The people of the Swamp

If you have to live anywhere, it's better than Nowhere- A bayou village weft to ruin by the counties beautification department. Nobody cares. The kids have a school but they don't learn much, they read books because it helps them get the taste of lead off their tongues.

The adults don't care much either. They eat the local food and live on the land, don't take vacations and never farm. You see, the small amount of arable farm land has been depleted of natural nutrients.

Now people like living here, don't get me wrong, but it's not in a way you'd expect.

People like to play the games, milking the cows and hearing the winds. We don't have any cows here at Nowhere, or not anymore, so instead of milking cows we pretend that grown women are cows. It's kind of weird, at least that's what some of the outside world has told me, but we get along just fine here.

We swim in the creek, adjacent to the river, it's kind of a little paradise for us, a home away from home. We don't really wish to get away, we just live, and do stuff to get by, that is, except for me. Playing around the swamp has always been something to do, but investing in my intellect has been my golden aim, my "Greek Ideal", if you will. I've got lots of books, books that people can't read, or at least not like me. They play with each other and eat the local food, but really that's all they get into. I get into books (so much that my brain hurts.)

People wish for things in the outside world, that's what my books have said. They play games with big people in big places, but this is not how Nowhere works, we're a unique clan of noble savages.

We have a jail, a courthouse, a movie theater and an arcade. The jail is our old dairy cow pen, and the sheep used to live at the courthouse, that is, the courthouse is where the sheep corralled. The movie theater is where we play games and watch the stars, the stars are what the stars are, the most shiny people of Nowhere.

People live life like they mean to live it here, its very fun to have no ambition, no aim, just a breeze to listen too. It's a bit like the ancient Greeks except they didn't have the movie theaters we have. Our slaves are not like their slaves, spoils of war, we have mullatoes who do our work, they're the perfect breed of sheep and goats that produced a mixed being, something of a human square, while everyone else is a circle. They're scared and gullible, like the weather is swift, sunny then raining, while the citizens of Nowhere are steady like a mist.

Frogs aren't that cool, but they are there for a reason, so we make the best of our acquaintances with them. Some people study us here in nowhere, and they usually ask me the same questions. The want to know why we live here, and why we worship the frogs, they ask about school and if we know what state and country we're in. It's not a particularly hard set of questions, but for the lead-heads, that's what the journalists call them, it's an impossible conundrum.

The journalists say the Mullatoes do more critical thinking than the average citizen. Many scientists have debated about the genetic quandary of sheep-goat offspring, but none have come to a reasonable answer. The scientists have made an effort to preserve our Mullatoe population, but they don't take many away, some people are afraid of them, and others say that the unique species should remain in its isolated natural habit. On the bayou at home we're never alone because plenty of people come to visit us and play our games.