Chase Shustack

While at a family breakfast, a husband would show his wife the story and remark about how the world's changing, and not for the better.

While people grumbled, these first thoughts stuck to safer shores, with people being grateful this happened so far away, or even muttering about lunatics under their breath.

interest waned quickly after breakfast.

It never occurred to the good citizens of Siskin whether the story was true.

After all, no one ever even heard of Westford, Ohio up until that morning.

And even stranger, this story appeared in their little newspaper miles away.

But the Siskin Gazette had never lied to them before, so people readily accepted it as truth.

It was interesting, but nothing that directly affected anyone.

If it was in the Gazette, it must be true.

And even if it wasn't, who was going to complain anyway?

And no one connected the morning's unusual story with that freshly cut log lying outside the old mill, except for the odd stranger seen mixing with the mayor at last year's benefit dance.

Life in Siskin continued as usual.

The National Grocery hummed with busy clerks and stockers.

Shopping carts rattled in tune with the beeping of scanning machines and canned announcements on deli specials.

A factory on the outskirts of town roared with noise.

Men on smoke breaks around heavy pallets of machine parts debating tonight's baseball game.

Across town at the local swimming pool, a family of four dug into their lunch of sandwiches and store-bought cake, watching as a particularly heavyset man in ill-advised swimwear launched himself from the top of the highest dive board.

Any worry about the story of a serial arsonist had faded away into the daily grind of an all-American summer day.

The only person who felt a tinge of abnormality, that something of an alien, undefinable nature just wasn't quite right, was Walter Green, the chief of the Siskin Fire Department for well over 30 years now.

Green was ordinarily a jovial, if not overtly conservative man of 56 and, as expected of a man in his position, was not known to let trivial things affect him emotionally.