We lived in the suburbs of a major American city now.

Both my parents grew up in tiny towns.

My father is a little Colorado mountain town, my mother in a tiny little village in northern

Mexico.

They both like to whack nostalgia fairly often.

Sometimes they make me wish that I'd grown up in a little town where everybody knew each

other.

There's no crime.

You went swimming in the creek after school.

Circus was actually a big deal.

And anyway, on its spooky part, I figured me this all a good fit.

My mother used to tell me a scary story when I was little.

Mostly stories that she'd brought back from her little town.

Finté Negra.

Stories like the girl that danced with the devil, which is fire, dog from hell, but this

scariest, according to her, wasn't an old folktale, but something that actually happened

when she was a little girl.

My mother was about four or five, I guess.

This would have been the late 50s or early 60s.

A family was murdered.

Like I said, this was a tiny town where there was hardly any crime, except sometimes maybe

some teenage boys would get bored and drunk and break into the schoolhouse or something.

...