My home town, Chapel Hill, is swelling like a wound trapped in healing the wrong way. Two middle school girls were hit by cars last week, with too many cars and not enough road on Estes Drive. Under the beloved words “affordable housing,” I have witnessed old apartments be ripped out one by one and replaced with buildings that echo with empty unlived walls. Forests have been torn on behalf of the swell, and then not even replaced. In this swell, so many have come, and I have remained since a time before.

The local food is a chimera, part Tuscan, part Asian, Turkish, Southern, and Mediterranean. Most restaurant staff is fond of saying “here we do things a little different.” Menus are mostly in QR codes, much to the agony of the many older residents. The popular restaurants that are pushed out with the word “authentic” are victims of the swell, with lines upon lines of people. Despite living nearly all my life here, I rarely go to the famous “authentic” restaurants, especially not since the swell.

No, I go to the ghost mall.

If Chapel Hill is a broken leg healing wrong, University Mall is a wound that has been picked at so hard that it will never heal. It has been picked at for so long, no one even remembers what the original wound was caused by. The mall is 90 percent dead tissue today with just a theater, gym, and two restaurants having much life.

My favorite local restaurant is Asian fusion, opening up on the ashes of my old favorite restaurant that closed down like any other business who dare to open at this mall. The body count is incredibly high, and at this point I’m almost proud of the mall for being so depraved. There was Bear Rock Café, a coffee shop with hideous antler chandeliers and giant fireplaces. Then there was the Dillards where I bought my high school graduation dress. Roses sold a little bit of everything. There was candy shop when I was little, and its death hit me especially hard. The shoe store is gone, and replaced with nothing. The pet store was a favorite, and it has been long gone. Chick-Fil-A clung to life for a very long time, but it too eventually succumbed to the ghost mall curse. I was actually surprised when Southern Seasons died, it had a great selection of goods and my cousin even sold cookies with them. GameStop turned into a lingerie store, then a sports store, and then emptiness.

This cursed mall even as a Wikipedia page. It was renamed “University Place” as though that can shed the skin of its past. It opened in 1973 with 78 stores. Now it is near empty and sits on the swelling town like a sad beached whale.

I go into my favorite Asian fusion restaurant, one of the last bastions of this dying crater. The swell has begun to gaze upon this beautiful wicked place. Perhaps this new Asian fusion is part of the swell after all, and I have unknowingly been conscripted to its mission in my love of rice and cocktails. I don’t know who will win, a ghost mall or this swell.

“Is this your first time with us?”

I shake my head. So far from the first time. They don’t know they are just reskinned with old bones only I can see. I can still see a low ceiling, people crowding the parking lot at Christmas time, and the toy store where I bought beanie babies. I remember gym treadmills were once aisles of cheap shirts and that the restaurant too expensive to eat at was once a place I stood naked, picking at my adolescent face in a mirror before trying on Dillard dresses.

If I had said yes, it’s my first time, they’d say, “Ah, well you should know, here we do things a little bit different.” By that, they just mean the food comes out in the order is ready. It’s really not that exciting. I know what’s different, and how they serve me is the least different thing in this entire town.

Yesterday, on the neighborhood listserv, I heard University Mall was getting rid of its garbage and recycling units. This swell so consuming, even garbage is no longer welcome on the land. It’s all according to the swell’s plan for the mall, an outdoor mall, gentrified into specialty shops and condos. Today, I saw an email added to the neighborhood’s subconscious, “You drive like shit, I will find you.” The swell is getting to people, the roads are now clogged arteries and our basic homes can sell for half a million while we get hit by cars. Now is the time to sell, the time to get out.

Not me though. I’m here to stay, to take the role of ghost. Part of me believes the swell wants me to leave; it wants to replace me and make me empty just like the mall. That’s too bad, the ghost is here, and she dreams of crumbling condos.

Allison Stalberg is a 28-year-old pop culture journalist pursuing an MFA in Fiction at Southern New Hampshire University. Her works include her self-published fantasy book, Wander, a sci-fi love story in Outposts of Beyond, and over 500 journalism articles on film and video games. In Bolivia with Partners of the Americas and in the states with the American Friends Service Committee, she has taught fiction writing and journalism classes to youth. She lives where she grew up, in North Carolina with her husband and cats.