The Last Day

This one is personal in a way that some of the others aren't. I grew up on the Ridge. Not a fictional Ridge. Not a place I invented because I wanted a good setting for a creepy story. The Ridge in this story is the place I knew growing up, and the family names scattered through it are real family names from there. Those aren't names I made up for atmosphere. They're names that belonged to the place.

And when you grow up somewhere like that, you learn pretty quickly that every place has its stories. Some of them are told openly. Some are told in pieces. And some aren't told at all. There were always things I wondered about when I was growing up. Names that seemed to carry more weight than they should. Families who had been there forever. Old places that had histories nobody seemed particularly interested in explaining. Things adults knew that children weren't supposed to know yet—or perhaps weren't supposed to ask about at all.

I remember that feeling. The feeling that there was a story underneath the story. I didn't know what it was. I just knew it was there. So when I started writing this one, I decided to take that feeling and see where it could go. What if all those old names really were connected? What if all those little mysteries I'd grown up around weren't separate things at all?

What if the reason nobody ever seemed to have a complete answer was because there was a very good reason nobody wanted to give one? That's where the Ridge in The Last Day came from. I took the place I knew. I took the names I knew. And then I gave all those unanswered questions a history. A very ugly history. The thing I particularly like about this story is that nothing about the Ridge looks frightening at first. It's an orchard. It's harvest.

It's migrant crews packing up at the end of the season. It's wedding plans and folding chairs and dress alterations and cold-storage buildings. It's the ordinary machinery of a place that has been doing the same things for generations. And that's exactly what I wanted. Because the most frightening secrets aren't necessarily hidden in abandoned buildings or haunted houses. Sometimes they're hidden in the things everybody does every year.

The wedding. The harvest. The closing of the season. The names in the family Bible. The stories nobody tells anymore. The things people have simply learned not to ask. Petra is standing right in the middle of all of that. She's grown up believing the Ridge's version of things because that's what people do when the version you're given is the only one you've ever heard. Her brother dies, and she's told it was an accident. A man she loves disappears, and she's given another ordinary explanation. And then she finds the ledger.

Suddenly all those little pieces she never questioned begin fitting together. That's the part that frightened me while I was writing it. Not the idea of some supernatural thing living beneath the orchard. The idea of people knowing. People knowing what happened. People knowing what was expected. People knowing what would happen if somebody asked the wrong question—and choosing silence anyway. Because silence can become a tradition just as easily as anything else. It can be passed from one generation to the next.

And eventually nobody even remembers who made the original decision to keep quiet. They just know that's how things are done. I think that's why the ending matters to me. Petra is standing at a fork in the road, literally and otherwise, with her bag packed and the wedding waiting behind her. She could leave. She could stay. And for the first time in her life, the choice is actually hers. But the terrible thing she's learned is that choosing is dangerous.

The Ridge has survived for generations because people made the choices it needed them to make. And now Petra has to decide whether she will become another one of those people. Or whether she'll be the one who finally asks the question nobody was supposed to ask. I suppose that's what I did with the place I grew up. I took all those old names and all those unanswered questions and all those things I remember wondering about as a kid...and finally gave them an answer. It just wasn't a particularly nice one. Bwahahaaaa.