The Crossing Guard

It was the summer of 2019, and I was driving from my small apartment in Ocala to see my girlfriend, Maya, who was finishing her master’s at the University of North Florida. We had been doing this long-distance dance for a year, and every other weekend I’d make the two-and-a-half-hour trek up I-75, past the endless stretches of pine trees and the occasional roadside fruit stand. I-75 was always the same: monotonous, predictable, and soul-crushingly boring.

That particular Saturday, my old Honda Civic was low on gas, and my GPS was having a meltdown, redirecting me to a back road that wound through rural Marion County. I’d been driving for over an hour when I spotted a dilapidated gas station ahead on the left, its flickering sign barely visible through the thick summer heat. I signaled, cut across the median, and pulled into the cracked, weed-choked parking lot.

As I rolled to a stop, I saw a woman standing at the entrance to the store, her arms crossed, staring directly at me. She was tall, gaunt, with stringy gray hair plastered to her forehead, and her eyes were sunken but fierce, like a hawk that had missed its prey. She didn’t move, didn’t blink, just stood there with an expression of pure, unadulterated hatred. The kind of hatred you only see in people who’ve been wronged beyond reason. I felt a chill crawl up my spine. A rational part of my brain said she was just some local weirdo, but another part, the primal part, screamed danger.

I turned away, fumbling with the gas cap, trying to shake off the unease. When I looked back, she was gone. Vanished. The parking lot was empty, save for a rusty pickup truck on cinder blocks and a deformed trash can that looked like it had been crushed by something huge. I chalked it up to heatstroke or exhaustion, pumped my gas, and hurried inside to pay.

The store was dimly lit, with a few shelves of dusty canned goods and a cooler buzzing loudly. An old man sat behind the counter, his face weathered like a dried-up riverbed. He didn’t greet me, just watched as I approached with a twenty. As I paid, I asked, ‘That woman outside, you know her?’ He looked at me with a sudden alertness, his rheumy eyes narrowing. ‘What woman?’ he croaked. I described her, and his face went pale. ‘Son, you get out of here now. Don’t look back. That’s Martha. She’s been gone ten years.’

I laughed nervously, thinking he was pulling my leg, but his expression told me he was dead serious. I grabbed my change and walked out, but I couldn’t help glancing toward the spot where she’d been. Nothing. I got in my car, locked the doors, and pulled back onto the highway, my heart thumping.

For the next twenty minutes, I tried to rationalize it. Maybe the old man was senile. Maybe I was tired. The road seemed to stretch on endlessly, and I was now more lost than before. I passed a sign that said ‘Pittman 5 miles’—a town I’d never heard of. That’s when I saw her again, standing on the side of the road, this time in the middle of a curve, pointing toward a dirt path that disappeared into the woods. I slammed on the brakes, my tires screeching, and as I came to a stop, she was right outside my driver’s side window, her face inches from mine.

She spoke, her voice like dry leaves scraping concrete: ‘He’s in there. You have to see.’ I didn’t know what she meant, but something compelled me to follow her gesture. I got out of the car, my legs trembling, and stumbled toward the path. It was overgrown, but there was a faint trail, and at the end, bathed in a shaft of sunlight, was an old, rusted swing set. And hanging from it, a scarecrow made of charred cloth and straw, its burlap face stitched with a grotesque smile. It was wearing my father’s old work jacket.

My father had died in a fire five years ago, and his jacket, the one he wore every day, had been buried with him. I blinked, and the scarecrow was just a scarecrow, but the jacket was real, singed and dirt-stained, hanging from one arm. I felt a cold hand on my shoulder, and I spun around. The woman was there, her eyes now filled with a terrible sorrow. ‘You weren’t supposed to come here,’ she said. ‘Now you have to bury it.’ She pointed to a shovel lying on the ground.

I didn’t ask questions. I dug a hole at the base of the swing set, my palms blistering, and when the hole was deep enough, I took the jacket and buried it. As the last handful of dirt covered it, the woman let out a long, sighing breath, and then she was gone. I walked back to my car, and when I finally reached Jacksonville several hours later, Maya asked why I was so pale. I couldn’t tell her. I just said I’d hit a deer.

To this day, I’ve never driven that stretch of road again. But sometimes, at night, I wake up with the smell of smoke in my nostrils, and I see the woman’s face, and I hear her whisper, ‘He’s in there. You have to see.’ And I know I’ll never truly escape that dusty gas station or the terror that waits on that forgotten country road.