You can listen to the trailer for my new podcast called A Dark Memory at the end of this episode of Scary Story Podcast.

My parents planned a trip for my cousins and I back when we were young, but it wasn't one of those cool trips to Disneyland or camping.

I was going to see our extended family.

Mom, Zans and uncles, all of them old and all of them rude.

They had never met me and they already started calling me Gorda, which did really means the feminine version of fat and Spanish.

It's like an assumed right that you get in my mom's family when you're old.

I was not looking forward to the trip, but something happened there that I could never forget, even though it has been almost 20 years since the visit.

The small town that we visited still had dirt roads and houses painted in fading bright colors.

Horily painted over so much that you could see their previous colors as a pink faded to reveal a blue, which had traces of yellow underneath.

But as we walked farther down the street and toward the muddy river where the trees were, we'd reached the house that belonged to my grandma's sister.

The house was now empty and that's what we would be staying.

It was a humble concrete brick house with large, unkept fields.

My mom used to tell me stories of the beans and the many vegetables I used to grow there to eat and sell.

Even though for most, it would have been tough to imagine anything growing in the hard dirt of that field.

I could see it.

I'd close my eyes and imagine the green plants.

I'd imagine my mom running around with her brothers and sisters laughing, just like in the stories she told me many times.

The time they out ran a snake.

The time they found a bicycle and rode it through the fields and to the wheels fell off.

Even if she was lying, I'd eat those stories right up.

I grew up in a crowded city where all I could do was play ball on the street and had to yell pause as loud as possible whenever we saw a car coming.

And it really messed up our games.

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