This happened when I was doing food delivery full time, back when I was between jobs and trying to keep my rent paid without asking anyone for help.

I was living in northern Pennsylvania at the time, in one of those areas where a town can look normal during the day, but,

once you drive

ten minutes in any direction after dark, it turns into empty roads, tree lines, old farmhouses,

and long gravel driveways that make you feel like you are trespassing, even when you are

exactly where the app tells you to be. I had been delivering for almost nine months by then, and I was

used to weird addresses. I had delivered to hunting cabins with no porch lights, trailers with

five barking dogs loose in the yard, apartments where nobody put the building number anywhere

visible, and one house where the customer asked me to leave the food inside a broken

washing machine on the porch. So when I say this order felt wrong, I do not mean it felt wrong

because it was rural, or because the house looked run down. I mean it felt wrong in a way I still

have trouble explaining without sounding paranoid. It was a Thursday night in late October.

I remember that because the high school football field was lit up when I drove past it earlier,

and there were still fake spider webs on a lot of porches. It had rained most of the afternoon,

not hard, but enough to make everything shiny and dark. By 9.30 the rain had stopped, but there was fog sitting low in the fields,

and my windshield kept misting over if I turned the de-frost down for even a minute.

I had already decided I was going to take one or two more orders and then go home.

I had made decent money that night, and I was tired in that specific way delivery drivers get tired,

where you are not physically exhausted,

but your brain has been staring at house numbers and traffic lights

and restaurant counters for hours,

and you start making dumb mistakes.

...