Small town dreams and musings
Posted on August 8, 2006
My mother once told me that dreams are wonderful things, little movies that play when you sleep. “They might tell you what you want to be when you grow up, things like that.” Yeah, that would have been nice, but I much preferred that one I had in the fourth grade where I got to kiss Mariel Hemingway. That was nice.
Well, last night I had one of those useful dreams (not of the Mariel Hemingway kind). This was a dream that I could only . . . well . . . dream about.
That’s right, a dream that gave me a story idea. Even better, a dream that gave an idea for a small fictional universe.
A universe called Aurora, Indiana.
See, Aurora is my hometown, a tiny burg of (at the time of my high school graduation) around 900 souls. It’s a quiet place on the banks of the Ohio River, a former Underground Railroad stop, former home to the Crescent Brewery, and home to a small factory that may or may not have ever been opened. Accounts are unclear. In the early eighties, a madman walked from his home up on Fourth Street with a few molotov cocktails and a small arsenal and proceded to shoot up the police department before walking on down the street and burning down a few buildings. The pock marks from his shotgun blast are still in the police department’s front hallway, covered up with a small piece of tape.
See? Interesting place.
Last night, I dreamed about Seth Fulk, a friend of mine from high school, giving me a walking tour of Aurora. Thing is, this Aurora was a little left of center, a little off. This was a small Indiana town where a pair of pornstars on the lamb eat fried chicken at the local IGA; where a five story house surrounded by twisting stairways lies tilted a few degrees to the side, the victim of an earthquake no one remembers; where another house lies uninhabited, those who venture inside scared away by the ghosts the former owner, a man who wanted to raise an undead army, left behind him.
This is a small town where the five street-by-five street grid seems to go on forever if you look at it from a certain angle, where turning down the right alley will take you to entirely different town you never knew was there, and where turning down the wrong alley will get you lost forever in a maze of brick and iron and concrete.
This a town where sometimes corn grows right up out of the cracks in the street, where the old cobblestones show through worn patches of road, and they’re stained with old blood. There’s a gigantic concrete staircase that leads down into the waters of the Ohio, and nobody remembers when it appeared or why it was built. Strange people live in small apartments over storefronts, apartments no one can find stairways to. The warehouse on the edge of town might be the home to a community of brutal savages.
And a magician named Charlie Crawford (Charlie Crawdad to his few friends) might be the only man capable of keeping it all in check.
I might have to change the town’s name. Who know? For now, however, welcome to Aurora, Indiana.
Relax.
Stay for a spell.
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