Officially everyone was evacuated long before they flooded the old town.
Officially it had been empty for almost a year before the dam was even finished.
Officially the former townsfolk were happily settled down in the next town over.
Yet somehow everyone knew someone who'd been left behind the night they drowned it all. Ask anyone over the age of forty and they'll all list the same twenty-odd names of their former friends, family and neighbors whose bodies were never recovered because they didn't "officially" die there.
If you look for their death records in the nearby church they all died of natural causes like stroke or pneumonia... in the same hospital... in the same month... of the same year. Coincidentally around the time the town was declared empty.
Once a year the older folks will go to the newly formed lake and throw flowers into it, hoping to appease their lost loved ones and stop bloated bodies from washing ashore. It didn't really work. Flowers were nothing compared to watching everyone you ever knew either running, swimming or drowning all around you.
It took all of a week for people to start and stop sailing over the lake. There's too many whispers out there, too many waterlogged fingers grasping at their oars and asking them to for help they can't give. The lake has a body count that grows by the year and a perfectly preserved town waiting to welcome them all back home.
Officially it had been empty for almost a year before the dam was even finished.
Officially the former townsfolk were happily settled down in the next town over.
Yet somehow everyone knew someone who'd been left behind the night they drowned it all. Ask anyone over the age of forty and they'll all list the same twenty-odd names of their former friends, family and neighbors whose bodies were never recovered because they didn't "officially" die there.
If you look for their death records in the nearby church they all died of natural causes like stroke or pneumonia... in the same hospital... in the same month... of the same year. Coincidentally around the time the town was declared empty.
Once a year the older folks will go to the newly formed lake and throw flowers into it, hoping to appease their lost loved ones and stop bloated bodies from washing ashore. It didn't really work. Flowers were nothing compared to watching everyone you ever knew either running, swimming or drowning all around you.
It took all of a week for people to start and stop sailing over the lake. There's too many whispers out there, too many waterlogged fingers grasping at their oars and asking them to for help they can't give. The lake has a body count that grows by the year and a perfectly preserved town waiting to welcome them all back home.
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