AIN'T THE TOWN FAYRE ROUND HERE

It went through the windscreen of Delia's Datsun and straight out the rear window clean as a whistle. No detours, took the head and all of the left shoulder with it. Farewell Delia. They held a small memorial service down by the river. She always liked it there, especially after what happened to her sister.
And then Larry went down to the cemetary five-days later to lay a bouquet he'd stolen from the drug store – and there wasn't even a plot. He told me this sitting in the cemetary picking the petals from the flowers . . . told me that I could believe it or fucking not but there wasn't even a FUCKING GRAVE MAN and how the FUCK could that be and don't fucking say she was CREE-MATED because he knew for a gooddamned fact she hadn't been. I never saw Larry again. His line was dead.
Craven, the truck driver, who got wiped out on Highway 4 three-months previously, after something shot through his windscreen and took everything down to the belt, didn't have a grave either. Lou Ellen found that out, because she works in the library. After she told me that, and swore me to secrecy, I went to meet her down at River and Blackwood and all I found there were shadows. You couldn't fucking drive anywhere, if you had a brain and wanted to keep it where it was. Bess and Ryan Jenkins had hitched, out through Anderson, over the old postal track cum lovers lane, and they didn't just walk out of town, they walked right out of existence. People stopped driving, in or out, even the authorities. They sent a chopper in two-days ago to drop supplies, it smashed into Jeb Manner's hay loft and there weren't no body and it hadn't been FUCKING IN-SIN-ERATED! So don't tell me it had.
People stay indoors. They brick up fireplaces and board the windows, slat the door at night, because whatever it is comes through . . . the holes. Up at the hikking hut on the Last Pass four kids, three of whom I knew, spent eleven-hours having something small but invisible hit them until the youngest, nine-year old Braden Lurkey got hit so hard his spleen burst. Only two of the kids came back and one of them Jordan David he's in ICU in a room with the windows steel-barred – while there's still a hospital to be I suppose. People are getting hit all the time in here, in this vacuum, and a lot are going crazy. Sempkins shot his neighbour of thirty-three years dead the day before yesterday . . . claimed it was an offering.

Whatever it is goes clean through. Or if it's smaller it just hits you. It FUCKING hurts when it hits you and Dwight says it's bad souls but Lewis says fuck that man it's super-fucking-UNNATURAL, and Lewis was most likely right because he died this morning when something shot up out of his toilet bowl and took most of his jaw with it to wherever it was on it's way to. You can't live inside you can't go outside and you can't fucking RUN and you can't fucking DRIVE.
We got no tv now either. Like we, or the rest, don't even exist. School's closed, library too, even the drug store. Main Street is empty bar the things that howl up and down it most nights from dusk until dawn sounding like the tearaway kids used to when they dragged cars up and down it on a saturday night. All the tearaways got torn way to some place else. The cars are still here, those left won't even dare sit in any of them. Bits of houses are going missing too, like the whole FUCKING town is made of LEGO and something's taking whole chunks for it's own collection. The church and bakery have almost already gone. Cemetary went a good while back, just a field now, hospital too and the David kid right along with it. What the FUCK is happening here and why isn't anyone doing something to fucking HELP us? The less of us there are left and what with the buildings going and Main Street possessed to all hell the more likely it is I'll go soon. Only I ain't never been hit yet – I just heard from others that it hurt like FUCK. I think I'm the only one who's seen them too because everyone else says they're invisible but they're FUCKING not! I see them ripping up and down Main Street and they look like folks in those old depression photographs they used to have down at the museum only that's all but gone now to . . . old timers . . . and too young timers . . .

They stop and stare at me and holler only the holler is silent. But I KNOW why they're FUCKING hollering only I can't tell no one because there ain't hardly anyone here TO TELL. So I'll tell you. They're hollering at me because they can't hit me and that's making them madder than all hell. That's what I thought two-days ago anyhow, until it suddenly dawned on me when I was down in all that was left of the library rummaging through old sepia photographs of this damned town when I found a photo of a picnic and I was in the fucking PHOTO-GRAPH sitting on a tree stump smiling at whoever took it with a REAL BAD SMILE.
That was when I realized why they're hollering at me – because I won't play their games with them. And ain't no one coming to help because ain't no one can help, because anyone who tries sometime just gets hit and hollered at or just plain left out of all the games. That's always been the way they've been, as I recall it now – ANGRY.

Note: this is a rejected story - ha!