7 June 2025, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2760: exposed!

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Thomas Stepforth Sr. got up on a fine September morning in Tinyville, VA and observed how quiet the rural town was of a morning other than the sounds of farm life all around – peaceful and slow. It was a good thing to be in Tinyville that morning, as opposed to Big Loft, VA the county seat. That was about to be a whole problem.

The Big Loft Bulletin, that day, was publishing who got paid and bribed to build Bayard Heights such that it was washed away in less than ten minutes when ancient Bayard Creek roared back into its old course underground.

The Lofton County Free Voice and sister paper in Spanish Un Voz Libre was publishing copies of the contracts, both as PDFs online and by slotting the signatory pages of the contracts into copies of the Big Loft Bulletin the night before.

“Oh, folks are about to be exposed!” Mrs. Maggie Lee said to her husband Colonel H.F. Lee the evening before.

“Like vampires on a sunny September summer day – almost made it out of the heat, but no,” he said. “I have the strong feeling I will be called off administrative leave and furlough tomorrow and return to my role as a police captain, because Big Loft Police Department as well as county may need all hands on deck.”

“It's going to be a hot one tomorrow,” Mrs. Lee said, “in more ways than one.”

“For some,” Col. Lee said, “it could get as hot as hell, and I do not say that lightly.”

The colonel's phone rang just then, and sure enough: he was back on the payroll for the Big Loft Police Department and ordered on duty for the rest of the week.

“The idea seems to be,” he said to his wife with a smile, “that when people realize they may have to meet me in a police situation, that alone may control some goings-on.”

“Well, yeah!” Mrs. Lee said, and laughed.

But that morning in Tinyville dawned clear and calm, and stayed that way in the combined realm of the Ludlows, Trents, Lees, and Stepforths, with the twelve little ones accounted for there enjoying each other without knowing anything else that was going on in the world, and even Mrs. Lee undisturbed, her husband checking in with her on every break, because of the little Lee growing within her.

“We owe them this,” Mr. Stepforth said to his wife Mrs. Velma Stepforth. “Just because other parents and grandparents have failed their children, and it is manifest all over the place today, has nothing to do with any of us.”

“You do kind of want to ask these people who signed off on this 'Who raised y'all?'” Mrs. Stepforth said. “But we cannot have these here being the reason that question was asked, so they get to safely enjoy their childhood.”