A fictional narrative as told by Northeast News Creative Director Bryan Stalder

One evening, while I was sitting alone at the Avenue Inn, Randy struck up some small talk. “So how are things in Indian Mound?” he asked.

Indian Mound is the neighborhood in Northeast where I grew up, and where I’d lived for nearly forty years. I updated him on some of the issues discussed at the most recent neighborhood association meeting, but it was clear his mind was mostly on cleaning glasses and rearranging bottles.

“They still got that little placard for the Northeast Boys who served in World War II up there?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “The marker from the American War Mothers, I think. It’s still there, though I haven’t looked for it in years.”

The middle-aged hairdresser, whose fading blonde hair catching the flicker of neon, spoke up. “A boyfriend of mine found an arrowhead there once. I’m sure it was worth something. I saw a whole collection on Antiques Roadshow—hundreds of dollars each.”

I nodded. “People always say they find arrowheads, but I’ve never seen proof myself. When I was a kid in the ’80s, the park had a small playground with a metal slide. It got so hot in the summer you could burn yourself. I looked for arrowheads plenty of times, poking around the dirt, but never came up with anything but rocks.”

Randy set down the glass he’d been polishing. “Well, we had one guy — Raymond, I think his name was — lived right by the mound, on Saida, near one of those north-south streets. He dug some things up in his backyard, brought them in one night. Laid ’em out right there on the bar, like trophies.”


Read more in this week’s print edition of Northeast News, or at Sub-stack…
https://substack.com/home/post/p-177575088

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