john x smith
I mostly keep myself to my myself. Got my store. Got my little workshop in the basement where I fiddle around with things and tinker my time away. I’ve always been a curious man; curious about the world, curious about people too. If I’d been a less curious man, I suppose I wouldn’t have ended up in this strange little town so, so far away from the world I grew up in.
Here, however, I’ve had to learn to be a whole lot less curious. These days it’s usually only other men’s wives I get curious about. A man needs a hobby, eh?
I don’t talk about my past. A lot of folk like that here, for one reason or another. Mine I largely want to forget, save for a woman I love. Or at least I did once. Now, I don’t know. Of all the places I could have run away to escape what I did, I came to Hawker’s Drift.
And I came because of her. Where else could I go, really? Who else would understand why I did what I had to do? Who else could I ever hope might forgive me? I’ve destroyed everything else. Nothing left behind me but death and betrayal, so I came here, opened up a gun store, of all things, and waited.
And kept on waiting, year after year.
I know things aren’t right here. You only have to open your eyes to see things that should scare a man. But people don’t seem to notice anything. Guess they don’t want to. The world is slowly falling apart, everybody who washes up in Hawker’s Drift says as much, in one way or another. Yet this place thrives for reasons I don’t want to get curious about. Just like everybody else (save maybe that idiot clown anyway).
All this town has seems enough for people to turn a blind eye to the way some young people just vanish, and the way other people drop dead when it’s particularly convenient for somebody else.
Still, they’ve left me be and no irate husband has come and strung me up yet, so I guess they aren’t the only things not getting noticed around here.
So, I sit and I tinker and I wait and I distract myself with other men’s wives. I stare at the little blinking lights for hour after hour and try so very hard not to remember.
And pretend I don’t see any monsters…