Eerie Indiana

a semi-autobiographical flash horror

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Indiana has always felt slightly sideways from reality.

I grew up watching the show Eerie, Indiana. Cult classic. If you haven't seen it, you should fix that.

The Tupperware episode is my favorite.

Indiana is a strange place. At least, where I grew up was.

The “Region”, as they call it, is the small suburban-industrial strip running along the bottom of Lake Michigan, wedged somewhere between Chicago and actual Michigan.

The town I grew up in was, in a word, liminal.

Deeply suburban, yet I could leave my house and wander into cornfields. Collegiate and highly educated, yet still measuring the year by whether it was football or basketball season.

I spent my weekends catching shows at The Second City in Chicago, which was just a quick train ride away. Or I drove down to DC’s Country Junction and went line-dancing. Literally everyone was in cowboy hats and shit-kickers.

I never thought I'd come back there.

I left like any Midwestern kid does. Coast-bound for glory. Hungry for culture. Anxious to leave behind Bible Belt mentalities and embrace a cosmopolitan life.

Boston. Law School. Eventually a family.

But something always drew me back.

Valparaiso, Indiana.

But nobody from there calls it Valparaiso. It's just Valpo.

Home of the Vikings.

Due to some tangential relationship to Orville Redenbacher, Valpo is the home of an elaborate Popcorn Festival each year. A bronze statue of the man sits on a park bench downtown—an enchanting little roadside attraction where you can snuggle up to Orville and have your picture taken with his arm around your shoulders.

I still remember when Valpo competed with Chesterton and its Wizard of Oz Festival.

I mean, come on, Chesterton got real-life munchkins.

Valpo got popcorn floats.

Of course by that point the munchkin actors were all rather ancient.

Now I suspect they're all dead.

When I say Indiana is a liminal place, I mean that in a few ways. The one that really creeps into your bones is the way it feels trapped in time.

Maybe that's true of the Midwest in general.

Main Street, USA.

Victorian town squares.

The illusion of Americana.

Storefronts may come and go but the place remains the same. Trapped in an unending nostalgia for a past that never was.

And so it was that I returned. A job offer that was too good to pass up. In my old hometown.

The old water tower loomed in welcome.

When I was little and we'd go for a drive, I'd always watch for it on the horizon to let me know I was back home.

They'd changed it—painted it.

Now it felt like it was watching me.

I found myself missing the old, faded green viking mascot that used to be painted on the tower.

Now there was just a vast unblinking eye.

I parked, getting out to stretch my legs. The water tower glowered.

A little girl rode past me on a bicycle with long blonde braids.

I recognized her immediately.

Kaitlin Smulski. Third grade.

Except Kaitlin would have been nearly forty now.

She turned as she passed.

Same 90’s style pink and purple neon windbreaker. Same jelly shoes. Same missing front tooth.

The same face.

“Welcome home,” she said.

“You've been missed.”

She kept pedaling.

I looked up at the eye painted on the tower.

It blinked.

Slowly. Wetly.

A boy walked up to me. I recognized him immediately.

Zachary Miller.

He tossed up a hacky sack and smiled.

For a moment, it seemed like reality glitched.

The hacky sack hovered in the air.

Zachary winked, catching it, and walked away.

All around town, people continued chatting and shopping without ever once looking up at the eye staring down at them.

As though they’d grown used to being watched.

As though they had always been watched.

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