Werewolf of the Trailer Park

The narrator grew up in a trailer park at the end of a dirt road, fourteen lots in two rows with woods on three sides. The pavement ended a quarter mile before the park began. Her dad worked twelve-hour rotating shifts at a plant forty minutes away, and when he came home he was dead on his feet but would still sit on the steps and listen to every detail of her third-grade day. She describes him as her whole world. The story isn't really about her mother, she says, but the worst night of her childhood happened partly because of where her mother was, and where she was not.

At the far end of the loop sat two abandoned trailers, unlocked or close enough to it. Every kid in the park over the age of six knew how to get in. They snuck in and out for years, eating stolen honey buns on a mildew couch, learning to cartwheel in the empty living room. The adults watched them go in and out and never said much beyond warnings about rusty nails and tetanus. To the kids, those trailers were clubhouses. The narrator emphasizes this point: there was a reason they felt comfortable going in there after dark. It would have been like getting scared of your own bedroom.

The boogeyman that nobody named