My Kind Of Town
by Doug Hawley
A tall bearded
man in a suit sighted the mayor of the small town,
and greeted the man who could pass as his twin,
except for his casual dress.
“Mayor Bachman, so nice to see you. Great
weather.”
“And it is good to see you, sir.”
“Since I’m thinking of moving here, I’d
like to know just about everything about your
town. What about the crime rate?”
“That may have been overplayed a lot. There
was the guy that the sensationalist media called
Mr. Audi for the car he drove, who intended to
blow up our stadium with thousands of people in
attendance. He was stopped by a clever
cop and his young friends. After he
was imprisoned, some say that he could hypnotize
people, like an American Rasputin. I
never put much stock in the rumors though. Oh,
and then there were the killings by the Vet
Cemetery revivals. ”
“Reanimated soldiers?”
“No, reanimated animals. After we
started cremating them we didn’t have any
more problems.”
Before the mayor could continue, a driverless car
that looked like a 1959 Cadillac pulled up to the
curb and said “Hi mayor, how’s it
hanging”.
“I’m afraid it’s been too much
hanging and not enough pointing. How
are you doing Maybelline?”
The car said “I just keep on rocking in the
free world. Have a good day and don’t
take any nickel meteors.”
The mayor turns back to his guest and says “That
guy is such a hoot. You wouldn’t
believe that he was speeding, running red lights
and running over an occasional pedestrian just a
few months ago.”
“Cars talk here?”
“I guess that you have not been paying
attention to the news. The latest cars
not only drive themselves, they have
personalities. They will probably be
asking for the vote soon. It took
awhile for Maybelline to learn some manners, but
she’s a good citizen now. I wonder what will
happen when she learns about sex.”
“I’ve got two questions. Why
Maybelline, and cars have sex?”
“Answer one – the car designer was a
Chuck Berry fan. Answer two –
cars don’t have sex yet, but the science
fiction story ‘smart car’ by the guy
out in the Northwest has been right on the money
so far, and he predicted car sex.”
A clown about 5’ tall and 100 pounds walked
by. “Hi mayor” in a high pitched voice.”
“How are you doing Dimebag?”
The clown expanded to twice his size and says in
a James Earl Jones voice “I told you to call
me Pennywhistle”.
“Sorry Pennywhistle, I’ll try to
remember.”
“That’s quite the trick, mayor. I
guess that it’s some clown secret how he
changes like that.”
“There’s even more to the story. There’s
an urban legend that he shows up at 25 year
intervals and leads kids into the sewers never to
be seen again. There’s a bunch of
teens that believe it and are trying to stop him. As
if any of the stories were true. But
there have been a lot of missing.” The
mayor’s voice stopped suddenly and he looked
momentarily concerned, but then brightened again.
“Dick, I travel a lot. How easy
is it to travel from Rock Castle?”
“I’ve got some bad news there. The
Bangor Airport disappears at random times and
flights have to be rerouted to Boston. Quantum
physicists have some crazy explanation, but I don’t
understand it. Of course there was
that time that we were trapped in an enclosure
for a while with no way out. You
probably heard about that.”
“Right. I think that the Simpson’s
did an episode based on your experience. Didn’t
somebody write ‘The Dumb’ about it?”
“I got to tell you that neither version
flattered us much, but ‘The Dumb’ was a
lot more accurate.”
“How about the school system?”
“More problems. The Prom Queen
from a few years back, Sissy Spacey, went crazy
when somebody shot her with rapid fire paintballs
as she was crowned. She turned on all
of the faucets and hoses telekinetically and
flooded the place. Hoo-wee, the
students all looked like drowned rats. The
building was ruined and every time we tried to
rebuild, the new place is flooded. We
gave up and bus everybody to the next county over. I
think that she got that way from her crazy
religious mother. But, and this is a
secret, her mother wasn’t as prudish as she
claimed. I’m Sissy’s dad.”
“Isn’t Sissy governor now?”
“Yeah, it is almost as if she has mind
control. She turned all the police
into plumbers and all of the plumbers into police,
and yet she always gets elected with 90% of the
vote.”
“How about parks?”
“We were going to develop the Cockknocker
property into a park, but it turned out that
anybody that went there turned green and went
crazy. They are politicians and mass
marketers now. Something about a buried alien
spaceship. One good thing about the
radiation from the property is that nobody can
use a cell phone here, so we missed the mass
murders caused by faulty cell phones.”
“What do people do around here?”
“There used to be a big military base, but
since their experiment unleashed monsters from
another dimension, they’ve been shut down. At
least that’s what we’ve been told. There
was a laundry, but one of their machines went
crazy and killed a bunch of people. The
biggest store is “Things You Need”. Great
bargains, but something always seems to go wrong
with the sales. Other than that, it is
mostly an artist colony, mainly writers.”
“Well Mayor, the place sounds perfect for me.”
“I’m sure that you will enjoy it Mr.
King.”
Appeared
in Down In The Dirt
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