Excited Delirium Book: Chapter 11 (Introducing The MOMYS)
Author’s Note: The following is Chapter 11 of the my online book “Excited Delirium”. Please post comments. Please tell your friends about this story. If you’ve missed a chapter, please click here for Chapter 1 (Prelude) or here for the full index.
Winter anywhere can be a daunting threat, particularly those who love to do nothing better than sit in the sun and soak up the rays.
Winter in January in the northern hemisphere challenges even the sturdiest of characters. Those who survive it have bragging rights to a much thicker skin than their cousins to the south.
Winter in January in North Dakota will truly test one’s sanity. The land is flat and ample, but that also makes for extremely cold and desolate winters. Even the Inuit would complain about the crisp and intense winds that rush across the plain, stopped only by the modest change in topography located to the West. With winds like this, the average temperature in January is consistently in the low minus 20s, at least since people have dared to record it.
Winter here forces those who are alone or who have been left alone to seek solace with each other.
Welcome to Heresford, where the average population has hovered around 1,200 a few years after Lewis and Clark stopped here to take a piss in neighbouring towns like Mandan and Bismarck (before they were what called that, of course).
The attraction to an area like this – for some at least – is that there is no end of farm land available for cattle, grain, soy or other cash crops. Any enterprising soul that wants to take his life into his own hands has ample resources here on the edge of the Badlands. You don’t even have to be enterprising. You just want to get away from it all and you can bankroll about a $1,000,000 worth of equipment and buy a slot of land big enough to feed you and your family.
Like any village that longs to be a town and any town that longs to be a city, the people that ran Heresford needed more people. Ranchers, farmers, mothers, children. Most importantly, taxpayers and labourers.
But this remains the land of shadows. In the colder months, the sun always sits in the crotch of the southern horizon, causing all the world to have long dark partners throughout the cold and harsh days.
Despite the forbidding climate, Heresford is one of the fastest growing communities in North America not because of its attractiveness or popularity, but because it is central to a new experiment of the Univist Church.
Heresford is the new home for the MOMYS, or Mothers of Many Young Siblings.
(Note: “Excited Delirium” is a work of fiction. Any person, place or thing depicted in this work of fiction is also a work of fiction. Any relation of these subjects or characters to real locations, people or things are an unintentional coincidence.)
Did you miss a chapter? If so, click here to see all chapters or click here to go to Excited Delirium: Chapter 1 (Prelude)
Excited Delirium by Liam Young is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
Based on a work at www.exciteddelirium.ca.