Order! Order, citizenfolk!

Pay me your ear, for I have news to tell you. There is another sinister affront to the good Neopoleon County to which I have been made privy in recent and difficult times. Worse than a man playing with grapes outside of the Season of Appropriate Fornication. Worse than a boy-man shaking a celery stalk at the church steeple. Worse still, and yet, still worse!

Your ears, my countrymen. I must have your ears, and I shall render upon you a story of such in-credible wrongdoings that the children and women kind may suffer the fear spasms.

Having a day of festivities to present to the townsfolk of Olympia, Washington today, I passed the night at the house of my blessed grandparents who live nearby in the forest. There I found myself safely sheltered in the deepest woods. But that safety would not last.

For at twenty minutes past the hour of five in the morning, the trees outside the windows seemed to come alive with a disharmonious cacophony, and it a-wakened me most abruptly from the slumber which is a man’s right.

Firstly I believed the sounds to be the imaginings of a brain heavy with the stuff of dreams and sleep, but as the night-confusion dissolved, the sounds continued, and I knew then that the forest was BEWITCHED.

I lay there in bed, wanting for the sleep to take over again my bedraggled body and spirit, but the sounds…

The sounds! They persisted like the screams of a woman being rightly punished for stealing a prune during the wintertime. As though her lashings were delivered, one after the other, without cessation or even a break of time for the whipper to sup!

It was learned to me this very morning, after dis-cussing the matter with my grandmother at length, that there are small demons who live in the forest, and who feel the need each morning to announce the arrival of the sun, as though they would be SUN-WORSHIPERS.

SUN-WORSHIPERS, ALL.

I do not know which prayers are kept, or which saintly shapes are made to keep these devils at bay, but it seems that my grandparents are safe. Bless be to them from upon High.

Here in Neopoleon County, however, we have no such pro-tections or the knowledge of their wise ways, and it is therefore that I now advance forth the proposed amending of the extant Neopoleon County Blue Laws thusly:

– A gi-gantic parasol shall be erected to cover the good Neopoleon County, and is not to be removed until such time as all the menfolk have had their proper five and three hours of sleep-time. The parasol shall be constructed by the women and put away in a small shed by the elderly.

– Any person being known to have brought a wood-demon into the good Neopoleon County, and therefore with them the terror of a thousand devils, shall suffer the cornstretcher until the spine has been lengthened by one half of one cubit.

I am told by a learned wise-man that these demons are called “birds.” While they do not occupy the cities and towns which comprise the most of Neopoleon County, the risk of infection is still con-siderable.

Com-pliance with these rules is church-enforced, and the deacon is a-roaming the county with his shotgun and will remove legal stragglers from the population simply upon suspicion of non com-pliance. Blessed is he who is heavy with rounds.

And praise be to the good Neopoleon County. May she ever be free of early morning sun and… “birds.”