I live in a town in Texas that doesn't exist. We have a disturbing annual ritual, and this year, it
Channel: Scary Stories
Date: 2022-11-24

I live in a town in Texas that doesn't exist. We have a disturbing annual ritual, and this year, it was my turn.

“Eat your meat, son.”

It was delicious, as always. Thick, hearty, bloody, cooked and seasoned to perfection. A whole plate, all from the same steer.

Each family received one full cow, butchered up and packaged perfectly.

Even the wafting smell of the aromatic steak, nearly cartoonlike as it drew us all in, could not lift the dour mood that hung over the table.

My father always grumbled.

Never yelled, never whispered, never quipped; just grumbled. Like the world was a pointless chore he just kept putting off.

I wish that explained why we lived in Scythe, Texas.

It didn’t.

There are well over 1,000 small towns here in The Lone Star State. All of them make the cut to get on the map – Cut n’ Shoot, Luckenbach, you name it. Bumfuck nowhere, meet cartography, your one suitor.

But not Scythe.

You could pick up a dusty roadside map from 1975 absentmindedly stored in an attic box, no Scythe. You can scour the internet for us today. Google has never heard of us.

By extension, neither has God.

I wish I could say this cold, lost part of the world was home because my father wanted no piece of life. The reality is, we’d simply lived there for generations. Everyone’s family had.

Nobody ever left, or came, to Scythe.

In retrospect, life was mostly typical, albeit mind-numbingly dull. My childhood diverged in two profound aspects.

Well, three.

Three.

First, a class in school we had to take annually from kindergarten through our senior year of high school.

A class called “Obedience.”

Like any other class, over thirteen years it developed from rudimentary facts and building blocks to the abstract and theoretical, more esoteric concepts. It was a strange hodgepodge of history, sociology, divinity, and law, all centered around our town.

And the rules.

My God, the endless rules.

I’ll spare you the infinite laundry list but suffice it to say, two themes dominated every lesson: no one could ever come to or leave Scythe, and we could never communicate with the outside world.

The penalties, all doled out publicly, ranged from obscene humiliation to gruesomely creative torture, but the driving point was always the same – if you don’t obey, you will suffer.

I had the same thought anyone have in this situation. The thought we all had. The thought we whispered when we thought no one was in earshot.

Just book it. Head for them thar hills.

We learned quickly that was not an option.

One of the earliest edicts decreed that if anyone escaped, their punishment would “pass on, with increased magnitude.”

Vague language. We knew from Obedience that the principle was interpretated liberally.

Your friends. Your family. Your neighbors. The guy you had a three-minute conversation with every second Wednesday at the feed store.

All on the chopping block.

Brutalized. Tortured.

The last person to leave Scythe was in 1916. Herbert Figgis. A sixteen-year-old who made it out. After all, it isn’t hard. There were no guards to dodge or walls to scale.

If you wanted to, you could just leave.

Nobody is sure why Herbert left. Maybe he didn’t believe what they’d do, hadn’t seen what we’d seen. Maybe he had, and he just didn’t care.

But the statute was absolute, and its enforcement drove a message that kept us existentially and literally locked in place.

After all, each family took turns polishing the sun-bleached skulls of Herbert’s mother, father, and two toddler-aged sisters that rest on jutted stakes on the road leading out of town.

One skull reads “OBEY.”

Another, “PUNISH.”

The skulls of the two little girls were marred with a single, fading word: “CULLING.”

Nobody sees clear when they’re standing in a storm.

Sure, in retrospect, it all seems obviously insane and evil, but this is what we knew from our first memories, all we knew. We had no yardstick to compare it to.

By the time we were old enough to see the horrifying parallels between us and the rest of the world *a la’* the internet and social media, we knew the cost. We’d seen it with our eyes.

The punishment.

The torture.

We kept our secrets with absolute obedience.

Reprimands were rare. There is no doubt draconian rule is a moral aberration. But you also can’t doubt its efficacy.

It usually only happened every few years.

Dan, the young hardware store owner with his stiff limp and kind eyes, lost two fingers for writing a letter. Not an expose’, nothing scandalous. He’d been a fan of a band, Modest Mice or House or something like that.

How he’d gotten the letter out, or how he had been discovered, we never learned.

The only clarity for us was the aftermath.

Two fingers for a fan letter with no return address. Taken slowly by a dulled, serrated knife.

We all had to watch.

And listen.

I’d never heard a grown man scream and sob for his mother before. Never heard a knife try to scrape its way slowly through dense bone, like trying to fell a