Small Town Grievances:

the doomsday book of grievances

The following is a master document from the first two years or so of the fiction newsletter Small Town Grievances — anonymous missives of a nameless small town suffering from an owl problem. The letter started in 2018 as a lifeline for my writing, and the response to it has been constantly surprising and kind.

It is presented here in about as raw and haphazard a fashion as possible, like something pulled from a river, but should be of interest to fans, new subscribers, serious scholars, the sleepless, the terminally unmarried or underemployed.

If you are one of these people, then I thank you.

You can subscribe here, read more of my writing here, or send offers of offensively generous book deals or literary representation here.

1 Incident at the Little School

There's a new radio show being broadcast in town. It seems to be nothing more than the sound of a man coughing and clearing his throat. Many hours of this daily. No one can say who it is. Everyone is extremely shitty about the coughing man.
Against all advice, Mayor has developed another tan. It is deep and worrisome. Citizens grimacing and closing their eyes as he passes close by. He smells like a lit match and his little blue eyes unfocus as he tries to think through even the most basic problems.
Claims are coming out of the big school that there’s an augur boy who can read the auspices in the dirt he washes off his feet at recess. But his prophecies, if true, are moronic and unprintable: the principal can remove a rib to better fellate himself, as one example. Or that boobs are where a woman’s lungs are (?)
Note: on Saturday there was a fire at the haunted train ride. There was a fire at the haunted house ride. There was a fire at the arts and crafts fair. The only apparent connection between them is that they ruined my weekend.
Note: Lorraine H. used up valuable evening free time by inviting everyone to her home so she could complain that a circus once came through town a great many years ago. Everyone was grumpy. We couldn't decide if it's bad the circus left or bad that it ever came at all.
There was a vote at the council meeting to raise $200 towards finding and prosecuting the coughing radio man. Suddenly a great deal of interest (citizens gripping their knives and licking their lips and chuckling to one another with cheeky devilish looks in their eyes etc). But where would the money come from? We already have so little to spread around. At the hospital the children eat sand.
Everybody is upset that I keep pulling grass out of the ground with my fingers. Mayor, who was never formally elected I’ll remind you, came to my home after hours and said I should be able to sit on the ground like everyone else without pulling out the grass.
A few months ago a theatre boy shot his tongue off with a blank during the little school’s production of a dreary play about farmyard violence. Everyone (doctors etc) assumed he would never speak again, but today he decided to reveal that he could still speak perfectly, and had all this time chosen not to. He reported that a pistol tastes much like a coin (as if we didn’t already know this, as if it wasn't obvious). Oscar M. gave a stirring talk about how we should be vigilant of gang violence, and many clapped.
I was too embarrassed to mention it during Oscar M's talk, but many years ago, while trying ourselves to form a gang, my little friends and I pledged to each swallow a bullet, one after another. Of course, I was the only one brave enough to go through with it. Is it still there now, sitting in the bottom of my tum? Or did it pass; did the bullet escape into the pipes under town and get washed away. Did it rush onward, first to the river and then out to the ocean, gone, far from all this mess.

2 We are all heart-sick, but the mayor most of all.

The library is running a confidence-building exercise throughout the winter where you can hold a thick book against your chest and have a colleague or loved one shoot it with a crossbow. If you want to sign up you need to prove you live a nervous life and are deeply unfulfilled on the daily.

Note: Lorraine F. is once again ambushing anyone who goes into the gas station and trying to sell them her own poor quality homemade motor oil. She calls it “machine wine”. If you call it by any other name she begins to wail and will not stop wailing.

A high-diver came to town to perform. He was a stunt diver who was famous a few decades ago for his hijinks. We all got excited for a spectacle, but it turned out that all the diver wanted to do was sing a song he’d written and play a guitar on stage. He refused to dive into water of any depth. Great discontent. We ran him out of town like an animal, him and his publicity manager, who, I deeply suspect, was also his wife. We spat into his gas tank and put our greasy paws on the nice clean windows of his car. He was in such a great rush that he left his motel room door wide open, and we took all the ice from the little fridge and stood around crunching on it.

Bad news: the comfort dogs they ordered for the community centre are huge and monstrous. Baying, tall, foul-faced boys not suited for the delicate work of comforting the town’s insane blind veterans.
Bad news: within half an hour the dogs all escaped and ran amok, chewing the hair from school-girl’s heads, sticking their long tongues through letterboxes, breaking off the stone penises of the weeing cherub fountains out front of the court house, etc. They are out there still. Once more our tender hearts have led us into the wilderness.

Mayor called an emergency meeting to announce he had a new crush. Much moaning and grumbling from all gathered citizens. We are sick of mayor’s endless crushes—as if the rest of us are not constantly heartbroken. Hearing him speak, you’d think it was the first time he had ever been in love, when in truth he seems to be in love every single day of the standard calendar year.

During Free Speech hour on Tuesday, Tony P. stood up and claimed that he had the only existing DVD of an unreleased James Bond movie where he (Bond) shoots and kills an actor on screen. Bond also directs foul language at the older gentleman who handles the electronics, things unprintable here (e.g. calling him a “dog’s p*ssy”). Tony P. demanded $250 bounty to view it and there was a ruckus.

Note: Mayor is being cagey about the identity of his crush. Amid a great deal of speculation, I alone know: before the meeting, I spied on him talking with a glamorous health services agent who the state sent to investigate all the food poisonings. After she left I watched him grip his chest with two hands and stare at his feet as if they belonged to another man.

In the spring my sister is getting married. She is travelling out of the state for it, despite the town having a new park, and big leafy avenues which are very gentle in the spring, and a very fine and reasonably priced non-denominational hall attached to the big school, and not to mention the nice gazebo. She said that the town is no good for a wedding (!) because stray animals keep treating the nice gazebo as a place to go toilet and give birth in, and because the river smells so strong it makes out-of-towners weep. I got so steamed that I broke our TV remote by pressing too hard on all the buttons at once, just as the user manual prophesised would happen if used unwisely, just like it said.

3 If the devil lived on Earth he would own a car-wash in this very town

Light mania as Mayor went AWOL for about 72 hours, from dinner Sunday. There were concerns—Sunday evening is a blue time for all, where all the glumness of the week collects, like useless overseas coins in the town fountain. Did he make the foolish decision to take a stroll in the dark? Our forest is deep, the river is fast and thankless. Our bike trails are absolutely filthy with stinging nettle and the soccer field has an owl problem.
Short period of lawlessness following Mayor’s disappearance. The pet shop was flooded and all the nudie books were stolen from the library. Enormous spike in bandwidth as citizens began visiting the banned websites from other towns. Sheriff Carl was only able to restore order by going house to house at dinner time and beating the shit out of anybody he met.
Perry R. who runs the video store, called a meeting to nominate himself as interim mayor. His chances were slim: the video store has astonishing penalties on late returns and plays its instore music at such deafening volume that it can be heard as far away as the hospital, where doctors need to make important phone calls, and victims of surgery need their rest. Many lawsuits.
More nominations for new mayor: Rodney B., a man knowledgeable about the aluminium trade; Annalesse M., who grew up in a city far away. Lorraine F. put her hand up, but only to suggest we take the opportunity to revise the town’s stance on using firearms to annihilate the birds that become trapped in our homes.
Tony M., of the car-wash, took to the stage to announce to everyone that he had wasted his life in the pursuit of wealth and material pleasures, when he should have been studying music. He said he has an artist’s soul but was led astray by the dazzling promises of the car cleaning business. “I probably would have made love to 1000 women by now if I hadn’t been such a bird’s ass about money,” he said. “It still makes me sick to spend a dollar. I wouldn’t even own a clock if Marion didn’t threaten to divorce me unless I bought one. Gaze upon me, young men and women present: I have CDs for sale, once I get my son’s computer working. You can sign up in the lobby.”
Mayor turned up Wednesday afternoon, when someone found him shivering on the roof of the library, still dressed in his dirty Sunday kimono. From the looks of it he’d gotten stuck stargazing and survived by drinking puddle water and eating whatever came in on the wind. It must have made a hamburger out of his brain because he was raving when they brought him down. “My children,” he yelled. “I have so many wonderful things I want to tell you about the things I saw. But they will all be too painful, too painful, for you to hear.”
That night I received one of Tony M’s CDs. Bad stuff, it somehow gave me indigestion. But in this world there are many fates worse than listening to a bad song out of pity. For example, my stepmother has skin so dry she regularly has to go to the hospital about it. There’s a charity and everything.

4 Bullied in the shadow of the taffy hut

Mayor used his powers to pass a bill allowing him to appropriate town money to fund his anime review website which famously doesn’t pay contributors. Oscar M. tried to filibuster the bill but he was deeply fatigued from a big pasta lunch. We will fight this.
Troubling public Q&A session with the hospital’s new chief of medicine, Edger T. “You want to have a baby? Sure, be my guest,” he said. “But it’s the worst thing you could do for the planet. Why don’t I just prescribe you a can of paint to go dump in the fucking river, man?” God, I have never seen a human smoke as many cigarettes as Edger T, our new chief of medicine. He excused himself to go to the bathroom and stayed in there for forty five minutes in absolute silence, emerging only when the sensor lights turned off.
Announcement: The little school is putting on its annual charity play, commemorating children decapitated by the misuse of appliances. The play has a very obviously European name. We are assured that all lines will be in English, but the little school has disappointed us in the past.
Many amusements reported at the country fair. There were long lectures about colourful moments in the history of creek studies, tall animals standing around wherever you looked, gracefully ignoring the cigarettes toddlers were trying to feed them. Unfortunately, teens from the big school made a disappointing display outside the Delectable Taffy Hut, chewing their taffy loudly, swearing, threatening citizens by rattling boxes of matches at them. One of them called me a “fat kitten” and cut the bottom of my backpack open with a big pair of scissors and all my supplies crashed out. Nervous laughter from the gathered townsfolk. They didn't want to have the teen's sharp scissors turned on their own sacks and satchels. Nobody does.
And where was Sheriff Carl to defend us? It seems that he’d chased a suspicious looking boy into the neighbouring field and got caught up in a spiky bramble bush. He tried to fire off his distress flare but it was wet and sodden from one of the recent rainy days, and he was deeply scratched up trying to escape alone. Now he's lying in a coma. Forgive me: I regret the cruel things I have whispered in my prayers about Sheriff Carl. I hope he lives through the night, and beyond.
Consensus is that the highlight of the country fair was the Concert of Greatly Talented Folks. There were two people who looked identical to one another, there was a blinding laser show, and a strongman who tore a volunteer into two parts. The volunteer’s bottom half continued to walk around the stage idiotically and the top half gasped and hooted and made little distressed jokes about his situation. Then they brought out a dog who they claimed was the oldest ever to live. He was huge and absolutely bloodless. His eyes were wise and pathetic; his owner fed him whole pieces of fruit she plucked from the exotic hat she was wearing, as he struggled to rise to his feet to meet our applause. There were so many questions I wanted to ask, but the crowd was in a frenzy, and who could blame them?

My sister dismissed the whole strongman routine as a trick: the volunteer had really been two small people inside a large business suit. Can someone really be that short? If so, it's the first I've ever heard of it. The world is already so full of horrifying facts, but there you go. There are ever more waiting to be uncovered; strewn around to be happened upon at the worst possible moment, like the bones of an ugly animal, or dried up worms no longer good for fishing with.

5 The horrible singing twins break my heart once more

Another parade was disrupted by a sighting of the big wolf. The parade came around a corner and there she was, eating trash in full view of everyone. No one likes the wolf. She is a coward and a dullard, a long-legged fool whom we always catch chewing dangerous and important electrical cabling. “Leave and don’t come back,” we said, waving our arms at the wolf.
The zoo continues to go underfunded by the town. The zookeepers have taken desperate measures to keep animals fed, shaking down visiting children and mugging weak single fathers. One tried to grab my wallet and I bit his hand as hard as I could. Never have I heard a sound so startling as the loud swear of the wounded zookeeper.
Mayor claims that he is among the few people on Earth who can snatch a bullet out of the air. Many boos from gathered citizens. Yelling and hisses, getting louder and louder until Mayor resumed his seat, blushing. We are all wary of what Mayor might attempt to do with his dreams, if we allow them to grow.
Whole town attended the big birthday party for the Carlisle boys over at Carlisle Ten Pin Bowling. Balloons, everything. The Carlisle boys are twins who look more or less exactly alike, and, needless to say, one of them is stupid while the other is very, very intelligent. Extremely unpleasant to spend any time with either of them, and bowling is a terrible game. But, as Father Lloyd says, we must earn the numbers to God’s door-code if we want to get into the internet cafe of heaven.
Rory C., the twins' father, saw how poorly I was doing at the bowling alley. The balls were too heavy for me, and I had as much control over them as I would over a passing comet. He told me I had the wrong outlook. “It appears to me that you approach life like it’s a little gold locket you wear around your neck,” Rory C. said. “Something you can’t try too hard to open, because you’re scared you’ll break it. I, on the other hand, see life more as big trash can full of fire. Something to be leapt over and hooted at in a fashion befitting a clown of history; something to be badly burned throwing gasoline on to, and to be used to dispose of small items you no longer need or letters you don’t intend to send. And afterwards, once the fire is out, it’s something to be dumped into a waterway so that all the fish and little river lifeforms remember you. And if the police want to do something about it, what can they do? What can they possible do to stop me?”

There was a great deal of kissing at the birthday party once the lanes closed and lights dimmed and the dancing part of the night began, can't deny it. The Carlisle boys sang for us in their high, exquisite voices. I felt sick. When would it be me up there, kissing my neighbours and associates, careless in the dark? I stayed seated, claiming that I had squashed my feet badly by dropping bowling balls on them. But in truth my foot health had never been better. It was my heart that had been squashed, by the bowling ball of my cowardice.

6 the dog made a full recovery but the experience changed him

Pat. M’s boy, honestly the dumbest kid any of us have ever known, made a big song and dance about how he’s going to go block up the river and flood the town to protest the near extinction of the pacific blind wren, an animal no one has ever heard of which lives a world away. As far as we can tell, it’s the Honduran government’s problem. Pat M’s boy said he plans to build his dam out of natural materials and vowed to never speak to another human again, but was later seen begging for wine and cigars out behind Smart Liquor, just like every other teen in the universe.

The Student Body president at the big school is an albino boy who has a dedicated girlfriend. It’s extremely distracting for everybody at official ceremonies when the albino school president is necking with his girlfriend, whom he plans to marry.

The long awaited trial of for Hank R. has begun. Hank R. was the helicopter pilot who used to fly the news chopper out of the air strip at Hindenberg. He was responsible for all that misery last Easter Parade when he kept descending low and bonking citizens’ heads with the feet of his helicopter, and blowing around paper plates with his powerful wind, and so on. He said he was upset because the parade goers were horse-eyed weaklings undeserving of a day off. Meanwhile, he had to work every day in a job he loathed, though when pressed on the issue agreed that flight is a marvel and we are lucky to be living in such a wondrous age.

Mayor hosted a public walkthrough of his private offices as part of a transparency initiative. The amount of glasses of water he leaves sitting around, half drunk, is troublesome. His personal computer is huge and dangerously warm with malware. A service dog got into a glass of water and started making noises no one had ever heard before. “No dogs!” Mayor yelled, shooing us out in panic. “No dogs!”

The Museum of Regretful Criminals is open again after renovations. It’s offering a deal where children get in for free if they swear on a holy book that they will cross no legal boundary set by man or god, not even if they get a free computer game out of it. The museum has some nice exhibitions about criminals who messed up their plans and feel dumb for it, and every noon during the holidays there’s be a reenactment of the foils of James Prince, the famous handsome robber whose leg swelled up after it got bit by a guard dog (graphic).

7 The advanced criminal Roland G. makes us nervous once more

Big surprise: the Christ Society’s math robot is on the fritz again, freaking everybody out over at the little school. The robot is really just an old Commodore personal computer with a speaker and a little screen in its belly that displays equations, and a papier mache head which is supposed to resemble St. Ignatius of Loyola. The Society carts it around to schools and lets kids spend their recess knocking out some long division or listening to the Sermon on the Mount, but it suffered badly from Y2K and now most of the time just goes absolutely nuts whenever a button is pressed. It screams, or plays ads for genital medicine or flights to countries that no longer exist. Many complaints to the school board.

Big commotion last Friday after Lorraine F. said a snake she was trying to chase down got into the aquatic centre. It took them a whole day to get the main pool drained and the snake people in. Afterwards, we stood around the empty pool with our flashlights, feeling foolish and afraid. If the snake had ever really been there then it was gone now, gone as we panicked, like everything else.

We received another taunting letter from Roland G., the town’s big criminal, who’s serving out a sentence over at Walterfield Correctional. Lots of worried coughing, brandishing of personal defense batons among gathered citizens as Mayor read out the letter: “Dear idiots,” it read. “Dear fatty fools, getting fat on your expensive butters. You are shallow water fish and I am a porpoise, which I have been reading about in a big blue book from the prison library. When I get out I’m going to zip around the shallow water with my big wet mouth open, and I’ll eat up everything in your miserable lives and simply digest it like I would any other food. Then it’s on to the next town, and the next after that. You are not special to me, and you’ll have to crush me with a boat to see me dead, but you never will. Because I’m an innocent man!” It went on like this for several pages. It seems unlikely that we’ll ever see Roland G. again. He has something like 135 years left to serve for his crimes against our town, which include dropping a piano on a blonde kid.

Mayor called an emergency meeting to announce that the gifted kids at the alternative school somehow got their hands on a TV. Bad news. They managed to watch something like 14 hours straight before someone caught them. Their fragile little brains are now in the toilet. They are violent and depressed. A handful have formed a shoplifting guild and are regularly seen kicking the shit out of the claw game out front of the Cigarette King. They say they want to take things further and roll burning oil barrels down the hill to explode Bread Heaven.
Town hall is offering $70 to anyone willing to negotiate with the kids. Oscar P. said he would take a crack at it, having himself known turmoil early in life (famously stuck in a tall fir tree for a day and a night until a big enough ladder could be found). Oscar P. wanted to appeal to their wonder — the gifted kids were once blue-souled little angels, sensitive to the marvels of accelerated learning and early-age instrument practice. A few minutes into talks, one of the kids stuck Oscar P. with a jagged piece of a broken CD Rom which had once been an educational videogame. The blood was astonishing. You wouldn’t know what to say if you’d been there to see it all.

8 Something must be done about the hideous monument!

Lower than expected attendance at the Hotdog Symposium and a great deal of food went to waste. Much of it was dumped illegally by unscrupulous vendors, and now a huge amount of hotdogs, possibly as many as 30,000, are floating in the river, turning the water grey. Most of the school busses go past the river and the children are understandably becoming rowdy and uncontrollable at the sight of the floating hotdogs. Local wildlife is going absolutely bananas for it too. It must be like something out of a myth to them.
Watch out: the arm wrestling young man has been spotted back in town. He’s a city guy who sometimes drives in and makes trouble on weekends. One of his arms is regular sized while the other, as is usually the case, seems many sizes too large. Very visually distressing to witness the arm wrestling young man. If you don’t accept his challenge then he and his sweating group of best friends, all of whom wear sunglasses inside, begin to scream at you.
Sheriff Carl has been released from hospital after getting his ass tangled up in a big bramble bush a few weeks ago. He is fragile from all the medicine they ran through him, and seems dangerously addicted to a melon flavoured antibiotic. He said that he’d done some soul searching, and realised, of course, that life is a fragile gift easily broken; it can be destroyed as quickly as a china plate being hurled from the roof of a one story building. He also said he had a useful dream about training ten or eleven police snipers from a young age and stationing them in towers around the big school’s sports field with the intent of blasting away all the sick swooping birds that have been giving the lacrosse players infections.
Good news: Mayor announced that town hall had finally gotten the money together to replace the ugly Decapitated Tourists Monument. Great jubilation from gathered citizens. We hate the monument — the bad statues they have outside the court house, commemorating a group of tourists who were killed gracelessly on the highway when they drove their car under a low-hanging billboard at what must have been about 1000 miles an hour. This was all years ago: the sign was advertising a kind of super cigarette which doesn’t exist anymore. The monument was required by the lawsuit brought against the town. Julius R., the only sculptor anybody knew, demanded complete artistic control, insisting that the statues have no heads, and vital organs on the outside of their bodies. Now we spend a fortune covering up the statues’ exposed genitals with specially made clothes which are always being stolen. Some unhappy citizens got together to source new heads for the statues, but these turned out to be huge and cartoonish, extremely ill-fitting, always failing in strong winds. Like any bad monument, it makes us feel exhausted and pathetic to be around. It makes us question how good our lives could be if they would lead us to stand in its shadow.

9 The dreamers dig their graves by the pornography tree

Bad news: the little school’s marching band sucks again. Great disappointment. For a while there they were on a streak, with three convincing shows in a row. But then two of the bassoon kids got drafted by some rich school at Hindenberg and the bottom fell out of the school’s spit budget. Worse, the band’s prized bass sax had to take time off after she mangled her hands in some woodshop foolishness. Her replacement is a cranky eleven year old with emergency-grade dandruff, who refuses to take risks with his playing. His work is tiresome, and it has made him many enemies. Somebody filled his saxophone with fruit juice at the recent Joy of Our Veterans recital, and it erupted everywhere when honked. The ants loved it. Afterwards, he was swearing so loudly that a chaperone had to stuff his mouth with paper towls.

The Christian movie theatre is opening back up, after a long time closed for operating as a fraudulent charity. It can’t be denied that there’s a strange energy at the Christian movie theatre. It makes people crazy. For example: once, during the screening of a black and white movie about Christ’s crappy experiences, my date, Harriet L., whispered for me to take my shirt off, and called me an “unwashed apple” and a “dirty haunted baby” in a bedroom manner. She said she was going to make an example out of my body, and bit me on the chest, hard and rapid as a rattlesnake. It was the most pain I have ever felt in my life. Sometimes it wakes me up, still, all these years later.
Town meeting was disrupted after the ancient rumour resurfaced about the suitcase of pornography supposedly sitting under a tree somewhere in the state forest, there for the taking. A lot of excited gasps from gathered citizens, stamping of feet in the manner of agitated horses. This story reappears every few years, and the pieces of it are well-worn: nobody has ever found the pornography, nobody knows how it survives in the wild, or who created it. It is a dark ambition to find it. Usually there will be a few days of mania as people set out in search, and one or two teenagers will need to be rescued from the forest by men with dogs. There was an immediate ruckus as everybody fought to be the first out of town hall and on their way. Afterwards, I stood out on the road alone, in the emptiness that follows large crowds fleeing with purpose, and thought about the suitcase filled with pornography.

10 Insane with sadness after a nice time with family

Guess who has a big stomach ache after staying out all night and smoking a thousand cigarettes with his brother who is visiting town? That’s right: Mayor. He is blind with hangover. He is treating us all with disrespect by trying to claim that he simply has blood poisoning from eating unripe fruit again. As if we didn’t hear him and his brother at 3am, cackling and running shopping carts and trying to bend the train tracks with their bare hands. Nobody gets any sleep when Mayor’s brother, who has to wear a neck brace, comes to town.
The paper is running a special edition on account of it being a year since the big wind blew down Main St and knocked everyone on their ass. Must we be reminded of this distressing episode, when everyone’s hat was snatched by the big wind and flown to hell? A whole Saturday ruined and still fresh. I myself saw up about a hundred dresses accidentally. Disgusting!
Note: the devastated widower Lionel T. is continuing his insufferable lecture series at the community centre. Who knows how long we will be subjected to them. Tickets are cheap, but the talks are drab and fatiguing. The topics are arbitrary (sea water, for example, or movie prosthetics, both of which he finds disgusting). They take up a whole afternoon and most of the time seem to infringe badly on copyright. But we attend all the same. Tall Lionel T. with his broken heart, the love of his life dead from algae. When she passed away she had water from about a dozen different ponds in her fridge. Poisoned by an insane hobby—there is no more human an end.
Another year of tragedy at the jobs fair. Tyler G., one of Town Hall’s custodial staff, got cocky demonstrating bidet maintenance for the crowd and electrocuted himself badly. Enough power went through him that the lights turned off over at Beef Emperor, all the way on the other side of the new highway.

Town meeting had to be called off due to Mayor’s hangover causing poor leadership decisions. His brother had left early and Mayor was wild and grim with loneliness. He proposed attracting a big paintball operation by way of almost negligent tax breaks. He wanted to spend town funds on ad spots calling for a girlfriend in papers around the world. When we voted these down he went berserk, and we were forced to lay blankets on him, one by one, until he was silent and calm and slowly, slowly, falling into a deep, breathless sleep.

11 The out of town kids have annihilated our famous glow-worms

Once again there’s been a big time blowout at the glow-worm cave and all the worms are dead or dying. A couple carloads of kids from the community college at Hindenberg, ignorant to the pathetic fragility of of the glow-worms’ ecosystem, came by on Friday and stunk the place up with beer. Their ringtones were deafening. The worms who did survive lost their luminescence; which is to say, they have reverted to regular worms, a complete waste of everybody’s time. When the police went to collect evidence they found a few bottles of beer still unopened and cool, and on their lunch break they sat on the grass in the sun and drank the beer and spoke quietly to one another.
Mayor called an emergency meeting to announce a special inquest to find out who has been sneaking around at night emptying all the bird-bath water out of the bird-baths. Many murmurs of agreement from afflicted citizens. We are all sleepless and fraught. We wake to find our bird baths dry, sometimes with cigarette butts strewn in the paths of our gardens. The birds are of no concern to us; it’s our own asses we fear for. If someone could drink water from a bird bath, then it follows that they could steal into our quiet houses as we sleep, put their fingers into our cereal, mess around on our computers and reset our settings, pocket our grandfathers’ valueless service medals, put on the old clothes left behind by our adult children, stare at themselves in our full-length mirrors and imagine that it is actually our lives that they’re leading and not their own. Mayor suggests we learn martial arts so that, if confronted, we could pop the intruders’ heads off like the lids of those cokes that you need a bottle opener for.
Note: the weekend’s small gun festival, the one the militia dads hold down by the lake, is being postponed until November due to some unpopular kids from the little school wanting to do a field study on those long-legged bugs who can stand on the water as if by magic.
At last, Perry R. has closed his vile video store. Full bankruptcy, something we could only ever dream of. They’re not even letting him keep the food he had in his little fridge. It’s an ugly moment for the town’s economy, but nothing unexpected. The video store had always smelled like hay, and the corners of the VHS cases were unreasonably sharp. Perry R. had carried too many ambiguously explicit European movies, which, understandably, made the town’s veterans’ groups go completely feral. For the last six months he had rented out the space to local clubs and some rowdy militia teens once accidentally set off a white phosphorous grenade while roughhousing and the cloud drifted over to Adriatic Mattresses and poisoned a couple of little girls. Now Perry R. has fled, disappeared and gone forever. He left the door to his shop unlocked overnight and soon we had raided what was left of his stock. Across town, our attics and kitchen cabinets bulge with VHS tapes. It is foolish, we know, but who can say how much they may be worth one day, once this, all of this, is gone.

12 Guilt! Guilt! Guilt! For our parents' aquarium crime

The election of the official town animal was delayed again after more trouble with the voting process. It was discovered that Lorraine F. had flooded the ballots with fraudulent protest votes, and Mayor had to call an emergency referendum to avoid another troublesome riot. If it’s enough to get the issue finalised then we’ll all be surprised; most of the legitimate votes were for animals barely eligible or things nobody has any idea about (“classic family dog”, as one example; “genocide salmon”, “deep mud empress”, “jester eel”). Lorraine F. admitted under interrogation that she sabotaged the votes in protest of the town glorifying animals, who she says cause most of the misery in town. She’s still sore about the time a deer got into her house on Labour Day weekend and drank all the fluid out of her cigarette lighters.
By contrast, Hindenberg’s official animal is a closed debate: an axolotl, on account of the big aquarium they used to have there, which was famously filthy with the things. One of those fish so strange and weak that speaking their name in more than a whisper will probably cause one of them to turn up dead somewhere. Something Big In Our Past: no one likes to talk about it, but we all know the story of how our mothers and fathers, young and with blind rivalry hot in their hearts, snuck one night into aquarium and knowingly poisoned most of the axolotls by jumping into the tanks with all their clothes on, contributing to the aquarium’s decline and abandonment. There are few crimes greater in our history, except maybe when Roland G. drove a bulldozer through that chess tournament.
The North West Headache Institute has had a big makeover after years of being starved for public cash. The state ruled that Mayor couldn’t use the health budget to fund his cigar review website, so now the institute has a brand new enhanced experience alcove and an upgraded toilet, and many hefty, sharp-edged magazines in the waiting room. The doctors clearly have haircut money now, and they seem more relaxed since the institute has been able to stop taking private interest money from those Chinese tooth whitening companies that are always under investigation somewhere for one river-life holocaust or another. Mayor is vowing to fight the policy change, and has warned of backlash from the town’s cigar hobbyists. “You want a war? Well you’ve just ordered yourself a bad one,” he said in a radio address. “The trouble you’re cooking yourselves, even God, in his ugliest manifestations, wouldn’t recognise it. We're sick of being pushed around.”

13 The parade lord would not be swooped

The cinema had to cancel this month’s Priority Night For The Easily Startled — when all the town’s meek folk get together to drink water and watch a gentle film and engage in other traditional weakling activities — after it was discovered that the newly upgraded toilets made "a sound like a tall man's yell" when flushed. The emergency calls, played that night on the news, were deeply annoying.
The big school is running an initiative in the new year where the kids who are too angry to do homework can get credit if they contribute one weekend per month to annihilating the disgusting lizards who have taken over the the town's model village. Our prayers are with the angry children, most of whom will return with, at best, fungus.
The first baby born at the hospital in the new year was Edgar T., the second child of Ellen and Frederick T., owners of the by-yourself dog-wash station which costs $22 to use. Edgar T. is a deeply normal looking baby whose emotional countenance is reported as “medium”. His bassinet was hoisted by a crane driven down Main Street at the New Year parade. Children lined the rooftops with rocks to deal with any swooping birds, but very few appeared. A good omen. We welcome Edgar T.
Mayor called a meeting to announce his only New Year’s resolution was to eliminate litter. We voted that he change this to not practising guitar at 3am or putting off his duties to train for what he called the "World Cigarette Games" and the meeting had to be adjourned due to a ruckus.
Wonderful Christmas Avenue was closed early once again due to an outbreak of urinary tract infection. Council put a cap on the amount of kissing booths this year — 44 — in an effort to avoid yet another health crisis, but there were many illegal operations working in the guise of other services (the male nurse at the first aid tent; the futuristic ladies’ choir). They prey on our weakness. The town is at its lowest during the holidays, ugly with lust and the weight of the year’s failures — when we are drunk, anxious for lost drones, when we have too much empty time to fall in love with our married neighbours.

14 The river has given Mayor a memory sickness

Well, it happened, just as they said it would. After many years, Judy L. the town’s most beautiful person, has returned, having failed to find fame. She is joined by her new husband, a stranger who could best be described as looking like his mother spent too much time on a computer while he was in utero. She has four or five children too, none of whom bear her grace. Our hearts are broken for beautiful Judy L. We all expected her star to rise; to one day endorse the kind of exercise equipment you have to stay up all night to see advertised, during the deranged hours.
Mayor is bedridden after contracting river sickness while swimming just after the big storm. It has made him insane. He won’t stop emailing the entire town with requests for chewing tobacco, which he has never even tried and which we all know he will hate.
At times Mayor seems confused by the passage of time, and his own place in it. He tells us of the wonders of electricity. He tells us to boil our water to kill the radiation in it. “Tell me what year it is,” he demands. “Have they started making violent movies yet? I bring advice from the future. And you can have it, if you can find it in yourselves to fucking pay me what I’m owed.” We are using his delirium as an opportunity to get several acts signed into law that he would otherwise never allow. We have had baseball taken off the list of illegal pleasures, for example.
Beef Emperor is offering a reward of one family banquet for anybody who has information leading to the recovery of the restaurant’s mechanical feature fountain, “Stroganoff Enigma”, which was stolen on the weekend. Police had to be called after a common birthday-party skirmish, and after the ruckus was cleared the fountain was gone. Sean R., owner-operator of Beef Emperor has been previously warned about the fountain, which he constructed and wired himself, and which had already electrocuted a seeing eye dog. But what can the police really do? Sean R. and his wife have dangerous high-iron diets and no fear of death following a decade of small business stress. Any excitement, like an arrest attempt, could end in a devastating cardiac event. We pray for the safe return of Stroganoff Enigma.
We held a parade for Judy L. We felt that we needed to do something. But she declined our offer, and so the town limo drove empty past the gathered citizens as the big school’s brass band marched incompetently in front of it, and a cold wind blew over from the highway and made everything smell like rain. Had I been in love with Judy L., as others had? I used to pass under her billboard every day, the one for a tooth whitening procedure that doesn’t exist anymore. Her big mechanical grin opened and closed rapidly, and more than once I dreamed I was being chomped up and destroyed in her giant mouth.

15 Depressed by more ARTIFACTS of our incomprehensible past

Another protest at the recital centre comes after more complaints from audience members about a choir boy who refuses to sing in anything but the low voice of a weary man.
There’s an industrial dispute at the paddle boat rental place. Staff say they are tired of having their fingers ruined in the paddle boats’ troublesome gears. They want to be able to drink the lake water whenever they’re thirsty without having the equivalent cost deducted from their wages, and to spit into the lake when they’re made upset by a customer’s impossible questions. This they made known by taking out an ad on what is essentially every page of the newspaper, ruining our Saturday puzzles, leaving nothing except Lorraine F.’s hated and negligent food column. It is deeply annoying for us to even have to be aware of the trouble at the paddle boat rental place.
The Renaissance faire had to be closed early after everyone who attended came down with a throwup sickness apparently stemming from a batch of trouble meat sold by out of towners. Many deposits on rental tabards were voided. Mayor urged calm and asked that everybody stay outdoors while the outbreak is dealt with, lest they fill their homes with sick. “I saw this in the army,” he said in his radio address. “Pass your waste into a hole if at all possible, or off a cliff or high bluff, or better yet from a tower.” We all look forward to the Renaissance faire, which has come a long way since it began as a gang of horseback teens spending their weekends trying to run over marsh birds.
God: they’re burying another fucking time capsule. Just once we would like a day to go by without a new capsule going into the ground or being dug up somewhere. The earth is filthy with them and we are weary with celebration. We care little for the strange and uninspiring offerings of our idiot great grandparents: an undersized tennis racquet; a cigar cutter depicting the toothless mouth of Pope Pious IX; something called a “women’s toothbrush”; and more than one instance of what is titled “municipal pornography”. What do these things mean? Whose vicious hands laid them here? We are constantly poisoned from drinking what we find inside the capsules, even if it clearly ground-seep or contaminate from the highway spills. And who can blame us? We are desperate for true answers, some end to mystery; we need guidance, to know what we can learn from this place so as to be rid of it for good.

16 Disgusted by the chalky victims of the ancient volcano

Council exercised its emergency veto against mayor’s plan to break into the town’s supply of emergency cigarettes and distribute them to citizens to “preserve and beautify townsfolk with the cigarette scientists' vital chemicals”. Someone saw him reading an alternative health manual published by one of those discredited war-crime countries. “Like the famous celebrities of Madame Tussaud, our present selves will be captured forever in a gummy and youthful refrain,” he said. “Future generations will feel weak staring at us.”
Lorraine F. came down from her crooked little home, fevered from watching documentary television, to yell at us about how the preserved dead of Pompeii are hideous and should be smashed with hammers by the corrupt Italian government.
Tony H. the wifeless man, having drunk too deeply of ruin-wine, became powerful with longing and interrupted another drive-in movie with his eternal search for a partner. “Many of you know me by now,” he called from the front of the pit over the increasingly loud honking of the gathered audience . “I am a good man. I am conventionally handsome and an organ donor. I have sinned, but they have been low transgressions not befitting the attention of any angel of importance. I once ran over my cousins’ foot with a mower, for example, and he had to forgo an officer’s commission in the air force, and truth be told I did it on purpose, though I couldn’t have known then the damage I would cause. I once kept a bird in an ice box for months and would bring it out to look at very late at night when it seemed I was the only man awake in the whole town. I am someone wanting what you all want; to desire and be desired, to make vulgar art with my body, and to one day have a child who can remember me as a proud tyrant of his or her history. I have close to a thousand dollars in video rental fees, but—”It became impossible to hear him over the sound of the crowd laying on their horns and screaming, yelling for him to be taken away. They called for his ass, prayed for him to be blinded slowly by the dull beam of the movie projector, threatened to drink his blood if he didn’t release is and allow our night to progress. Soon a tall teenager had him in a headlock, as is inevitable, and the film continued. But I'd already left. I'd lost my appetite for wonder. It wasn’t until I was back on the road that I realised that I’d been screaming at Tony H. too, something I have no memory of. A word. But what was it?

17 We must do something about the heroic boy!

Many have grown tired of Eli S. the heroic boy. He has abused his stipend. He has exhausted the town's sweet rolls and his shadow darkens the express lane at Grocery King regardless of the number of items in his cart. He regularly leaves the library toilets unflushed and when confronted about it he calls the librarians “hog-boned past-clowns” and “soft-palate cowards” with “skin like sodden velum”. “Sniff my hive”, he sneers. He has saved us all more than once, we are reminded. Isn’t that worth more than 10,000 sweet rolls? Nevertheless, a cabal has formed intent on toppling the heroic boy.
Bad news: there was an episode at town hall when Mayor told a class of history students visiting from one of the nice schools at Hindenberg that the worst thing he can imagine is “a desert filled with people with no arms or legs all screaming for milk” and now Hindenberg is threatening to pull out of next month’s Canned Goods Con.
Bad news: More than two hundred citizens signed an open letter demanding that they be allowed to play with mercury whenever they want without being reminded constantly of the devastating health effects by "the jackals of the foreign press".
A girl from the big school claims she can step onto a freshly baked pie without it crumbling under her weight. The type of pie is apparently irrelevant, and she invites anyone brave to bring their own to the hockey oval after school any regular week day. People who have seen the act support her claim and even describe her as leaving no footprint. A miracle? Either way we are grateful for another distraction; to be allowed to forget for at least an afternoons our true concerns, like how Oscar F. hasn’t changed his pool filter in so long that it now looks like a wound.

18 Lord let us shake the influence of the horrible ghost

Prolonged period of genuine mania after the staging of a dismal but well-received play at the big school depicting the local legend of Wooden Henry the vengeful ghost, an ancient resident of town. Citizens freaking out. As is the popular image, Wooden Henry was portrayed as a big upright wooden coffin with feet sticking out bottom, a little glass window in the front from which he can leer at his victims and remind them of their sins. Despite assurances of the story’s fictive nature, productivity throughout area has come to a halt: fatiguing mandatory sessions of security council; collapse of already brittle alliances between town’s martial arts clubs; classes cancelled at both little and big schools as children sleep all day in their parents’ beds, catatonic with terror. Garbage men fear leaving their trucks and being exposed to Wooden Henry; they pour gasoline on the trashcans as they speed past in the dark of early morning. The usually graceful town hall fountain, uncleaned for days, is ugly with mosquito eggs.
A town meeting was called to assuage fears but Mayor’s notable anxiety (he was wearing a bullet-proof vest) quickly derailed proceedings and opened the floor to panic. Lorraine F. said Wooden Henry hates modern popular music and can be banished with any foul smelling household chemical. He will not open a freshly painted door. He is drawn to unflushed toilets and food left out longer than an hour. He lives in un-rewinded VHS tapes. He is a friend of all unmarried women and conjures ill heart health in men over fifty. Terrance M. claimed that Wooden Henry’s dark influence was likely to blame for his pets' constant tapeworm and the failure of his pathetic wedding photography business. Afterwards, we saw Mayor sprint from the building to his waiting car, crouched low like he was ducking the spinning blades of a helicopter.
The panic has led to great solitude on the streets night and day. On Main St the warm wind goes unnoticed. Some businesses continue to stay open: Beef Month continues at the newly refurbished Heavenly Beef Emperor, with special menu items and door prizes through to July. The public pool is deserted but accessible; the gates were left unlocked when owners Geoff and Mary O. fled for their lives. I was hoping to swim some laps but got the deep jitters when, standing alone in the silence, I heard a commotion come from the equipment room. It was just one of the town’s sick deer, bloody-mouthed from eating those bad mushrooms that make them go crazy. It had simply wandered in to chew on a rubber pool noodle. But for a moment I thought it could have been him. Forgive me. Forgive me for the fear in my heart when I felt Wooden Henry close.

19 The library welcomes the perverts' return

Town hall is considering its options against Annabelle F. after she knocked a utility pole into the river in an effort to electrocute some river teens who were splashing around and being disrespectful. Annabelle F. claims the kids hooted at her and said she was a “forgotten machine” and a “milkman”. They said she had “a face like a fucking dictionary”, and accused her of being behind on her taxes. She alleges the river teens were drinking from old glass medicine bottles of the variety found in hospitals nobody goes to anymore. Everybody is sympathetic for Annabelle F., whose baby has one of those famous diseases that make it look ancient.
Strong condemnation of Tony F., who refuses to cut his dog’s toenails. We’re all disgusted by the dog’s long nails, the clicking and clacking of which unsettles out-of-towners. Tony F. said he couldn’t risk cutting the nails himself because he suspects that they carry that nasty bacteria that makes birds fly into power-lines. The last time he got scratched he was so depressed he had to sit around for two days listening to the radio. Mayor put it to vote and it was decided Tony F. would have to take the dog by the community college in Hindenberg to see if they can do anything about the toenails with the radiation they have there.
The library is holding one of its special nights where perverts can pay a fee to view the books that can’t usually be displayed due to the authors’ names being too crass or resembling something frightening (e.g. Edgar P*stol). The library is raising funds to get a professional in to finally do something about the horrible ceiling rat, which has either died or had babies depending on whose blog you read.
Some of the science kids from the little school had the thought of digging up a few of the 13-year cicadas to see how they’re holding up ahead of next year’s emergence. Bad idea: the cicadas were boiled-looking and foul. They had the nowhere-eyes of condemned criminals, and stunk like spent matches. Word of it got around at the little school and now all the children are wailing. They wish they knew nothing of what was to come.

20 The death of Mayor

Saturday some out-of-towners found Mayor’s body in the wetland about five miles out, where the river gets into the state park. Always strange when bad news arrives on a Saturday, a traditional day for television, and eating hotdogs by the river, and other quiet virtues.
The wetland is a popular spot for unfaithful married folks to conduct outlawed practices, and the out-of-towners likely had their minds set on some hideous congress (no clothes but hats and shoes still on, for example). Instead they found sodden, sunken Mayor. Lonely and swamp-dead. With little mushrooms growing out of his clothes and frog babies in his eye holes and everything. He had been gone for a vacation week of what he called “cave experience”, which we gathered to be mainly shadowed pervert stuff, and he must have found some misfortune in the wild. We gathered on the road as they brought him in and we thought: Mayor. He was grey. The rough weather had made him graceless; a woodland thing had spent some time on him. The night before this I’d had a strange dream where Mayor was thrown by masked figures from the open doorway of a light plane, of which I was the pilot.
The pool was closed due to malaise. The flags at Heavenly Beef Emperor were flown at half mast before being cut down and allowed to fly away on the wind. What to do with a moment this large? Townspeople sat in their heavy armchairs drinking glasses of water. Some of them watched TV with the sound down low, or sighed in the lanes of the bowling alley and took their hamburgers outside because nobody had it in them to clean the tables. Lorraine F., grief-crazy, danced violently for hours in front of town hall until the cops caught her up in a big white bed sheet and dragged her home. Alistair Y. of the mortuary spent a day and a night on Mayor to cover up nature’s efforts and by the end Mayor looked like a movie star who’d died during an intimate surgery. He was golden with preservative medicines. Dust settled on his bulbous eyelashes. If you lit him he’d burn like peat. You could shine a torch on him and the whole room would glow.
Mayor’s body lay in state at the police station for a week and we each visited to make peace or whisper our little vengeances to him; to give pity, to promise to eradicate whatever it was that had stolen him from us — be it beast or bird, or a murderer, or the devil berries that he so enjoyed picking, which were mostly tasteless but had a funny mouth feel, and which were deeply poisonous in the great quantities at which he enjoyed them. The coffin was poorly maintained and attracted birds, so we took turns keeping vigil overnight, lighting candles to cover the smell and keeping Mayor misty with balm. Forgive me, I told the unswept ground. Forgive me for what I let the men do to you. I mentioned my dream to Oscar F. and he agreed that I may have contributed to Mayor’s death.
Emergency session called at town hall to discuss Mayor’s replacement. Great distress. They could do this? With Mayor unburied, his body still warming under the lights of the police station foyer? A good deal of wailing and moaning as if from an ancient hospital. Those who stepped forward were spat upon as traitors — I was one of them. It was imperfect, but if this was to be my time then so be it. I’d sat for too long as the town’s miseries overflowed. I’d seen too many children eat batteries for sport. If historians wanted to make a dog of me then they could work that out amongst themselves later.
But then, of course, before we could go to ballots, at the very height of our grief, came the turn: multiple reports that Mayor had just been seen, alive. He was eating a big banana split at the expensive ice cream place over in Hindenberg, evidently spending the last of his pocket money on his way back from holiday. A quiet moment, utterly still, before a great ruckus broke out. We run to our cars and raced to Hindenberg to confirm the news. There he was, sap-mouthed and confused. And when we were sure it was really him, that he was alive, we broke him. We pulled him into the street and filled his shirt with trash. We dragged him through the mud and made him drink puddle water. We took out loans in his name as he watched, helpless, from the street outside. We shouted foul things never uttered before on Earth, things our minds had no way of processing. We warred through the sunset and into darkness, and then with nothing left in us but these animal-thoughts, we simply lay were we stood and slept until morning.
No one has yet come forth to claim the stranger’s body.

21 Tonight's reading of the Doomsday Book of Strangers has been cancelled

After many weeks of mystery illness, Mayor has been diagnosed with “War of 1812 lung”. Greatly disheartening to have tolerated Mayor’s hacking cough for much of the festive period only to have it revealed to be a special disease from a time no one cares about anymore. Beverly M., curator of the Museum of Historical Sicknesses, is understandably having kittens about the possibility of documenting his symptoms. Her little cronies — almost all of them widows — have been camped outside Mayor’s property for weeks and are threatening to dump phosphorus in his pool unless they’re allowed to treat him with their stinking and ancient balms.
Keith L. became passionate with holiday misery and chained himself to the town fountain, threatening to disrupt everybody’s weekend unless council put in a bid to host something called the Divorce Olympics.
The New Years’ reading of the Doomsday Book of Strangers was called off after it was revealed that the book had not been updated at all since the previous year’s reading. It’s unclear whether somebody had been lazy or if strangers had just stopped appearing in town. The last entry, dated fourteen months ago, noted that a burly unknown family had sped through town in a fast car the colour and smell of sweetbreads, stopping only at Edgar L.’s sad little antiques shack so each could make hell upon the toilet, which isn’t even technically available to customers.
The town is mourning nice old Ellen R., aged 98, who founded the little school’s Gentle Sweethearts program and taught there for many years. The funeral service was a mess. Several generations of the town’s gentle sweethearts became paralytic at the sight of the rows of cold gravestones and the ugly men who tend them. A prankster got hold of the projector and played a video of a wild bronco bucking its rider into mush. The little school has announced that the Gentle Sweethearts program will be suspended until someone can figure out how to speak to the children without driving them insane with anxiety.
Great disappointment after it was revealed that the New Years’ celebrity was Tetanus O’Neil, a man famous in our parents’ day for having a tremendous capacity to withstand violence. “I’m a man who can’t be killed by conventional means,” he called as he stepped on stage to ring the new year gong with the town’s big mallet. “I have skin like an old leather hat thrown out a train window. My broken bones knit without the instruction of a trained nurse or doctor. My neck is a trunk of cedar from god’s first garden and hewing it would take a decade of hard labour. I am the collection of heavy rusted knick-knacks that appears in every household. Come do your worst to me, you sad little piggies.” Many boos from gathered crowd, who had hoped for something better after the disappointment of last year’s celebrity: an ancient veteran who made us feel guilty for wasting expired meat. We are sick of guilt and hopelessness. We are sick of desire. We can no longer bear standing in our spare rooms, staring at furniture we don’t recognise, every love unrequited. I found myself one of many volunteering to take to the stage and cave-in Tetanus O’Neil’s head with a metal pole. The club was heavy and I knew the impact would ring through me. But I did not fear it.

22 Purge your heart of the Christian Dirtbike League

The Christian Dirtbike League cancelled its Big Jumps for St Christopher jubilee because the wind generated by the junkyard made the whole town smell like a cat food festival. Mayor added the league to the town’s codex of disappointing organisations, which anyone is allowed to access at town hall library if they can convince the attending librarian that they paid their taxes last year.
Henry F. has announced that he will be opening up his collection of extremely dangerous weapons for townspeople of all ages to come and enjoy. These exhibitions are always ranked “N/A” by the big school’s educational value matrix, but Henry F. is undeterred. Donations will go towards funding the ongoing legal trouble from his last display, in which somebody “managed to get onto the computer that stops everybody’s hearts”.
Some of the devout folks in town are trying to get council to shut down the little school after the board decided to stop teaching from a pre-war science textbook that labels most bodily byproducts as “god’s holy slimes” which children must never destroy unless they want to get put on Satan’s dessert menu.
Lorraine F. took up valuable time at town meeting to state once again that we’re all missing the opportunity to make a fortune housing the state’s violent prisoners in private basements and backyard holes. Big uproar. “If you’re happy to just sit there, unpaid, while you have a perfectly good hole going completely to waste,” Lorraine F. yelled over the hubbub, “then you’re already in more trouble than could ever be afforded to you by any murderer or crazed slasher — most of who, I’ll remind you, get the violence parts of their brain sizzled out with a police raygun the second they’re in cuffs.” Much booing from the gathered crowd, though there was some vocal support from the backyard hole types, who seem to grow more numerous each time the issue is raised.

23 No official limit on the meat cauldron

Town is getting serious about stopping folks from going up WiFi Hill, the one place where they haven’t managed to block internet yet. Citizens say they’re going simply because the hill provides entertaining views of the creek families running amok, but we all know everyone’s up there visiting ugly websites and coming back down with unknowable passions. You can hear them whispering about it afterwards, crouching down behind the yellow waste bins at Medical Brother where they think nobody will dare follow. The hill is one of the many places where mean grass grows and we’re at risk of spreading it throughout town if we lie around all day collecting burrs, out of our minds on pornography. Sheriff Carl says if we spot any of his officers up on WiFi Hill then we’re allowed to take their service weapon and discharge it toward the mountains where nobody lives anymore.
Wednesday’s town meeting once again returned to the tired topic of how all the graves at the public cemetery are practice-stones with the exact same words written on them — a result of a deal town cut with the vocational school out at Hindenberg which had 6,000 of them going for pennies. Here lies Dead-for-Nothing Aaron, loving chimp of Christ. He stands guard now in heaven’s prized cafeteria. Grieving townsfolk have always taken the liberty of covering the tombstones with t-shirts printed with the deceased’s real name, though these eventually decay and fall off, or are cut apart by frightening graveyard teens, and you’ll often see hideous clouds of the tattered things blowing across the government highway on the cemetary winds.
Bad news: Mayor announced he has already lost the drone he got for his birthday and has used his emergency powers to conscript everybody into searching for it. A bad use of afternoon television time. Mayor stomped the last one we bought him into smithereens because it got too close and the noise frightened him, so we’re not holding out hope of a safe retrieval. Everyone’s going along with it though because charter says that while conscription is in effect town hall must provide a colossal pot of mince that everyone can come dip their mugs into as much as they want.

24 First they came for the Interactive Hall of Apes

Wallace F. of the carpet warehouse has reportedly destroyed his marriage by spending every waking hour on the flight simulator he built in his basement. His wife Jennifer F. has taken out a full-page ad in the paper attacking him, describing his basement smell as being that of a prison library. She says carpet cleaner runoff that his company dumped in the river is why at dusk the frogs make a noise like “a daycare centre being raided by the cops”. She claims authorities won’t investigate for fear of not being allowed a turn on the flight simulator.
Job alert: city hall is looking for a contractor to go to Mayor’s house at the end of each day and search it room by room to see if the big moth has returned. Mayor will wait outside with engine running and bags packed in case of bad news.
The little school is threatening to cancel its Notable Townspeople of History Parade if too many students once again choose to dress as Dr Edna G. — “the grandmother of Chinese water torture” — who lived in town briefly while awaiting extradition a few decades ago.
The future of the Interactive Hall of Apes is in question after council pulled funding, citing negligible cultural value and content that is too startling for the out-of-town weaklings on whom our tourist industry relies. A spokesperson for the town’s divorced-dad alliance says that closing the hall dishonours the memory of those who have died at the hands of violent gorillas throughout history.
Town has been notified that the state will once again be bussing in prisoners to spray the parklands and riverbanks with silver oxide in an effort to attract aphids to the area. The idea is that the aphids will in turn bring back the birds who eat the aphids, and so on until the entire biosphere — decimated by everyone playing the radio too loudly for the last hundred years — is returned to some form of working order. These are always strange little periods for the town. The silver oxide turns the sunsets brown, and renders anyone who breathes too much of it bald and miserable. It makes us all sensitive to light and familiar faces, or we'll become feverish upon hearing songs popular in our youth. State funding is again so limited that the prisoners are required to double up inside their hazmat suits. By the end of the day they are so tired from the coordinated waddling that they simply stop and stand together in place, utterly still and silent. As the sun sets we watch them sleeping and whispering together, the wind shifting the skin of their suits, as they wait for the bus to come find them in the darkness and take them away.

25 Returning to the prophecies of the least eligible bachelor

A county judge has ruled that Loraine H. be placed in a medically induced coma after she broke orders barring her from sneaking into maternity classes at town hall and banging pots and pans together in an effort to drown out any potential “European discussions” from being absorbed into the brains of the unborn.
The unpopular basketball court is open once again, with new management trying to attract crowds back to games with promises that its scoreboards will no longer go down mysteriously into the negative, or display numbers nobody has a name for.
Stories are coming out of the little school that there’s a child there who can eat any raw material and produce from their body basic man-made items of general use — a ball of yarn into into a child’s scarf, for instance, or a nugget of silver into an engagement ring. Town hall is in talks with the child’s family to verify the claim and see if they can “do something about all the cardboard Mayor leaves lying around”.

Good news: friendless Lionel G. is again having visions every time he consumes too much salt. Anyone who visits his shack bearing a gift of red meat will have their fate read so long as they’re able to withstand the cruel language Lionel G. uses in daily speech. Not recommended for everyone. During one such conniption he predicted that I will marry into wealth and have many sons and daughters, but that the children will be “poisoned little pigs” with “fuck-hole brains”, who will produce “more medical waste than has yet been seen by human eyes”. He called my sister a “swamp-lipped conductor on god’s most pitiful train”. Visiting hours vary, so interested townspeople are advised to approach Lionel G.’s home from the west and wait to see if cigarette smoke rises from the windows.

26 The trees are ancient and their sap disgusting

Town hall has announced that it has finalised a deal with a pharmaceutical firm in Hindenberg requiring the town to dish out doses of the discredited anti-viral Moroxodine for any illness or injury that may occur within town limits over the next sixty years, in exchange for the company deploying powerful chemicals to destroy the diapers clogging the the pool filters at the orthodox water park.

Mayor is threatening to disrupt education funding unless both the big and little schools consider implementing an exercise program he calls “caveman marathon” which he dreamt up during one of his dozen or so laser-eye surgeries. It seems to involve tying sacks of coins to each of his belt loops and sprinting around the fragile old-growth part of the state forest until he runs out of clean water and has to be rescued by whichever of the trainee rangers hasn’t been drinking. Afterwards, you can see the sappy hand prints he leaves on the post office windows as he tries to get a glimpse of the adult stamps.

The motel wars continue their desperate escalation as rival businesses seek an edge over the competition. Clive F. of the Great Southern took out a full-page ad announcing that all rooms in his establishment will now feature a window through which guests can see and communicate with the ghosts of dead loved ones. The Lumley twins of Lumley’s Highway Rest have placed bounties on individual members of Clive F.’s family, whom they intend to “incorporate somehow into the motel’s disgusting water feature”.

Town meeting descended into a large ruckus Wednesday after council voted to uphold an outdated writ banning gatherings of “any burlsome goode folke with necks exceeding in span a hand of father birch, and wholeweights when tallied exceeding the market tonnage of a Jerusalem steer”, effectively outlawing all of the town’s rough and tumble clubs and strongman guilds. Moment of chaos as burly townsfolk in attendance were forced to disperse and began to heave to and fro against the walls of town hall, which was far beyond capacity. Strangely calming to be caught, imobilised, in the hot wave of the strong men. Feeling like a lump of sugar dissolving in the swell of god’s breadmaker.

27 Trembling at the church of terrible products

Startling moment outside the good supermarket Sunday evening when I peered into a passing pram only to find that it was full of loose hardware supplies, and thought for a moment that something terrible must have happened.
Oscar F. is appealing the revocation of his library card after it was discovered he was the person turning the restroom taps so tight that at least one pensioner needed counseling. A spokesperson for the library board said that the incident was simply the latest of a string of issues, including that Oscar F. books out computer time every day and cooks an entire lunch next to it on one of those little poisonous butane stoves that pregnant women shouldn’t be around unless they want their kid to grow up colour blind. Librarians refuse to humour his tired complaints about how nobody is allowed to reserve the “comedy DVDs that are racist against Italians” anymore.

Mayor filibustered most of Tuesday’s Free Speech Hour to once again call on the government to release something called “the Dennis the Menace tapes”. In the ensuing ruckus he threatened to go “incognito mode”, where he lies for many hours at the shallow end of the public pool, breathing through a long piece of hollow pasta and staining the water with his expensive jeans.

Council is reviewing its options following the expiry of an order barring Lorraine H. from selling horrible roadside goods from her stall on the government highway. As of this week Lorraine H. is legally allowed to set up her shop to sell things that nobody is brave enough to classify: “Judas nuts”, “mortuary bread”, “gravedigger’s hotdog”, “heretic latte”; a subscription to something called “The Final TV guide”. The products are deeply unsettling. Depression spikes whenever they circulate, and online reviews flatline for our already troubled tourist attractions — some of which (Condom Island) can’t withstand any more negative press. Dan W. of the health office warned that officials will be hard pressed to intervene as most of his inspectors are still recovering after seeing what happens if you drink a whole glass of blood during goof-off time.

28 Speak one nice word and begone, citizen!

Big surprise: Town freaked itself out after spending too much time thinking about electricity again. See the children hurling their phones onto the pavement, taking bets on which one will be the first to erupt into enough sparks to cause a fire in the dry gutter grass. Neighbourhood groups form in the still evenings to roam around looking for faulty light poles, contact with which will most likely kill them. They know how dangerous the adventure is, but they also know we must approach our fears with a forward and honest heart, and that in doing so something wonderful may happen to us all.
Huge lines at the Jesuit food court to see the assistant manager at the salad place, who will submerge her hand in the deep fryer if there’s a good enough crowd-energy to warrant it. The episodes leave her seemingly unharmed. Unclear what it is about her physiology that allows this, though there are rumours she is in talks with council to be the face of a campaign highlighting the dangers of standing too close to the microwave during the development years.
New arrivals: The town welcomes attorney Jonathan T., previously of Hindenburg, who moved to a home on Wattle Street to be closer to his clients at the sludge plant, which is currently facing a lawsuit from the little school after plant fumes were linked to a spike in that condition where children can only watch movies with the subtitles on. When called for comment, Jonathan T. said that he was confused because his realtor told him the phone line wouldn’t be activated until at least the end of the week.

Mayor has agreed to start cutting his own hair as part of town-wide budget saving measures. Predictible results. Mayor is self-conscious and emotional about handiwork. He’s called for emergency curfew hours until his bangs grow back in. Anyone looking up from the ground in his presence will have their water cut, and some folks are reporting that Mayor is wandering from house to house at dinner time, asking for honest feedback and idly picking food from residents’ plates. He says he wants them to be as truthful as possible, though he takes with him a lackey carrying a big spiked ball and chain strikingly similar to the one lost in a burglary last summer at the bad haunted house which you’re only allowed to go to if you’ve had your diphtheria shots.