Population 1303. Drive into town on a foggy night and the headlights dance like horses. The variety store cashier speaks only in lines from TV sitcoms. Last year’s drought left over a hundred dead locusts per crunchy square foot. Puritans have run the Optimists’ Club for five generations. Zeke’s Antiques sells mantelpiece knickknacks, but everybody stays clear of their hideous asymmetry; nobody buys them, or knows who supplies them, and more keep arriving every month. The kids all know which book in the library should never be opened. Barnàbos has lived here fifty years; everyone calls him “the newcomer.” Since Trudeau last ran, Esther’s husband has been a hill of stones; for keeping quiet, she’s enjoyed a generous compensation. In unrelated accidents, Becky’s three kids all broke both their legs in their fourteenth years. Down a hall in his house he seldom enters, Hab fills a closet with the feathers of his parakeets. As Stubby Bruce likes to say, “Everyone becomes an iguana—it’s just a matter of time.” On winter nights when Jupiter glowers low and fat on the horizon, the conifer-crowned shadows up the ridge on the edge of town shake and snap at Heaven. Those nights uncoil and set loose the Dandelion Man, a thing of writhing vines that stalks the ridge and abducts an unsuspecting resident as regular as any ritual. Once in high school you drove her out here, parked your dad’s car on the shoulder of the road by the big pond, kicked off your shoes, and waded into water trembling with frog purr and cricket whisper. Her brown toes tamped mats of mud and drowned brown lilies. You had never guessed what lust-maddened monstrous knot of weeds was walking these hills. Nobody can recall ever seeing the Coffee Time closed. “Now, reality?” says the village’s last living veteran. “That’s a funny thing to talk about over here.” Once a year, the volunteer firefighters take pomegranates home to their husbands. In a back-forty woodlot shack, a hundred meters off the highway, lives a man who knows everything but his own name. He knows when the Dandelion Man wakes. He knows when the green plague will fall, how it will whisk the coffins off all the bones like silk bathrobes off all the brides. Locust Hill. Twinned with Cecily, Alaska. A nuclear weapons-free zone. Thanks for visiting. Come again.

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Mark A. McCutcheon teaches English literature at Athabasca University. Mark’s debut poetry book, Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them, was published (open access) in 2019 by AU Press; his poems and stories also appear in journals like Grain and On Spec, and the 2020 anthology Beyond Earth’s Edge (U Arizona Press). Mark’s open-access cultural studies and literary critical work includes The Medium Is the Monster (2018) and articles in SFRA Review, English Studies in Canada, and other scholarly periodicals. At Twitter and Mixcloud he’s @sonicfiction.