Our Town

Our Town is a haunting post-nuclear novella set in the rubble of Smaty Creek, Tennessee. When the bomb fell, most of the town perished. What remains are the elderly, the ones too old to run, left to piece together meaning from devastation. They bury their dead. They maintain the illusion of an abandoned town to the outside world, salvaging what they can for survival. Their conversations reveal collective grief and fierce resolve. When an enemy jet unexpectedly roars overhead, the old men arm themselves and shoot it down, a moment of bitter, desperate defiance. Written in the early 1950s, this is speculative fiction that measures war's cost not in territory gained or lost, but in the names of the dead that no one else remembers. It's a story about what we owe to the places and people we've lost, and the stubborn, sorrowful act of carrying on.