. However, it turns out natural resources involves a lot more math than I was anticipating, and since I had nearly failed all of my high school math classes, I ended up having to take a bunch of extra math classes in order to meet the prerequisites for the stuff I actually cared about.

The first semester of my sophomore year the math class was statistics. Around the 5th day of the semester this kid sat next to me in class, a guy I had never seen before. He was about average in every respect except for the fact that he looked like he hadn’t slept in a week and that his eyes were the most vivid green I’ve ever seen in my life.

This is an open tag for anyone who wants to do it!