{"id":434,"date":"2022-11-14T02:10:32","date_gmt":"2022-11-14T02:10:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.illinoisstate.edu\/euphemism\/18-1\/?page_id=434"},"modified":"2022-11-14T02:10:32","modified_gmt":"2022-11-14T02:10:32","slug":"daluse","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/18-1\/fiction\/daluse\/","title":{"rendered":"Daluse"},"content":{"rendered":"
Robert E. Plunket<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Nothing much ever happened in Daluse.<\/p>\n

It was a small town \u2013 tiny really \u2013 with two bars, a laundromat, a grocery, and a post office. One of the two bars was owned by the town\u2019s mayor who was a stout man with a round greasy bald head and ornery looking whiskers and a constant supply of mucous in his throat which he coughed up in a handkerchief while giving speeches in the town center. The town center consisted of a modest circle of crabgrass and a few dark spindly trees with a cracked cement walkway running through the circle and a green wooden bench. Almost no one ever sat on the bench.<\/p>\n

There was also a five and dime in town where one could buy a can of chili or green beans or a household sponge or nails to hang up pictures.<\/p>\n

But no one ever hung up a picture in Daluse \u2013 in their homes that is – because the townspeople who lived in Daluse were not artistic-minded. They fished and hunted and farmed the land, etc. Grew vegetables. Chopped down trees to burn in their wood burning stoves. Genuine out-doorsy, \u201clive off the land\u201d type stuff. They were survivors.<\/p>\n

They had survived the great war indeed. The war had occurred right outside of Daluse quite a long time ago. Only one person who lived in Daluse was old enough to remember the war. His name was Eddie and most people called him \u201cancient Eddie\u201d for obvious reasons. Eddie had wispy white hair sprouting in odd spots from the top and sides of his shriveled noggin. His hair was soft and looked like feathers. He could no longer walk so his son Jasper pushed him along in a flimsy wheelchair up and down Main Street, Daluse where the two bars and laundromat and five and dime were and Eddie would bark out orders to his son as to where he wanted to go next. He was near completely deaf so when someone was in one of the two bars, and even when Eddie was a block away, that person could hear where Eddie wanted to go next. \u201cLaundromat!\u201d or \u201cFive and Dime!\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n

Ancient Eddie did not fight in the war but rather he hid. All of the townspeople of Daluse hid which may very well have saved them from the slaughter that took place in the nearby city of Wanessa. A large percentage of Wanessa\u2019s population were decimated during the war. \u201cIt was unpleasant to say the least,\u201d Eddie would tell people in Daluse. \u201cWe could hear their cries clear across the woods \u2013 hideous blood curdling screams. At night.\u201d Daluse was then (and still is) surrounded by woods that were thick with an assortment of oak and hickory and cottonwood trees stretching up to the sky amidst their own kindly branches. On a windy afternoon one could hear the branches shaking to and fro, the thinner branches knocking into each other with their waxy leaves shimmering. On these afternoons it seemed all of Daluse was surrounded by a soothing chorus of woodsy knock-abouts.<\/p>\n

Which is why the wholesale bloody massacre that took place just one town over in the city of Wanessa was such a contradiction to what was happening in the tiny hamlet of Daluse. There were homes in Daluse situated on the outer rim of the town limits whose backyards ended right where the woods began and these people would sometimes sit on their back porches at night after dinner to enjoy a cup of coffee and sweet roll and feel the breeze and listen to the branches. But then sometimes they would also hear the distant shrieking of those in Wanessa being butchered. When that happened they would grab their coffee cups and run into their homes and lock their<\/p>\n

doors and windows. It was as if they lived down the road from a drive-in movie theater that was showing a horror movie every night and you could not hear any of the dialogue or the soundtrack or anything else but the screaming during the murder scenes. And mostly those screams that were high pitched like when woman or children were being killed.<\/p>\n

Each resident of Daluse (five hundred and eleven give or take on any one day) had double and triple padlocked every means of entry into their homes. Even the ones who lived in the apartments above the stores in the town center blocks away from the woods. The ones who lived at the very edge of town up against the woods would then stand watch on their roofs with their rifles and their rifle scopes and look out over the tops of the oak and hickory trees and struggle to see who or what was causing the slaughter. There were glimpses of horrific huge figures not of human form with no apparent limbs yet they moved along and overtook the blighted townsfolk of Wanessa with ease and while the victims would struggle and shriek the forms would make no sound at all. They would simply devour one Wanessia and then roll along to the next one and devour that one.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew they were being beheaded,\u201d ancient Eddie would tell his friends at the bar owned by Daluse\u2019s mayor, referring to the poor people of Wanessa. \u201cBecause we found their bloody heads in the woods.\u201d The bar was called \u201cMayor\u2019s Tavern\u201d and it was always dark inside because the bar\u2019s windows that fronted Daluse\u2019s Main Street were small and there were only three light fixtures hanging over the bar each with a dusty green and yellow tiffany light shade. On the outside of the bar at the entrance there was an old blue and red neon sign positioned right above the bar\u2019s heavy oak door that read \u201cMayor\u2019s Taver\u201d because the \u201cN\u201d had long since burned out. The sign was lit night and day and it made a constant soft electrical humming noise.<\/p>\n

No one knew why the heads of the poor decapitated people of Wanessa were being discarded into the woods of Daluse. \u201cAnd we were not about to stroll into Wanessa from those woods to inquire,\u201d is what Eddie would say, \u201cI\u2019ll tell you what!\u201d<\/p>\n

The crows would pick the flesh from the heads. This is how the people from Daluse would find the heads \u2013 they would simply watch to see where the crows descended. They were superstitious folk (and still are to this very day) and they did not want to leave the decomposing heads in the woods. \u201cBad karma\u201d is how they would have explained themselves had they appreciated art and lived in the city of Wanessa which housed an art museum, two mom and pop bookstores and a small amphitheater where people played their brass and stringed instruments. But Dalusians did not use these types of words. They just said things like \u201cit ain\u2019t natural to leave \u2018em sittin\u2019 there\u201d or \u201csign of the devil\u201d and then kissed a piece of garlic or a gem that hung from a chord around their necks.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mayor back then made a speech in the town center about what to do with the heads,\u201d Eddie explained after a hearty swallow of domestic draft beer. Daluse\u2019s present mayor who was tending bar that day then spit up some phlem into his handkerchief as if queued by the mention of \u201cmayor.\u201d \u201cWe then took a vote on what to do with the heads. And by God . . .\u201d and here Eddie\u2019s entire skeletal-like frame shook and he gripped the arms of his wheelchair and became choked up and the tears rolled down his hollowed cheeks.<\/p>\n

\u201cI voted to throw \u2018em back!!\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert E. Plunket Nothing much ever happened in Daluse. It was a small town \u2013 tiny really \u2013 with two bars, a laundromat, a grocery, and a post office. One of the two bars was owned by the town\u2019s mayor who was a stout man with a round greasy bald head and ornery looking whiskers and a constant supply of mucous in his throat which he coughed up in a handkerchief while giving speeches in the town center. The town center consisted of a modest circle of crabgrass and a few dark spindly trees with a cracked cement walkway running…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":0,"parent":96,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-434","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/18-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/18-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/18-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/18-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/18-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/18-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":435,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/18-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/434\/revisions\/435"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/18-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/96"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/18-1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}