It looked like Darla was resting in a comfortable position. She had fallen head first onto the floor, and one arm rested above her, while the other one was to her side. Her face was turned away from Simon, and her legs were slightly spread apart, but no more so than they would have been if she had been comfortably sleeping. Simon sat next to his sister on the ground, staring at her body. She had been alive moments before, and now she was dead, and her murderer sat not twenty feet away.

“Murderer!” Charles screamed, reading the thoughts from Simon’s mind. His face was red and he had long since discarded his notepad, where he had been scribbling the night’s events until the gunshot had broken his happy writing.

“As I said,” the smoking man said. “All will be disclosed as soon as the rest of my compatriots appear. Sure, it appears to be a strange conceit for them to appear in the last parts of the story. But they will come and explain themselves to you better than I could.”

“She had a family,” Simon said, still not grasping what had been going on.

“We all have families,” the man said, waxing poetically in an obnoxious way, especially given what he had just done. “We are all family, in a way of thinking. In the way Darla thought, she would have agreed at least with the sentiment if not the implementation.”

“Do not think your sister was a saint,” an elderly man said. He had walked into the mayor’s in the ensuing screaming and stood near the door, a clipboard under his right arm.

“I do not care if she was a saint or a devil,” Simon screamed. “She was my sister and did not deserve to be shot down in cold blood by one of her own.”

“Ah,” the smoking man. “You knew somehow that we were of her own blood, of her own kind.”

“You are no relative of mine,” Simon said. “There is no way any relative could do what he did.”

“That is where you are wrong,” the smoking man said. “It is relatives that always hurt us the worst. I wish I could tell differently, but that is how things have always worked in this crazy world of ours.”

“I still do not understand any of this,” Charles said, trying to force an explanation.

“Shouldn’t someone call the police?” Penelope demanded. She was trying to bring order to the proceedings with little success.

“There is nothing left in this town, certainly nothing that you would consider part of a police force,” the old man by the door said. “Have you not noticed that the town is in shambles? There was a rebellion here. It was a local rebellion, to be sure. But it has decimated the town, and I’m afraid it was your sister that was at the center of it. She was the cause and the end of it. We did what we did because of her, and it was only with her death that we could look back and then look forward, secure that we can still move forward in the world with what little we have with us.”

“None of this makes a lick of sense,” Charles said. Simon agreed with Charles. He was not sure if the dull of pain from his sister’s death had affected his ability to understanding the unfolding events. He watched as the old man made his way to the smoking man’s chair.

“With Darla no longer among us,” the old man said. “There will be new leadership in the town of Fishs Eddy. We may not become great as she may have wished, but we will become integrated and the meek shall walk among us and not be judged. You should know how that feels, Simon. Were not you and your family a victim of this same arrogance that Darla was guilty of? How do you not feel that there was something lost in what she had wanted to accomplish. You have felt it, haven’t you? You have felt the injustice of living in such an important place in the world, and yet having not the influence that the place, by your very birthright, should have provided you.”

“I still do not understand what any of this has to do with why my sister had to die,” Simon said. “If she was as bad as you said, if, as you said, she was on the wrong side of this conflict. What difference does it make? You were not at war. Fishs Eddy, for all its great people, could never have gone to war. It was a town, a small town at that. And even with its supposed expertise, its supposed powers or skills, what good would any of it do if in the end there is no town and no townspeople?”

“They will return and we will rebuild it to be much like it was,” the old man said. “We will tear down this monstrosity of a building after we are done, and life will return to normal, as normal as a town such as Fishs Eddy could be.”

And as if by magic, the old man and the smoking man walked past them and left the room. Charles, Penelope, and Simon stood and watched them leave. Neither tried to stop them. Charles stood there, with his telephone in his hand, looking bewildered by what was going on. Neither man moved quickly, the smoking man with an extensive limp, and the old man with age. They made their way out across the room and out the door.

“They are gone,” Penelope said. She walked to the far side of the room and sat in the smoking man’s chair. Simon was not sure why she was doing that. From the way she looked, Penelope did not look sure of her motives either. But she sat there, and her shoulders grew limp as if an extreme exhaustion came over her.

“I need some air,” Simon said, turning his back on his friends and racing down the marble stairs and running out of the door. He expected to run into the smoking man and the old man, but they were no longer there, seemingly vanishing like smoke. The streets outside the City Hall were filled with people. It was strange to see so many people out and about when just hours before the streets had been empty, and not a soul except his motley group wandered its streets. He thought of Darla and how she led them to the City Hall, how she had promised them that all would be revealed in the austere white building.

Simon walked to the center column, the one that had blocked the door from fully opening to the outside, and hugged it. The people that walked in front of the City Hall looked up at him. A small boy walking a few feet in front of his mother and father stopped to wave, perhaps thinking that he was a new street performer looking for an audience.

The people who walked in front of the City Hall were all dressed in fine clothing. The woman wore large dresses that ballooned out and slid along the ground. The white lace that encircled the bottom of their dressed did not retain the dirt of the sidewalk. It was either that or they had not been outside long enough.

A police officer walked down the street, tipping his hat to the townspeople. He spun a wooden baton on its lanyard rope. His face was dominated by a large handlebar mustache. Simon watched him walk toward him. Simon still hugged the column. As he grew closer, he realized who he was and waved at him.

The police officer started to wave back, but must have seen something in Simon’s face. He stopped waving and approached Simon. The spinning of his baton increased as if in nervousness or just out of habit when he was called into duty.

“Good day to you,” the police officer said as he approached Simon. He had stopped spinning his baton, and placed it on his hip.

“My sister,” Simon said. “She was shot. In there.” Simon pointed back toward the City Hall.

“Shot?” the police officer asked. Simon thought the police officer was looking for something to say as Simon’s words registered.

“Did you shoot her?” the police officer asked. He did not reach for his walkie-talkie or phone. When Simon looked at his belt, he saw that he did not have a talking device. He figured the officer may use new technology, or have the transmitter under his shirt. He wondered why such trivia bothered him at this moment. He had to report a crime, the death of his sister. It was a crime on many levels that he still did not understand—mostly because it had never been accurately described to him.

“You don’t say,” the police officer said. His only movement had been to pull on his mustache, straightening out the end, only for it to pop back upward after his fingers had run through the hair. “There are many strange things about these past few weeks. This would be strangest. We have not had a death in Fishs Eddy in quite some time. I mean, people die all the time, as is nature’s course. But an unnatural death was what I was trying to get out with. Do you mind if I take a look, see if maybe she’s in better shape than you remember?”

“I am her sister,” Simon said. “And I can assure you she in not in good shape, not in the least bit.” Simon stepped aside to allow the police officer to pass in case he wanted to check. “She is on the top floor at the end of the hall in the mayor’s office. You can’t miss her. My two friends, Penelope and Charles are there with her. And they can tell you what happened as well as I can. We can explain the man who shot her, and his accomplice. They moved slowly and could not have gone far. I suspect they are very close by.”

“Leave the suspecting to us police,” the police officer said. “That is what we get paid for. In this here building?” The police officer pointed toward the City Hall. “They have said that it is a cursed building, this one. I never believed in curses, at least not those types of curses. But these last few weeks made the fool of me. I reckon I don’t want to go in there to see the truth of these things.”

“What do you mean you don’t want to?” Simon asked, completely confused by the officer’s reaction and the sorry state that his story had been received.

“There are some things best left unexplained by the likes of you.”

And if on cue, Penelope and Charles appeared at the door. Sunlight struck Penelope across her face and Simon could not help but notice how beautiful she looked at that moment. He knew he should not think of these things at a time like this, but that was what crossed his mind and what he clung on to. It was an island of sanity in the strange whirlwind of events that had slowly unfolded over the last few days. Had it only been a few days time since he had left Houston? He did not remember such a time as before he had left. Of no matter. It was clear that he would not resolve the problems now.

With the people on the street and the sunlight glaring from the perfect blue sky, he did not want to worry about such things. They say the kindest action a person could take is toward the body of a dead person: there can be no reward for tending to the dead, since the dead have already passed from the world and can never return the favor. Simon was not sure how true that was. He knew himself not as a kind person. He was not even sure what type of person he was anymore. He looked at the police officer and back to the City hall and groaned slightly. He felt groaning was the only reaction to what had happened.

Words: 2,059

Word total: 50,013

Words remaining: 0

It’s done.

It took me awhile to finish the last two thousand words. I was on the airplane, returning home from New York, when I put a bow on it, and called it a year.

I wish I could say I found a story at the end, that the characters came together and sang in harmony for at least a few stanzas. I wish I could talk about how I found characters with voices of their own; characters who surprised me at different turns. There is a lot I wish I could say about my writing this year.

What I will say is that I once again discovered the worth of these Novembers: they force me through the painful process of throwing down words. This year, with nothing in front of me except a vague idea, I managed to squeeze out at least one good idea as I scribbled. I will not know until I go back through the words in a few months or years time whether the idea remains good. For now, I am thankful for it to be over.

We’re back in Seattle now, tired but no worse for the wear. I’m hoping these are not the last words I write for a while. We’ll see how strong momentum is and how long it lasts.