A SICKNESS IN THE STOMACH

CORINTH, MI.

Population 1,543.

A small township in northern lower Michigan, somewhere between Gaylord and Atlanta. It sits on the edge of Miller Lake. Every July tourists come for the brown trout festival.

It's winter and unseasonably warm. The sky alternately slate grey and brilliantly sunny. The roads are black slush and patches of dead green show through the patchy snow-melt. Snowmobiles sit abandoned in yards. The conifers stand bunched together, still clad in their dark green raiments.

There is a rot in the trees. Needles turning sickly yellow. Swathes bare, denuded, like dead pillars. The forestry officials aren't sure why.

You arrive in town, on main street. It stretches for two blocks. Cinder-block bars, shuttered cafes, and little shops selling ammo, liquor, and lottery tickets. A big truck with a snowplow strapped to the front trundles past.

There is sleep in your eyes and a craving for coffee in your belly. A dossier sits in your glove-box, stamped with the name Harry Konikowski. White, middle-aged, owns a small time construction company out on Willow Road. Three times charged with battery and assault, each case settled out of court. His Facebook page is endless pictures of fish he's caught and anti-vaccination conspiracies.

You're here because the precogs back at headquarters picked up something odd. A gyre, something psychic, spiraling inward on this town. A deepening sink of rage, fear, and distress.

Find out whats causing it. Stop it if you can.

Proceed with caution. The locals are, as a rule, paranoid and armed. 

WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW

Konikowski's daughter, Jenny, a high-schooler pregnant before her time. The thing in her belly terrifies her; a tumorous parasite growing, leeching. Abortion is a sin she daren't commit, so the fear festers.

Since thirteen she's been on a cocktail of anti-depressants proscribed by a doctor in Gaylord. They keep her mind muddled. Her parent's think there is something wrong with her. They blame the flu shot and pray for her deliverance.

In fact, she is a grade-A psychic. One of a hundred in the whole country. No one could possibly know this. She certainly doesn't.

Jenny takes refuge in the backwoods, when she can sneak out. Cans of beer and her best friend Eva. Sometimes, in the smoke of a bonfire, through the haze of liqour, they steal soft kisses from each other's lips. Vague dreams of flight and escape bubble up and fade away in the light of day.

She's stopped taking the pills. Each morning they're washed down the bathroom sink. The world feels so much more acute now. People find her observations uncanny, lacking in tact. Her parents whisper, when they think she can't hear, about a visit to the Church psychiatrist. Her classmates call her a crazy bitch behind her back.

In three days, a freak ice storm will knock over trees and break power-lines. In five days asphalt will boil and bullies bleed from their ears. Pets will birth malformed offspring. In seven days, reality breaks. Corinth becomes a nightmare-scape, its people lost and maddened amid houses twisted into kitsch labyrinths and devouring trees that crowd you in like a jeering mob. At the eye of the storm, Jenny. Tormented by parents become ogreish grotesques.

The Agency will cordon off the township and expunge it from the records.

This is the worst case scenario. 

+++

Use Violence. Else, the fiction reigns. 

I made the art.