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To: Readers

From: Chief Snowiks, CHPD, Idaho

Good Morning, Readers. It has come to my attention that, while you have received information thus far about the main characters in this novel, you have been told little—and possibly nothing—about the place in which these people live. I firmly believe that it is impossible to properly understand a situation without the context of a physical location. Therefore, I’ll be taking this opportunity to tell you where we live.

Chagrin Heights is located in Idaho, about a thirty minute drive from Boise. If anyone claims less than that, you should assume a lack of respect for posted speed limits.

Population: 449

Elevation: 2,752 ft

Median Resident Age: 47 (Which is a good ten years above the state average, implying either excellent healthcare or a driving need for young people to get out as soon as humanly possible. I’ll leave you to decide which it is. Hint: the nearest Hospital is in Boise.)  

We have two stoplights, one park, one school, and two Unitime towers, even though the official documents say three. I’ve filed four separate reports to tell them that one is an old cell phone tower that hasn’t been converted, but nothing has ever been done about it.

I’ve lived here for the majority of my life, so I can tell you that we used to have a nice community center on the corner of Rosemary and Chameleon. It has since been repurposed into an energy conversion center, which does very little in the department of town comradery, but it powers our laptops, so that’s (apparently) just as good.

But it’s unfair of my to impose my bias on this place. Truly, Chagrin Heights is a decent place to live. It’s an uncrowded corner of the world, which is a rare thing these days. It also enjoys low crime rates, which is even rarer. It has very little light pollution, if you’re into starry skies. It is surrounded by farmland, if you’re tired of looking at city skylines.

And, despite the fact that our community center has been turned into a large solar battery, the people here will actually stop and have a conversation once in a while. (A real conversation. The kind that involves putting your phone away for half a second.) It is, as our median age might suggest, a nice place to retire.

If one was the sort of person looking forward to retirement, that is.

I hope this information will prove valuable to you. I would also like to point out that Chagrin Heights will be unable to hold up to its standard of painful tedium for long. As you may have heard by now, the clocks are wrong. All of them. Every single clock says a different time.

Yeah, I scoffed at first, too. But as it turns out, the clocks being wrong is a bigger problem than we all thought.

Respectfully Yours,

Harold Snowiks

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Curious about Snowiks? You can find other posts about him Here. 

Thanks for reading! Feel free to write back to Snowiks in the comments. I’m sure he’d love to get mail. Also, you didn’t hear it from me buuuuttt… my cover for ABWD is finished and it’s AMAZING!! I can’t wait to show it to you!