Just Like Old Times (excerpt)

Author's Note

I spent an afternoon in a nearby town--I won't say which; I don't want to offend, and besides, it's not the point. The point is the impression I got, which may have had everything to do with how I was feeling and nothing to do with the truth of the town at all.

I walked in the library, thinking to read or get some work done, but I couldn't settle down to either. It felt smaller on the inside than it had looked from the outside. Its "quiet zone" was loud with school-age kids playing video games at each other. I went to a nearby Mexican restaurant for lunch, only to veer away from the door rather than go inside. It felt oddly uninviting. Its parking lot was empty despite its having been open for hours. I ate lunch instead at a pub that turned out to have a depressingly generic-looking menu and a beer selection that, despite the hundreds of craft breweries just within a fifty-mile radius, might have been from anywhere at all.

Walking back to my car, I passed another restaurant, this one with a big sign stating not the restaurant's name but merely the type of cuisine they served. That's usually a good indication. It means the place is such a neighborhood fixture that it doesn't need a name. All the locals already know to go there. But there was a much smaller sign, half-hidden under the awning, that you had to get right up close to see, that revealed the place instead to be yet another link in a bland national chain.

Again, it was probably more to do with my state of mind than with the town itself, but I got the weirdest sensation that this wasn't a real town at all. It was a fake town, a cargo-cult town, an empty shell in the shape of a town. It was a mock-up realistic enough to lure people in from the highway, but once you got up close you'd see no substance there. It was an enjoyably eerie thought with delightfully creepy implications, which I begin to explore here.

Cover art incorporates photo by Schorle (Own work, GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.