Christ, Antelope, Oregon population: ghosts, weeds, and the echoes of busted dreams. The kind of place where the wind whistles through abandoned fences like a junkie playing a broken flute. You walk down the cracked asphalt and stumble on this thing, a child’s toy. Plastic. Bright colors that mock the dust. A blue-and-yellow front loader tipped sideways like a casualty in some forgotten war of make-believe.

The real horror isn’t the toy, it’s the silence around it. No kids laughing. No parents yelling. Just dry grass rattling against chain-link and the hot stink of asphalt baking under a sun that doesn’t care. This machine was once a weapon of imagination, a mighty bulldozer flattening dirt piles and conquering sandbox kingdoms. Now it’s just a corpse. A relic. An artifact of a ghost town that chewed up its last heartbeat decades ago and never looked back.

This is America in miniature: plastic dreams scattered in the weeds, left to rot when the circus packed up and went bankrupt. Some kid once gripped that yellow scoop with greasy fingers, shouting out wild nonsense about construction and monsters. Where’s that kid now? Dead? Grown up and punching the clock in a dead-end job, forgetting the toy that trained him for a future that never came? The toy doesn’t answer. It just lies there, like evidence in a crime scene nobody bothers to investigate anymore.

Antelope doesn’t forgive. It doesn’t even acknowledge you. It spits you out in rust, weeds, and the occasional sun-bleached memory. The bulldozer is still here, but the empire it built has crumbled. And all that remains is a photograph, a warning, and a hell of a reminder: nothing lasts out here in the badlands, not toys, not towns, not even the ghosts.