Iowa is the best place to bury a body if you’ve got one. It is a place where it is possible to not see anyone for days—not in the East Coast sense where, inevitably, you run into humans on the street as you run to the deli in your pajama bottoms. It’s possible to literally not see an actual person for days in Iowa as long as you forget to reach out to them. It’s a place where it’s easier to become paranoid and vulnerable, hiding behind a curtain as you watch your neighbor check the mail, than it is to find people who are willing to see you.

People don’t make eye contact in Iowa. Or maybe they just don’t make eye contact with me.

Clothing becomes a sort of facism in Iowa because everyone wears the same brands. It’s not about style—it’s about fitting in. You buy the same five sweatshirts as everyone else in your high school with your football team’s logo on it whether or not you care about football and you alternate them on the days when you see people. Sometimes, you can get away with wearing the same sweatshirt two times a week but you hope that people don’t catch on because cleanliness is close to sacred in Iowa.

Iowans are terrified of being perceived as too sensitive. They'd rather be silent and strong. The tenderness of social justice repels them because they can only trust practical solutions for practical people. People in Iowa desperately need to be normal. They are only interested in normal things for normal people.

Everyone shops at Hy-Vee in Iowa though Wal-mart is also acceptable. Target is for the elitist ones who think that they’re better than everyone else. You are expected to make excuses for yourself (you really just like the carbonated drinks, there was a sale…) if you shop at Target. You are expected to stay at the same job in Iowa. If you apply for a different company (factory farms or insurance, because that’s the two main industries in Iowa), then you are quickly branded as opportunistic. People will say that you think you’re better than everyone else, which is the worst thing to be in Iowa.

You don't really know what grass looks like until you go to Iowa. Grass seeds tickle your waist, looking like wheat and grows out of the ill maintained curbs. Cattails are everywhere in Iowa. Dandelions and clovers too—most of the indigenous plant life is extinct. The prairie has been replaced by endless rows of corn and soybeans that are dispersed so evenly that their patterning becomes an optical illusion.

There is a kind of paranoia that hangs over everything in Iowa. When things are that quiet—and sometimes you can go entire stretches of the night without hearing a single owl or car—you start to make things up. You start to believe in reality glitches in Iowa. You start to think that you just saw the same curtain move in the same way twice and that this is evidence that you live in some kind of computer simulation and you start to wonder who the programmers are. You believe that the zombie apocalypse is very real in Iowa and you also believe that you are in the best place to survive it. You hear rumors in Iowa—that the deer have already been infected with a virus that animates the undead, that there were alien sightings somewhere close but far away, that the world is controlled by a secret organization run by lizards.

You see ghosts in Iowa. This is inevitable. This is the great plains where you can feel in your bones an emptiness that was carved out by genocide. All the towns have indigenous names.

Ron Paul always did well in Iowa. Everywhere, you see sun bleached and frayed stickers on stop signs and bumpers with his name. Iowans deeply just want to be left alone. Being alone is what they are most used to. Iowans just want to bury their bodies in silence. They need their space to do this without getting caught.

Jodi Byrd writes that the origin story of the United States is a horror story. Nowhere is this horror more silently present than in Iowa. Iowa is obviously and loudly a haunted place. Haunting are about shame. Iowa is a place where you can’t ignore your shame. Iowa is a place where you have to ignore your shame. Iowa is a ghost story where being seen terrifies you. Iowa is a place where the hairs on your neck make you feel like you are being watched almost all of the time.