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Down in the Dirt (v132) (the October 2015 Issue)




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Zip Code Revoked

Craig Watts

    Well, the first I heard about this whole pathetic thing was when Jake down at the gas station stuck a thermometer into the gas tank. God damn it if the temperature of the gasoline wasn’t 172 degrees. It was practically boiling. This thing has damn near ruined everyone in town’s life, but I can tell you one thing, though. I would have loved to see the look on the Jake’s face.
    To be totally honest, I had seen some strange things around town, but I hadn’t paid much attention to them. Maybe I actually chose to ignore them, who knows? There was the time on Route 61 when I saw smoke coming from a crack in the pavement, but I managed to explain it away in my mind. Then there was also the fact that no snow would accumulate in certain parts of town. There’d be six inches of snow on Main Street, but the asphalt would be bone-dry two blocks away on Elm Street. The guys who drove the snowplows were pretty pissed. Those guys get paid by the hour, you know. As for me, my snow shovels have been getting rusty, and god damn, but my lawn is a crying shame in the summer. Yellow and crumbly, like walking on potato chips.
    So how about this? Imagine a town meeting where the Mayor is burdened with telling his constituents that their town is on fire. Permanently. But they usually won’t be able to see it. That was one for the ages. You should have been there.
    So, the long and short of it was that some guys were burning trash near the mouth of the old coalmine. This is twenty years ago, mind you. A vein of coal caught on fire somehow, and it’s still blazing away below ground. They tried everything: digging, pumping in water, voting out the Mayor, but nothing worked. There’s a fire below the ground, and our town is no longer safe for occupancy.
    Suddenly everything started to make sense: the percolating gas at Jake’s place, the random plumes of smoke coming out of the ground, the mysterious disappearance of snow once it his the ground. But not only was the fire impossible to put out, it was getting progressively worse. Not only would the pavement crack, but it would buckle, making roads impassable. Not only would smoke come out of the ground, but carbon monoxide. That’s the stuff people use to kill themselves when they leave the car running in their garage, and now we had clouds of the shit springing up in our back yards. Let’s just say that real estate prices dropped. Seriously, how could you sell a house here? “Welcome to Centralia, where every swimming pool is a heated swimming pool!”
    Eventually the government came up with money for relocation. I think it was around $40 million. I know that sounds like a lot, but it really wasn’t. Once it was divvied up, most people still took a loss when they moved. The town emptied out almost overnight. You can’t even mail a letter from here anymore.
    Living here now is downright surreal; it’s like being on the moon, or maybe in purgatory. I’ve had to change my route home several times because roads have become unusable, one by one. Either there’s been an eruption in the middle, or a pit has formed. Nobody will be coming to fix them. My own lawn still won’t grow, but other parts of town have grass three feet high in what used to be people’s front lawns. Abandoned houses are slowly collapsing into themselves like wet cardboard boxes.
    I’m getting older, too. Maybe that’s why I don’t want to leave. There’s something in me that wants to decay along with this town, and eventually die with it. I guess we’ll see each other through to the very end. Some nights I’ll lie awake, and I swear I can hear cracks forming in the earth, or geysers of poison bursting through the old school yard down the street. And somehow, alone in the dark, I decide that there’s no place I’d rather be.



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