Mike's Pond

A short story.

I grew up in the 1980s in the idyllic suburban town of Amherst, New York, adjacent to the city of Buffalo. It was Middle America. The main cultural phenomena were Little League games and block parties.

But we had legends.

There were horrors that lurked in undeveloped plots of wooded land. There were stories born from the looming scare of chemical plants in nearby Niagara Falls, where a residential development called Love Canal made national news.

"Mike's Pond" is a very short ficitonalized memoir about a boy who goes out one night to explore one of those urban legends and discovers the real-life demons lurking close to home.