Town Grievances 1: Incident at the Little School

Let it be known:

• There's a new radio show being broadcast in town. It seems to be nothing more than the sound of a man coughing and clearing his throat. Many hours of this daily. No one can say who it is. Everyone is extremely shitty about the coughing man. 
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• ​Against all advice, Mayor has developed another tan. It is deep and worrisome. Citizens grimacing and closing their eyes as he passes close by. He smells like a lit match and his little blue eyes unfocus as he tries to think through even the most basic problems.​

• Claims are coming out of the big school that there’s an augur boy who can read the auspices in the dirt he washes off his feet at recess. But his prophecies, if true, are moronic and unprintable: the principal can remove a rib to better fellate himself, as one example. Or that boobs are where a woman’s lungs are (?)

• Note: on Saturday there was a fire at the haunted train ride. There was a fire at the haunted house ride. There was a fire at the arts and crafts fair. The only apparent connection between them is that they ruined my weekend.
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• Note: Lorraine H. used up valuable evening free time by inviting everyone to her home so she could complain that a circus once came through town a great many years ago. Everyone was grumpy. We couldn't decide if it's bad the circus left or bad that it ever came at all.
   

• There was a vote at the council meeting to raise $200 towards finding and prosecuting the coughing radio man. Suddenly a great deal of interest (citizens gripping their knives and licking their lips and chuckling to one another with cheeky devilish looks in their eyes etc). But where would the money come from? We already have so little to spread around. At the hospital the children eat sand.
   

• Everybody is upset that I keep pulling grass out of the ground with my fingers. Mayor, who was never formally elected I’ll remind you, came to my home after hours and said I should be able to sit on the ground like everyone else without pulling out the grass.​​​
   

• A few months ago a theatre boy shot his tongue off with a blank during the little school’s production of a dreary play about farmyard violence. Everyone (doctors etc) assumed he would never speak again, but today he decided to reveal that he could still speak perfectly, and had all this time chosen not to. He reported that a pistol tastes much like a coin (as if we didn’t already know this, as if it wasn't obvious). Oscar M. gave a stirring talk about how we should be vigilant of gang violence, and many clapped. 
   

• I was too embarrassed to mention it during Oscar M's talk, but many years ago, while trying ourselves to form a gang, my little friends and I pledged to each swallow a bullet, one after another. Of course, I was the only one brave enough to go through with it. Is it still there now, sitting in the bottom of my tum? Or did it pass; did the bullet escape into the pipes under town and get washed away. Did it rush onward, first to the river and then out to the ocean, gone, far from all this mess.