DEVIL'S TAIL ROAD

by Rosalind Barden

"As you walk down the road at sundown, it pulls up behind you, pulls up off the ground, because it's not really a road, but a tail, the devil's tail, and it pulls off the ground, and it rears up, up really high, up in the air, and then it snaps down on you.  Just like that."

"No, not just like that.  I've heard it does something even worse.  Leaves its mark on you forever."

Sukie shook her head.  Her classmates stood about in the late November gloaming at the turn to the abandoned, weed-choked road trying to decide if one was brave enough to risk running down it and back.  They all should have been home long ago.

"There's nothing to those old dumb stories," Sukie told them.

"Then you run down and back.  Dare you."

"Double dare."

"Okay, I will, scaredy butts.  You'll see.  Nothin' to it."

With her classmates whispering nervously behind her, Sukie took off running, and as she rounded the first bend, they were out of sight.  There were lots of rabbit holes in the dirt, broken bottles, a collapsed old barn left over from when the area used to be farms, but nothing scary.

She came to where the road dead-ended in heaps of rusted car bodies from the 1970s and even the 1950s that people had dumped there.  But, nothing scary.  As she turned to run back, she thought she heard an odd scurrying amongst the car corpses.  Probably a possum or bird or something.  That's right.  Just a possum, nothing scary, nothing at all.

She ran back, maybe a little bit quicker this time, but, really, she wasn't scared.  When her classmates saw her coming, they took off, tripping over themselves to get away.  So much for applauding her brave accomplishment.  "Scaredy butts!" she yelled after them.

Sukie trudged back home.  As she settled in for some TV watching, her annoying little brother stared at her, hard.

"What are you staring at?"

"It's just, it's just . . . ."

"It's just what, doofie head?"

"It's just you got yourself a long pointy tail hanging off the back of your butt."