The Town Without a Toothache // A Town Called Run

            My name is Hathorne Nathanial Epoch. I have been gifted my name by my uncle, Hue Epoch, through his love of Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—a book I never much liked. He tried to avoid the obviousness of traditional naming by rearranging my name and reverting the spelling back before, he says, Hawthorne kicked against Salem. I don’t mind much  my name. Beyond of my name, though, I live in a small house near a bridge that people walk across frequently. Not many cars drive across it. Not quite sure why. It’s a strong looking bridge.

            But this story’s not much about me. It’s about my sister. Her name is Jillenhaul Mealier Epoch. I don’t think that’s who she is. It’s just her name. But our parents named her Jillenhaul because they thought it was both feminine and strong—haul being similar to the word ‘maul’, an action which bears enjoy. They didn’t want her to grow up with all those traits that the women in the stories they read had—helpless, reliant, scared—but they didn’t want her to grow any facial hair. So they tried to balance it out in her first name. I think the name describes her pretty well to the extent that a name can. I really don’t care much for names, but a name’s something we talk about people with, so it’s important to know them.

            Now I want to tell you a little about where we begin. We have lived in a town not much bigger than one of those suburbs that those companies keep building, but everyone has bucked against the changing of our town. People here own land and houses that have been here for years and years, and, although we don’t have fancy sidewalks, the older folks still go for walks at dusk and dawn. It’s a tight knit little area and it seems to me that people here support each other. Like my uncle Hue, when he got drunk one night at Risky’s Bar and fell down and broke up the bone beneath his eye. A couple of people there brought him to Allie’s house—she’s a doctor that works from her home and others’ homes—and she woke up at, what was it, two in the morning to give him some drugs and let him sleep on her couch. She has a fancy couch. It’s copper—very shiny and clean—and a lot of sick people lie on it. So he slept there that night and then later got his face better fixed up. He still looks a little lopsided, but that’s what happens if you drink to much and break your face I suppose.

            That’s really only one example of niceness here. I don’t quite know if people do that kind of thing everywhere, but I sort of think that not everywhere they would. I suppose no one will ever know, but that’s just how it is. Lots of people leave and then come back when they’re done leaving. I think there’s a little bit of an aura around the place you grew up in, especially if it is overflowing with good memories. I know of some people who have come here because they didn’t like where they came from, which I can kind of understand but not at the same time, since I have always liked it here. It’s like they say about how it’s hard to love something you never had. My friend, Pen, for example. She never knew her dad, which I think is a big mishap on his behalf because Pen is a great girl. But when I asked her if it was hard not knowing her dad, she then told me that how could it be hard to not know him because he has never been part of her life and she’s always never had a dad, so it’s perfectly normal to not have one. I thought a lot about that, and I decided that I am just glad I know my dad.

            So my sister, Jillenhaul, did a very good job at school. I didn’t do too well, simply because I didn’t buy the history they told and tried to teach us. Despite how wonderful it is here, the teachers still have to teach the things they are told to, which really isn’t their fault. They complain about it quite a bit but still teach us. They say if they don’t, they won’t be able to work as a teacher, and we suspect that it’d be better to have them as teachers teaching us things that they know aren’t complete rather than having someone who thinks it is trying to teach it to us. So I didn’t get good marks in school because I aligned with the teachers a lot. My sister, Jillenhaul, however, lapped up what they taught and just flew like a bat out of a cave through school. She, unlike me, was able to learn things she didn’t believe. I have always admired her for that, because, even though she knows it, she can just ignore the falseness.

            So she graduated top of her class. I was a year below her, so we went to school together most of our lives. I was thankful for that, because she’s never been a bad sister. Like I said, everyone here is tight knit, so school didn’t have much of a suffering to it. The kids were all mostly nice to each other, except for the kids that had special needs. Everyone was extra nice to them because they didn’t quite understand what was going on, and people just wanted to make sure that the lives they lived were surrounded by friendship and positivity, so people went out of their way to be nice to them. We could see the world for what it was and we all wished it were a little more serene and ideal, so why not inflict that kind of fantasy upon people who could handle it? That’s what we thought, so that’s how we treated them. I think they were happy for it. I still see them at the grocery store, always waving and smiling.

            My bed was my grandpa's bed when he was still alive. I got it last year when he died, sleep well his soul, and it's helpful to have a nice bed when you're needing sleep. It was nice of him to suspect I'd want it, since I never said anything but always admired it's strong wooden frame and carved curls. Anyway, I should get back to Jillenhaul.

            Jillenhaul is, like I said, quite a bright girl. The boys like her for that and her dresses. She wears so many different dresses. It amazes me every time I see a new one because I always wonder where she stores them. She makes them all on her own, too, which I think is really resourceful, because one time she made a dress from the interior of Uncle Levi's old car. He, like Hue, likes to drink, but one night he didn't drink at all and crashed his car into the ground and it burned up like the chair we burnt for my birthday three years ago. When the fire went out and all the fire people arrived, all that was left was some crusty metal and the passenger seat. For a reason none of us would come to understand, the seat was left uncharred, so Jillenhaul took it upon herself to immortalize the whole ordeal. She cleaned up the upholstery nice and pure and then cut it up and sewed it back together and now no one would think that she was wearing a fireproof seat all around her body. Uncle Levi was okay, too.

            One day, with a suitcase full of dresses and other things, Jillenhaul sat down for breakfast. She didn't say much. She went to the counter and got a plate, a pancake that Cousin Judy made, some butter and some of the syrup our neighbor Ralph gave us, and sat back down. She then got up again to get a fork and then sat back down, again. She ate her pancake and I said to her, “Hey Jillenhaul. What's in that suitcase?”

            She said, “Oh, some dresses and other things.”

            “Oh, okay,” I said. “Why?”

            She just laughed and said back to me, “Because I'm going to somewhere.”

            Here Cousin Judy chimed in and said, “Where are you going, Jillenhaul?”

            I was thinking the same thing but I was glad that Cousin Judy asked her, because most times I like to keep people's space all to them. Judy, however, oh boy does she like to know everything.

            “Not sure,” she said. I was surprised at this, because it wasn't like Jillenhaul to not be sure of something.

            “Oh,” we said. Then we ate our breakfast and did that day. Before we all left, however, Jillenhaul made it a point to come and say goodbye to me. It was strange.

            “Hathorne,” she said, “I'll probably be back sometime. I'll write you, okay?”

            “Okay,” I said, “I'd like that.”

            “Good,” she said. Then she left with a smile and her walking away.

            That was the first time she left. I still am not the most sure as to where exactly she went. The postcard had three squiggly letters on the front that I couldn't understand, trying to cover up a picture of what looked like a tar pit. It was basically a big black pond, and I think there were two statues. At least I hope they were statues, because it would be quite unkind to just take a picture of two people in the circumstance that these possible statues were in. One of them was of a woman reaching up towards a branch, her body being swallowed by the black ground beneath her. On the branch was the other statue, a little baby or toddler looking at this woman, not reaching back because it must be hard to balance with such a little body. It was strange.

            On the other side of the postcard was some writing. All it said was: “Hathorne. Letter on its way. From, Jillenhaul.” Sure enough, a letter came a day later. I think she must have written the postcard with the intention of writing a letter or maybe she was working on the letter but didn't have it finished and really wanted me to see that picture for some reason.

            A lot of things were said in that letter, but I got a better understanding of what she meant when she returned a month or so later. What she told me helped me see all that she experienced while she was out there. She made some keen observations and I think it's a good thing to share when someone sees something in a new way.

            So, while Jillenhaul was wherever she was, she saw a small advertisement underground on a board plastered with different colored pieces of paper. She said that there were so many that it reminded her of fish scales, each protecting the beginning of the one beyond it. She stopped and looked at these advertisements. Some of them wanted to find a person who got lost somewhere, some of them wanted to sell something, some wanted to buy stuff, and some of them just wanted to tell others about a class or program or a job. Must be a nifty place to have when you are in need of one of those things.

            A purple piece of paper caught her eye. It was buried beneath two other sheet scales, so she plucked it from its placing. What reeled her in was the picture of a hamburger. It was a unique hamburger, sitting on a somber marble floor with a big, flaky croissant serving as the bun. She thought it must have been nearly a whole pound with all the lettuce and tomatoes on it. It was printed in such a fashion that it made her hungry, so she looked up to the top of the page. Surprised at what she saw, the title was “NEED: HUNGRY KIDS.”

            At this point Jillenhaul was neither hungry nor a kid, but the picture made her hungry and the fact that they needed kids served as a slight deterrent for reading on. She thought about it a minute or two—tossing around the implications of understanding why a place with a fancy floor and a fancy hamburger would need hungry kids—and then decided that there was no harm in reading on. So she did. At the bottom of the paper were serrated rectangle strips cut from the sheet, each with a number and address on it. Two or three had already been ripped off, so she took one for herself. She then tacked the paper back up where it was, buried and all, and then walked up the nearest stairs and into the sunlight. 

            She followed the street signs until she found herself at the address on the little piece of paper. Along the way people walked around her, in front of her, past her, with her, and all the ways that people can walk in respect to someone else. The steps and door were clean and black.

            She walked up the steps and knocked on the door.