Chokeville – The Hook
Joshua Allen’s Chokeville:
And he dubbed himself the Mayor, this skeletal, scarred kid of eighteen, and even though many tried to take the name from him over the years, using all manner of weaponry, none were successful in making the boy stay dead, and he is still the Mayor today, still impossibly young, overseeing two centuries of brother killing brother, stabbings, gougings, chokings, gunplay, boating accidents, infidelities, fires, one fire after another, well poisonings, trees crushing horses, detonations of every stripe, welts, hangings like you wouldn’t believe, kicking feet, fixed contests, rigged elections, car wrecks, overturned trucks, slaughtered cattle, men cleaned like fish, drownings, endless drownings, too many to count, suffocations, draggings, beatings, dislocated shoulders, a history of mayhem that we all feel ticking inside us as we walk this city’s streets, even as we hoist a child to our shoulders or kiss a girl on her neck, even as we think ourselves good and honest men.
Now that’s a sentence.