The Parish Paper Prints More Truth Than It Knows

delivered on time. the door was like that.

There is a little town paper out of Le Marais Perdu (The Marsh Chronicle, and I will keep linking it until one of us gets a cease and desist) that I have read faithfully for years, and I want you to go read it too, because it is the single richest primary source in this basin and it does not know it. This month alone, and I am not exaggerating any of this: an alligator has begun attending mass, and the church's response was to bless a pew. A classified ad seeks a night watchman for the icehouse whose only stated requirement, besides punctuality, is that he not count the coats on the hooks. The fishing column, the fishing column, casually warns readers off a slough where the fish bite too eagerly, on the reasoning that, quote, fish that eager are recruiting.

And down in their archives page, plain as a hymn number, it says: please do not ask about 2014.

Friends, a town that has to ask you that is a town that remembers the answer. I have seen two kinds of places get that comfortable with their strangeness: places that are protected, and places that are kept. I have not yet worked out which one Le Marais Perdu is, and it says something about my line of work that I am not sure which answer would help me sleep.

I relay. You decide.

In Truth and Terror.
— Beau