My grandparents used to live on the side of a red rock mountain in the city and the

sun or in desert. It wasn't like they were alone there living in solitude or anything. It was an

entire town with shops and houses. I had to go visit whenever I had breaks from school.

I'm saying that I had to, not because I didn't like it there, but because I found that place

extremely creepy. I had a cousin about my age that used to play with me and would also stay at my

grandparents home during breaks. It was the only time I get to see him. We were the type of kids

that would climb trees, play N64 until late at night, and stay up watching, are you afraid of

the dark and MTV most of the night until the electricity cut out at one point. It was part of the

creepy town. Then in the morning grandma would knock on the door and find us on the floor somewhere.

She did usually see that I was awake and invite me over to the kitchen, where she'd serve amazing

scrambled eggs with homemade bread. Grandpa had usually gone out to work or out to the store to get

things very early in the morning. And since my cousin would sleep until late, I got to spend a lot

of time with Grandma, asking her questions about our family, the town, and sometimes she'd start

talking about the news, which frankly I didn't understand at the time. There was one thing that got

my attention pretty quickly. She had heard a segment on the radio about reports of dogs going missing

and appearing a few days later as if nothing had happened, and she claimed to know one of the owners

of a missing dog. Grandma used to know a lot of people in town, and I got to meet many of them

because they used to stop by the house to have coffee with Grandma almost every morning.

From what I remember, Grandma had two main groups of friends. One of the groups was made up of four

older women who stopped on their way back home from doing the shopping and would have coffee and

bread for my grandma's kitchen. I was fascinated by them. They knew a lot of stories, talking about

their sons, things that they heard on the radio. And I think one of them was a writer or a journalist

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