State Sign
(Writer’s Group prompt of use an actual place for inspiration. Please note that no evidence of POW deaths is related in the records to the Hofmann forest. Liberty was taken for this story. Any relation to people living or dead is co-incidental. This is a work of fiction.)
Arriving at the Sneads Ferry High School, just off of Dixon, Kiara sat on one of the concrete benches outside to put on her sneakers before heading inside for college testing. Within moments the shadows of the long, covered walk between the drop-off line and the entrance were eclipsed by bodies. She looked up to discover Mandy in front of her with her boyfriend Chuck at her shoulder, with them were Tim and Granger.
“S’up?” she asked, setting her sneakers aside. Kiara glanced at the high school entrance to see who the school had hired for the special Saturday duty. Ken Baumgardner stood guard at the door; the white police officer made eye contact with her, then lowered his hat and leaned in the doorway in a way which blocked the camera lines. No help there. Standing, leaving her book bag and her sneakers on the bench, the seventeen-year-old Black girl backed onto the grass.
“What are you doing here?” Mandy asked, “School’s closed.”
“ACTs.” Kiara responded, looking around for any other aid. She had walked all the way over from High Ridge, leaving way early to make sure she didn’t miss the testing since both her parents were working this weekend and had taken the cars. “I’m going to take the ACTs.” The way early seems to be too early. No one else was being dropped off yet.
“You don’t be needing that.” Mandy said.
Kiara chuckled, hoping to break the hateful pall they were emitting. She grew up with most of them, except Granger whose dad worked at the nearby base. Heck, her father and Mandy’s mom shared a last name, as black and white families often did in North Carolina, when one family owned the other at one point and neither family were of a mind to move away from where they had set down their roots. Making eye contact with each, she said, “Sure will, if I am going to get into a good college.” Only Timmy broke eye contact. The others stared with anger.
Chuck spat on the concrete walk, leaving a tobacco stain. The coach wouldn’t be happy to learn he was pinching. “Stealing scholarships from white folk with your DEI reversal dis-crime-ination.”
“Yeah.” Granger added. “Like your brother.” He and Tim started circling opposite sides around the bench. Kiara took a step back for each slow step forward they took.
Only J-J had gone onto college, her other two brothers had gone into the trades. He had gotten a full ride, but that had been a sports, not academic scholarship. Like everyone in her family, Kiara hid her smarts, keeping to the middle of the grades as best she could.
“Well, I am not trying to get a scholarship. Just have to take this to apply to Appalachian State U. Honest.” She held up her hands toward them.
“Girls don’t need to go to college.” Mandy put her arm through Chuck’s and leaned on his shoulder. “Just get yourself a man. No need to take a seat away from guys.”
With Mandy tying up Chuck, the explosive running back for the Bulldogs, Kiara took off running across the grassy lawn in front of the school the beads in her hair clacking behind her. If she could get to the treeline leading into the Hofmann Forest which the school backed against, all she would need to do is hide there until other kids start unloading.
Chuck was a short speed runner and Tim did hurdles for track. Granger, though, was a long-distant runner and Kiara had already walked three miles to get to school. He yanked her down by her hair just inside the trees, sending beads flying, and punched her once, straddling her and raising his fist to hit her again, pausing a second as his social programming kicked in against hitting a girl.
“Do it,” panted Mandy as she caught up. “Teach this bitch not to steal from her betters.”
He pounded her three more punches, before standing and kicking her once in the stomach with his boots. “Don’t make me run again.” Cuts ran red where his new class ring had broken her skin.
The morning mist, not yet burned off in the June morning under the trees, cooled lungs as Kiara coughed blood, spitting leaves and loam inhaled as she sucked oxygen back into her body.
The mist thickened, and Kiara felt a different anger from the soil dugged into her knees and elbows. Shorts and a t-shirt offered little protection from being tackled to the ground. She panicked momentarily. She shouldn’t feel that anger, that connection to the soil. Not outside the coven circle.
Her beads!
“Nigger, taking what belongs to us.” Mandy kicked Kiara in the hands wrapped around her middle to protect her abused stomach. “Black trash.” She kicked Kiara again.
The ground groaned low.
Hofmann whispered in Kiara’s ears. Slaves who died cutting lumber in the forest, who bled harvesting the tobacco fields clear to build the school. But they were old, old voices, faded with time. Stronger were the German and Italian voices of the POWs held on US soil during World War Two.
North Carolinian business men knew what to do with free labor no one would come looking for. Thousands of interned soldiers found their way into the farms and lumber mills, filling slots left by the freeing of slaves eighty years before their capture in North African campaigns. The south does like taking free labor from Africa, no matter the skin color.
Her blood, blessed by the Loa under full and new moons since her mother had introduced her to the secrets, fell to angry soil, feeding it without the beads to contain her powers.
“Run.” Kiara whispered.
“What’s that, Black girl?” Mandy kicked her hard enough to roll Kiara onto her back. “Run? Don’t worry. You won’t need to run ever again.” She kicked her another time, rolling Kiara face down into the dirt.
“Mandy…” Tim said.
“Scared Timmy?” Mandy teased. “It’s time to take out this trash. Just another Black girl disappearing one summer afternoon. Didn’t you see the news? North Carolina has half of the missing black girls in the nation this year. No one will notice one more.”
Granger pounded his hands together. Kiara’s blood transferring from his right ring to his left palm. “Now we are talking. Wait ‘til I tell my dad I got my first kill.”
“Hold on.” Tim backed into a tree. “This is wrong.” He locked eyes with Chuck, the leader of the group, who shrugged like “what are you going to do? teenagers do shenanigans.”
Then the star running back snapped open a knife he always carried. “You can help, or you can be a pussy. But you are going to stay quiet.”
Tim nodded his head rapidly, the golden rays cutting through the branches of the ill-fated forest zig-sagging across his face. Mist rivaling low clouds swirled at his feet.
The forest woke. Indian battleground, slave land, a secret pit grave where Axis soldiers had been tossed responded to the necromancer blood soaking the loam.
Tim, fighting it every step of the way, swallowed when his eyes crawled back to meet Kiara’s brown eyes with just a touch of green, so like Mandy’s.
While the others had been concentrating on Timmy, Kiara had raised onto her battered hands and knees. Her cut face turned up, dripping blood, and she mouthed to him, “Run.”
Inside his brain, the word echoed in a thousand languages. American Southern, Lumbee, Seventeenth Century English, Hattian, German – Run. Run away. Don’t look back. Run.
His eyes dilated. His color blanched to ghost white.
Ghost hands lifted her to standing.
Tim ran.
The three others of the mob swung back to look at her.
Seeing their victim standing, Mandy rushed forward to push her back down. Granger closed on one side and Chuck on the other, playing his knife back and forth. “Time to die,” he said.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Kiara said in a voice not her own.
Skeletal remains burst through the ground, clacking and clicking into place, slurping from the mud, thudding dropping dirt to the ground, vegetation burned the nostrils with scents of mold and moss from the freshly churned soil.
Behind Ted, running as though his life depended on it, the screams started, like teenage high-jinks to startle people at Halloween…or people being torn apart.
Kiara rested against a tree. “Danke,” she thanked the German officer who had been supervising when some timber fell the wrong direction. Struggling with her one year of high school German, after checking he wasn’t bilingual in French or English, he asked that he pulled the bones into the pit with his group so they wouldn’t stand out if someone came looking for new bones in the ground. Scratching through her memory, past her pain, she wiped her face for blood, then applied the sacrifice to the tree, asking the appropriate Loa to heal the area of all evidence, restoring the ground to health. Stumbling out, she found an Italian zombie carrying her beads. The boy had to have been only sixteen when he had died.
He spoke, or at least understood, English.
“You are very kind to have collected these for me.” Kiara bruised lips split as she talked, giving the boy strength and clarity as more of her blood leaked out of her skin. Never in her life has she spilled this much blood uncontrolled by bowl or goblet. “I hate to ask more of you, but if you could, see that those three spirits are sent on their way. I don’t want them hanging around here. The forest has dealt with enough.”
He nodded and shrugged, indicating he would try, but couldn’t promise anything. The other spirits were more vengeful than he, and both Chuck and Mandy descended from people in Oslow county who cracked whips against those who were not allowed to fight back. The spirit-infused body reached out a hand to cup her check and passed back much of the energy it had absorbed. Cuts sealed, raised bruised stopped swelling, the rib rasping with every breath disappeared from the list of offenses her body was keeping track of.
The spirit disappeared, soil falling off of her and him and merging back into the sport fields around the High School, leaving her clothes wrinkled but clean. She limbed slowly back to the school where streams of students talked, walking into the school for testing. Beside her shoes and bags stood Tim, rocking from foot-to-foot, the whites of his eyes getting rounder the closer she got.
Kiara sat down on the bench, wincing as she bent over, to put on the sneakers so she could go indoors. The beads dug into her hip as she changed feet. The noisiness of the world faded without her feet connected to the ground, but she didn’t have time or energy to return the beads to her hair and still have any chance with passing the ACTs.
Tim stayed frozen like a prey before a predator.
Standing, Kiara shouldered her bag. “You are going to stay quiet,” she said softly.
He nodded.
“Say it.” She lifted a finger to the middle of his forehead.
“Not a word, ever. I swear.”
“Are you here for the testing too?”
“Nah, we just wanted to mess with some of the ni—” he stopped himself mid-word.
She dropped her finger to his lips. “Do better.”
He nodded again.
(words 1,916; first published 5/25/2026)
Ordinary Monsters series
One) Monsters in the closet (5/10/2026)
Two) Monsters in the school (5/24/2026)
Three) Monsters in the Restaurant (6/28/2026)
Four) Monsters at the Church (7/5/2026)
Five) Monster in the Club (TBD)
