I Live in a Small Appalachian Town. We're Not Allowed Outside After Dark.

The sun was already kissing the ridge when the narrator noticed it through his kitchen window. That golden light hitting the mountains meant he had maybe an hour before full dark, and everyone in his small Appalachian town knew what that meant: stay inside, lock your doors, don't even peek through the curtains. His grandfather's voice echoed in his head like it always did at sunset: "The lost lights take what they want." Seventeen souls in his grandfather's lifetime, and not one body ever found.

The narrator—a thirty-year-old man named Milo—had been staring at a text from his friend Bryce for ten minutes. Party at Murphy's tonight. Murphy's bar was in Quigley, twenty miles down winding mountain roads. If he left right now he could make it before darkness settled in. Getting home, though, that was the problem. His wife Virginia walked into the kitchen with their four-year-old son Danny on her hip. She'd seen him holding his phone. "You're not seriously thinking about going out tonight," she said flat. Last month the whole Zimmerman family—mom, dad, two kids—had their car break down on Route 47 around eleven at night. State police found the vehicle three days later, doors open, engine still running, but the Zimmermans were gone, just like the others.