In a little less than two hours, while handyman Jim Steffke fixed the back door, Fanta had culled FROM HELL HOLLOW’s letters to the editor, photocopied them, replaced the originals, then annotated each copy and placed it in a folder, gradually constructing a mental matrix to guide his journalistic manhunt.

At noon-thirty, he took a lunch break: a chocolate bar, more whiskey, a smoke, and a self-scathing mock headline.

Longtime Vegetarian Counts Tobacco as a Vegetable

Pre-Vietnam, all the meat he could eat.

Post-Vietnam, never another bite.

Go figure.

Should he find it odd, he wondered, how FROM HELL HOLLOW raged at him, of all people, Grape Fanta, champion of the loser, truther to the tool, hugger of the tree, hunter of the Tofurky, outcast in the land of his birth for all deviancies above-listed, and more?

No. It wasn’t odd, he decided.

It was perfect.

His correspondent was a wounded man, jilted by his dreams, howling into a mirror.

Fundamentally, Fanta thought, in seeking his ranting letter-writer he was seeking himself—if, forty years ago, instead of choosing to seek salvation in newspaper truth-telling, he had sought salvation by embracing the land—if, instead of Happy Valley Shopper firing him and changing the locks, his dream-bending demise had turned out to be tainted wells, infected meat, and bug bites.

Fanta did a little more research: farmers’ market registrations, permits for small-time agro such as beekeeping, membership rosters of the local Lyme disease support group and the local anti-vaxxers group, phone calls to a select list of bartenders, a survey of public records for arrests on anything drug- or alcohol-related.

By early afternoon, with his file folder of FROM HELL HOLLOW letters in hand and a particularly stirring 2019 specimen on top, he was locked and loaded.

Seen out the office window, the display in front of Farmers Bank said 1:27 P.M. and 102 degrees.

Ha. Weather. Don’t give me weather. Give me climate. Don’t give me your little tiny time. Give me now.

He took a final few nips of Walker, then experienced a nostalgic crying fit while using his cozy old toilet for the final time.

At last, he set sail into the dangerous outside air.

Several Local Back-to-Landers Short-Listed for Melancholic Delirium