Apathy Hill - Brief intro

Apathy Hill

1. The hand that never held.

There’s a swell of opinion around these parts that the three missing people have been abducted by alien forces that drop out of the sky at night and land in the Whispering Woods before sneaking into folk’s homes and somehow spiriting a body away without making any noise or breaking anything.

Whispering Woods has it secrets just like most folk in this town and it’s accepted that no one ventures into the woods not even dogs because there’s something n there that you can’t see but you can feel. I only know this because we were told by our parents, we read about in the library and we’re reminded by our teachers. Legend has it that something bad happened in the woods about a hundred years ago and of course things got exaggerated and distorted to the extent that fear is now the woods best weapon.

It is accepted stupidity here that if the three missing people are in the woods they won’t be coming out. The town is on edge and soon there will be enough people here burying their heads until this whole thing just somehow gets caught up in a passing wind and moves someplace else.

Sheriff Bill Sockamore, the local police chief says that he thinks that these people just upped and left the town in search of something more exciting and that they’ll all be back home soon or at least write and let people know they're ok. The town we live in has doesn’t have an official name nor at least a name that anyone can remember and has always been known as Apathy Hill because of the population’s general lack of enthusiasm and the collective feeling that everyday we all just keep walking up an imaginary hill to nowhere.

Everyone knows everyone here but everyone is a stranger and most people get by with sign language because it’s easier than talking as there’s not much to say. The population hovers around twelve hundred give or take a passing soul searcher stumbling across a place they won’t put on a postcard. Other than being born here the town is pretty much accident free and this is often misinterpreted as making us one of the safest places to live which I suppose it was until the missing people incident.

The town has very little history even though it’s been limping along for about 150 years. There are no real civic heroes and no monuments to folk who contributed to the social upkeep of the community. Zachary Tuper 96 years old and Apathy’s oldest resident claims that there was once a statue in the middle of the town put up to celebrate the work of the first ever mayor a man called Jeb Romona. As Zachary is the only man who can verify this and the fact that he’s living proof that wisdom doesn’t grow with age most folk just agree with whatever he says. There are no other folk in this place with the surname Romona so either the mayor didn’t have kids or they left town early along with a questionable history.

We have one school that fits all. We like to pick and mix so you can get a class full of kids aged from 6 to 16 with the same ability. It makes for interesting social experiments, considerable emotional upheaval, sexual unpredictability and moral dilemmas. The teaching staff are good, kind and safe religiously adhere to the `long held tradition of repressing any ambitious thoughts of those they teach.

Try as I might I guess I’m not doing the town of my birth any favours here but I have little paint and no brush so the picture is bound to be sketchy and frankly disturbing.......

(C) SJ2009