?...?

I scrawl this in haste across the back of a campaign poster I found under the bed. I can?t read the writing on the other side, and the candidate?s countenance lacks a single recognizable feature. It may be that along with words, I have lost the ability to read faces. If this is true, the entire town must have descended into communicative purgatory. Yet, I see my mother?s visage, and hear my mother?s words. She comes to my room and feeds me broth, lays a tender hand on my cheek. Before she even opens her narrow lips, I know what she is going to say:

?Why, dear? Why won?t you join the others??

The wind outside is cold. It rattles the mottled glass, and seeps through the papery walls that tick and creak. The pipes inside them moan, threatening to burst. I have one blanket, that is soiled and worn nearly transparent, to wrap around my quivering body. I curl myself into a ball on the bed that is missing a leg and dream that I?m struggling up a snowy mountainside, cradling a small flame at my bosom. I must get to the top before angry gusts swallow its heat.

She says, ?Come and be warm.? I squint at her, so as not to see the welts on her arms and neck. One day, after the spoon sat empty in the cooling bowl, she left, but I didn?t hear the key turn in the lock. Instead, I heard small scraping sound. I looked down and saw bronze teeth shining in the gap beneath the door. Now I am my own warden.

The mob caught up with me not long after my last missive ? how many months ago? I pray that it found its path, by hook or by crook, through the few sane hands left, to the printing press and that someone with half a brain is still publishing the Lantern.

Meanwhile I found my way, through very unsane hands, to this house, which, in my blurred mind (I only saw the exterior once) appears as a neglected marionette, hanging limp in a mesh of telephone wires. Why did they imprison me? Because I refused to partake in their idiocy, their cruel and masochistic games ? the memories of which still haunt me. I don?t want to write about them, but I will tell you this.

The night of my ?liberation? I stared at that key for hours, not wanting to venture out of my room. No matter how miserable I was inside it, I was sure that to witness the world outside of it again would finally drive me mad. Nevertheless, my brain decided that action was better than inaction and that, maybe if I left the house I could find a way out of the town and escape this miasma once and for all. On feet numb with cold, I crept down the hallway and onto the creaking stairs. Painfully, slowly, over the course of hours, fearing at every tread, I made my way down that wooden hill. Then my thoughts of escape fell into paralysis. Sprawled about the bare parlor were my captors, each one wrapped in a roll of pink housing insulation. They wheezed and coughed in their sleep. My mother opened her eyes and began to unroll herself with little yelps of pain.
?Here,? she said ?Come and be warm. Come and take mine.?

I am back in my room and determined to stay here. I realize now that I?m all she?s living for. If I leave, she?ll succumb to madness and destroy herself like the others. I drop this out the window in hopes that some interloper in the shadowy street below (I see movement down their ? figures? Footsteps? Friends? )

Help! Send help ? I?m stranded on this snowy mountainside and this flame is growing larger, too big for me to carry in my cupped palms.

Signed: Secretary of the City Council

!!!

Confusion! Mayhem! Disaster!

On the floor, I see a woman?s shoe missing a heel. Its nails protrude like fangs. Next to it, a paving stone lies in a galaxy of shards.

It began with the aforementioned street festival; how long ago does that last council meeting seem, with its atmosphere of placid redness! I should not have taken that proceeding for an omen of normalcy. A foretaste came that evening when the groundskeeper spotted the alderman with teeth sunk in the roots of a hoary bob tree, the tufts of hair behind his ears raised in warning. The groundskeeper lifted his flashlight beam and continued with the rounds, turning his eyes into caverns, as is customary of our citizens when confronted with the infernal rages of Our Shadow.

Preparation for the street festival consumed the town for weeks afterward. Citizens netted trees with white lights entangling themselves and their neighbors in the process. Docents prepared califacient drinks. Deep doughnuts with gooey centers baked in ovens while children collected explosives from trench coat dealers in side alleys. In other words, everything as normal?until the opening day.

The podium decked in bunting and bolstered with iron supported the weighty mayor and Our Shadow, the alderman. Both wore the ceremonial vermilion wizard hats and corsage of honeysuckle. Opening their mouths in turn, they conferred the expected blandishments, but the alderman?s eyes were, in fact, looking in opposite directions and therefore at nothing. With increasing frustration, the mayor elbowed the alderman when it was his turn for panegyric, but the cross-eyed trance fixing Our Shadow ceased to budge. Suddenly a Holy Silence descended upon the congregated celebrants like the vacuum before a typhoon.

In the middle of this void, the alderman unhinged his jaw and let loose a creature of delicate construction. This creature, only to be described as a batterfly, for it was half bat, half butterfly, rose like an autumn leaf in reverse, growing as it ascended. Its wingspan covered the entire square, filtering the golden light into orange. The dumbfounded crowd gazed upward, and the only sounds to be heard were the crisping of leaves against the pavement and the vibrations of a massive dust body.

We took this as what it was: a kind of soul confession, a confession that went beyond the mere limitations of words - the alderman?s attempt to birth some beauty from his wretchedness. For, in our eyes, he was guilty, even if the courts couldn?t prove, of walking into that night nursery and placing his hands around their tender necks and squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.

Anyway, some brazen pip, unfazed by the ghostly spectacle, launched his arrow-red firework straight into the moth?s thorax, disintegrating it in a papery poof. All present inhaled the mildewed precipitate. When we awoke from our numbness, we found that the social contract shredded. The lights were going out, and our real story, the one that had always back-grounded our days, loomed in all of our near-view mirrors.

But now, I must leave this building of unknown dimensions. I hear mad laughter and sentences strung backwards and the footfalls of a confused mob echoing in a nearby stairwell. Farewell dear townspeople, those what can still read in the right direction. I will write again from another temporary haven, should I pass one in this backwards borough.

Yours truly,

Secretary of The City Council

(. . .)

It began thusly: an elderly gentleman in the corner of the meetinghouse whispered into a paper cup, ruffling the edges of his coffee. ?Do we have a dissenting opinion?? But the question laid like dust behind the portraits. Then, the groundhog?s teeth snapped into a root. All present heard the sound through the open window, from green and shady yard.

The alderman raised his hand and covered his eyes. ?Those damn creatures are ruining our town,? he spat. ?With their chewing and gnawing!? A butterfly floated in and rested on the edge of a gilt frame. Sunlight clipped a section of the insect?s wing and bathed the room in vermilion. ?But for the grace of God, bring in the performers!? someone cried.

The performers arrived with a license, which was duly stamped and notarized, and then they proceeded to take off their hats. From underneath their hats exploded such torrents of hair, such wild knots and locks, writhing and grasping like tentacles! Laughter and applause from the gallery, a dim frown from the alderman. Never was their a man with a cooler nature to his blood, a man so un-impressible!

Loneliness fills the alderman. At times he believes he himself the only man in the world, or perhaps he believes himself the only ghost. He steps around dark corners, into the shadows. ?No one understands the weight of my responsibility,? he tells himself. Were someone to startle him enough, he might disappear in a fury of bats.

Cry for the alderman, dear townspeople, for we know he has murdered his darlings!

In conclusion: the city council determined that the weather will be what it is, that the problem of crime ?must be addressed,? and that the street festival will proceed as normal next month.

Until then, dear readers!

Signed: Secretary of the City Council