And Then the Town Took Off

One morning, the truck driver heading into Superior, Ohio finds only a massive crater where the town used to be. Superior has simply lifted off, drifting somewhere above the clouds with all four thousand of its residents still inside. Don Cort, the protagonist, wakes up trapped in this airborne town, watching the professor next door claim responsibility while the mayor desperately tries to maintain order and the military fires missiles at something they can't quite hit. What follows is a strangely endearing battle between civic responsibility and physical impossibility, as the townspeople argue about whether they're escaping, falling, or simply accepting their new status as a floating republic. Wilson treats the absurd premise with deadpan seriousness, letting the comedy emerge from ordinary people confronting the extraordinary. The real charm lies in the human relationships: Cort's awkward courtship, the professor's increasingly elaborate theories, the town's stubborn insistence on holding meetings and elections while floating above the world. It's a gentler, more whimsical cousin to Kafka's surrealism, written with 1960s optimism and a belief that even impossible situations can be solved with enough determination and a decent local government.