Belfast Is Gone

It happens twice every year, and this year, Belfast was first.

When I was seventeen, I lived in Belfast, New Hampshire. It was one of those small towns, frozen in time, with perhaps a few thousand people who inhabited it. Most of those people had undulated their way in and out the doors of Horton’s café at some point or another, and it had been for as long as I had been alive the primary hub for all that happened there, where the mouths of women gossiping and their children arguing flapped up and down, gyrating in the air, creating whirlwinds of speech that press into the paint of the ceiling. Whatever you heard, whatever was said about anyone in our town usually found its beginnings in words dropped casually here and there from the lips of women and men who flitted in and out of conversations between one another in hushed tones and whispers.

Horton’s Café sat stoutly on the corner of Tucker Hill Road, which anyone would classify as the main drag. The store was managed overhead by Mrs. Horton, who also worked a shift or two every week to keep “in touch with customers,” as she said. If there was anyone in Belfast who knew everything about everyone, Mrs. Horton was that woman. She had long grey hair which she kept in a near-permanent bun wrapped tightly against the base of her head and tucked against her neck. Her fingernails were painted once a week at the salon down the street. The store needed “a female touch” to keep it running smoothly, and this is the reason she gave for keeping her hand fixed so firmly in the innards of her store. Her true motives became clear whenever the mouths of two women began to move in that excited way that declared a secret was now being loosed on the world. She always had an ear ready when she stood behind the counter. If you think that a word you said inside those doors belonged to you and your companions alone, you were sorely mistaken.

Down the road from Horton’s Café sat Rhoady’s Books, which was perhaps the second-best place to go if you were looking for a slice of Belfast culture. It was the best place to go in forty miles for a good book, and I had spent a lot of time there myself. They tended to be the best employer of high-school students and I once considered a job there two years ago for that reason but I felt the potential risk of growing to hate the place was far too great a risk to take. Nevertheless, there were times I would open the front door and look at the help wanted sign and motion towards it with my eyes in hopes that, by some luck, the manager would look at me and look at the sign and immediately understand what I meant. Needless to say, this never happened.

If you continued past Rhoady’s Books you would soon come to the movie theater, which was run by the Warren family who managed to squeeze just enough revenue from the creaking establishment to keep it from simply falling to pieces where it stood and ceasing to exist. The theater had a total of four screens, and they ran four films for two weeks before they got new ones. I had been told it was also possible to rent a screen for one night at a low fee but I had never seen reason to pursue this theory beyond polite conversation. As a consequence, the theater always reeked of a long-forgotten regal air being replaced with the stink of desperation and a slow death. It had a very poor air conditioning system that was retrofitted to the building in the days before it could be unequivocally declared that it was, indeed, on its last legs. Nevertheless, the new air system quickly fell into a state of disrepair similar to that of its surroundings, and the Warrens had never had the heart to get it fixed. I tended to avoid the theater because its seats creaked and the doors moaned when you opened them, and in this way the Warrens had already guaranteed the demise of that which they had maintained only half-heartedly anyway.

There was a small general store across from the café. It was a dusty old shop that barely warrants mention, and this mention is only due to their gasoline pumps. The proprietors of the general store benefitted from most of the gasoline sales in Belfast, because they were the only store with pumps. If you did not want to buy gas from the general store, you would have had to drive fifteen miles out of your way to Brandon. Most people would have rather paid for the gas here then go out of town, which ensured the slow, almost malignant trickle of vehicles one could find pulsing in and out of the filling station until ten o’clock on most evenings.

These buildings together accounted for the majority of downtown Belfast. Past the movie theater, Tucker Hill Road branches into residential streets that cut into the forest and plop houses between the trees.

But when I was seventeen, there was very little that was truer to me than two things: that my life, if you could call it that, was on its way down from some high point which was not near high enough for distinction, and that the town of Belfast was very soon to be exterminated--wiped out, purged from the greater New Hampshire and the United States in general--and there was just about nothing in my power I could do to stop that.

I wasn’t quite sure why the residents of Belfast were so quick to accept their town being selected for the “small-scale preventative liquidation” that occurred semi-annually and made small features in the local news beside domestic terrorist threats but not taking precedence above foreign terrorist threats or celebrity weddings by any means. I know no one ever really quite knows what’s going on behind the curtain and behind closed doors on a larger scale, but always figured if the big government folk were looking to wipe out a significant part of the population, they’d hit the cities. Perhaps that would cause too much of a fuss internationally, though; it’s tough to say.

The typical morning stupor plaguing most of the student body at Helen Keller High didn’t seem to apply the day after news of the liquidation had been broadcast through antiquated local radio and a poorly written headline in the Belfast Weekly newspaper.

Rabid chatter buzzed through crowded hallways where some already-resigned, teary-eyed girls gasped and stuttered and clutched their friends while solemn residents of the bordering town with whom we shared the school looked on not knowing whether or not to express the inevitable survivor’s guilt that was creeping steadily into their minds.

I just wanted the vending machine to work.

“Come on, baby, just give it to me, I swear I’ll call in the morning!”

Tom, a brawny, crew-cut-donning core member of my group of friends, was standing next to the malfunctioning vending machine, stroking it, his face pressed against the side, whispering in a mocking tone.

“Third time this week this thing won’t give me my fucking Cheetos,” I griped. “It’s a vending machine, it’s supposed to vend. This is not about love.”

Tom smirked.

“Hey, assholes!”

Voices were chiming from down the hall. I looked up to see the remaining members of the group bounding over like a pack of rogue cocker spaniels with energy to spare. Regan, whose hair looked like it had been brushed with an eggbeater on most days, cracked open an energy drink--most likely his second yet that day. Colin had his pale blonde head buried in a vintage comic book that probably cost more than his outfit, and the scrawny, rodent-faced Meese was nervously applying chapstick, looking over his shoulder like he had stolen it and was waiting to be called out.

Regan rubbed his hands together, surveying the hallway packed with distressed students.

“So I guess we’re fucked, huh?”

Colin did not look up from his comic.

“Belfast has more squirrels than people. I dunno what we were expecting.”

Meese, even twitchier than usual, crossed his arms across his body as if giving himself a much-needed hug.

“You guys don’t really seem worried.”

Regan gave a half-smile.

“I dunno, man. Maybe we’ll just leave.”

“Leave?” I raised a quizzical brow. “You think they’ll let us do that?”

“Who’s ‘they?’ Fuck it, I don’t see why not.”

He attempted to run his fingers through the tangled mop of hair on his head and took another swig of his chosen poison. I was ready to give up on the vending machine entirely.

“I’m fucking starving. Gonna grab a bagel before class. You coming?”

We made our way through the hoards of sorrowful students, Tom’s tall stature sending students backing away like a sour-faced Moses parting the Red Sea, and we went about our day as usual.

Border patrol arrived that evening. The following day, the first attempted escapee was killed.

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Excerpt from Belfast Is Gone