by Jody A. Harmon
Chapter Three
Sunville was changing.
The children made lists of all the things they wanted. The parents made the lists, too, and compared what they had with what their neighbors had and sighed loudly, realizing they’d need to work even harder and make more money to stay ahead.
The town doctor got fancy new machines because he had to stay ahead, too, and the townspeople were visiting him more and more, complaining of all sorts of ills. There just was no time for him to do it all so the good doctor took to handing out big bottles of pills to cure everything the townspeople complained of.
The people of the town had certainly changed. They weren’t cheery, relaxed or happy anymore. They took to talking about one another and most of what they’d say wasn’t the truth and wasn’t nice and they didn’t care. When a neighbor was in trouble or sick, they’d ridicule that person or get the constable to lock them up or just ignore them altogether.
Johnny Seasons got a manager’s position at the plastic palm tree plant and took to drinking heavily with his buddies on the weekends and making fun of his grandfather’s confusion.
Piola began to get proper ambitions and decided she would become a rock star. But the first thing she bought with her paycheck from the swimsuit plant was a fast black sports car and some street drugs because, she claimed later, the doctors pills were just not strong enough to fill all the holes.
The biggest change in Sunville was this: Sunville’s sun was not as warm anymore. Everyone could sense it but people avoided talking about it openly.
Groups of townspeople huddled together discussing climate change possibilities and who was to blame. Everyone had a theory.
Very slowly at first, then faster and faster and faster, the warmth of Sunville faded.
At first, people pretended it was not happening. They just wore a few more clothes to ward off the chill of the day. They defiantly continued to wear their expensive sunglasses and drive their fancy convertibles but it was becoming harder and harder to behave as if Sunville was still warm.
Every single day the frost lasted longer, until one day, the frost never unfroze.
And henceforth, an everlasting freeze encrusted the town of Sunville.
Chapter Four
The tiny decorative plastic palm tree plant was the first to close down followed closely by the swimming suit plant and all the other new industries. The vanloads of foreign tourists no longer came either. And the national TV morning shows could only talk about how you don’t want to visit Sunville unless you want to travel to where the sun don’t shine. Then the morning show people would laugh among themselves and move on to another story quickly.
The townsfolk became bitter. The bar was very busy but almost no other business prospered in Sunville. The church, that had been empty for so long, was torn down and two more bars were built on the lot.
The townspeople wore their expensive sunglasses, drank, yelled at their children and cursed the cold.
Mr. Huffnpuff pulled the shutters on the Tourist Bureau windows and never answered the door. He recorded a message for the answering machine that said “Please visit sunny Sunville. We cannot answer your call right now due to excess call load.”
Huffnpuff took to slinking around town only at night and was often seen buying large bottles of liquor in the adult section of the corner store. One day, his former dog, whom he’d turned out as a stray, so he would no longer be forced to love him, found him dead in an alley of an apparent heart attack. His former companion lay down against the cold lifeless body of Huffnpuff, then turned his nose to the sky and howled so mournfully it could be heard throughout Sunville.
A group of men got together in a back room of the poker club to draw up a petition that they sent off to their elected representatives far away and demanded they do something to change Sunville back to what it had been. The petition stated that the townspeople deserved this because they had paid taxes and were good citizens.
The letter the federal representative sent back said:
“Dear Sunville, So Sorry. We have commissioned a study, at taxpayer expense, and found that the sun does not come under Federal jurisdiction. If it did, we would certainly demand that it shine on Sunville. Thank you very much for contacting your elected representatives. Please vote for us next election.”
This reply made the group of men very angry. They went immediately to the bar to order drinks and complain.
The women yelled at their children, fed them processed prepackaged dinners, watched soap operas and popped anti-depressants from big pill bottles the doctor dispensed them through a rectangular hole in his otherwise darkened office door.
The older children often rampaged through town, smashing mailboxes and stealing electronics they felt they deserved to have, but that their parents had not bought for them. Many children died skidding off the frosty roads in their speeding cars. Empty beer cans were found at the scene of many accidents.
No one knew what to do.
There was only person who wasn’t different at all, who seemed unaffected by the changes.
It was the old woman that nobody ever paid much attention. The old woman hobbled faithfully along the icy sidewalks without a coat and smiling as she completed her twice-daily rounds.
This made Sunville citizens furious…..and privately curious.
They complained about her over beers at the bar and to talk show radio hosts who sympathized.
The phone lines hummed with nasty gossip about the old woman’s constant smile and how come she didn’t need a coat in such cold?
There was one little girl in Sunville who was a little bit different than the other little girls and boys. Her name was Lindy Lu and her brain still worked. She had always bothered her parents with lots of questions.
One question she asked her mother once was this: “What happened to all the animals when the animal shelter was torn down? Who feeds them? How do they survive?” She bothered her mother and father every day with this question until they angrily told her that asking questions is a sin and she would not go to Heaven if she kept it up.
So Lindy Lu, the bright little girl with big eyes and long brown hair, said nary another word about it. But her heart kept wondering. She kept her questions inside herself but she kept them. And having questions is a very important thing.
Lindy Lu wondered about other things. She wondered about the old woman’s smile.
She had been forbidden from asking questions of her parents. She decided she would find her answers elsewhere. Lindy Lu determined to approach the strange old smiling woman with her questions
(The history of SUNVILLE will continue in the September issue of EAP…what will the strange old smiling woman say?)