Darkness on the Edge of Town Read Free

eaten by saber-tooth tigers,mankind has been afraid of the dark. I never understood why, until now.
    I’m sitting here whistling a tune by Flogging Molly and wishing there was still electricity so I could listen to my iPod. I’d fucking kill to hear some music again—something other than Cranston down on the first floor strumming away on his warped, out-of-tune guitar, or the local juvenile delinquents rapping bad hip-hop to one another around the rusty burn barrel on the sidewalk. Yeah, I could go for some Flogging Molly right now. Or Tiger Army. Or The Dropkick Murphys. A little bit of that would chase the darkness away.
    No. No, it wouldn’t. Who the hell am I kidding? Music’s no good. The darkness would just swallow that up, too.
    Okay, I’ve stalled long enough, and this whiskey buzz ain’t gonna last forever. If I’m going to tell you about this shit, I suppose I should get down to business. Christy is sleeping in the next room, and Russ is upstairs packing for the trip. We try to avoid one another these days, so that none of us gets angry. We can’t risk turning on one another, and the slightest perceived insult could easily lead to that. See, the darkness amps up our negative emotions. You might not understand that now, but you will.
    There’s not much time left. Soon as Christy wakes up, we’re leaving.
    Hopefully, we can keep the outer darkness at bay just a little bit longer.
    And keep the darkness inside us at bay, as well.

C HAPTER T HREE
    You know those coming-of-age books and movies? The ones where a bunch of plucky kids have all kinds of adventures during the summer, and it ends up being a major turning point in their lives? They defeat the monster, bully, bad guy, abusive parent, insert your own antagonist here, and afterward, they are changed forever as a result of that confrontation, and when they look back on it as adults, they realize how it shaped and molded them?
    Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. I mean, who hasn’t seen one of those movies or read one of those books? We all love that kind of story because we can all identify with it. We’ve all been kids, and we’ve all faced our own monsters.
    Here’s the thing about those stories, though. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the time, they take place in a small town and in a simpler time—usually the fifties or the sixties. Back when things were supposedly more gentle and innocent. I mean, it’s a real slice of Americana, isn’t it? All you need to do is add some baseball and apple pie. Coming-of-age stories are supposed to represent America at its core—everything that is good and decent and moral about us as a nation.
    But they’re not really all that accurate anymore, arethey? In those stories, everybody knows everyone else in town. People say hello when they pass one another on the street. The town has a real sense of history—the populace knows who founded it and when and why, and all the things that have happened there since. Can you say the same thing about where you live?
    Before all of this, Walden wasn’t like that. Yes, we were your stereotypical small town, but we were also a town of strangers. I can count on two hands the number of people I actually knew here. Christy and Russ. Cranston downstairs. My boss at the pizza place and the other delivery drivers. And Dez. But Dez doesn’t count because everyone in Walden knew who he was. You couldn’t miss him. He was the only homeless guy in town—by choice, really. Because of that, everyone knew Dez. He was the exception.
    In Walden you didn’t stop and talk to people on the street about the events in your lives. Oh sure, maybe you nodded, acknowledging their presence. Maybe you even commented on the weather or asked for the time of day. But that was all. There was no five-and-dime store selling chocolate malts or comic books off a squeaky spinner rack. No kindly pharmacist dispensing medicine and grandfatherly advice in equal measure. No mom-and-pop