Blue Moon.

The town I live in is dead. There is nothing worth anything anywhere in a 100 mile radius. The people around here dress in kaki pants and argyle sweater vests. When the wind blows, you don’t feel a rushing sense of excitement. Instead you just watch another dried leaf blow across the gritty concrete. You don’t ever hear any jaw dropping rumors, and you certainly don’t see anyone more exciting than the old women down the street who sometimes walks to the bottom of her driveway half naked to get her morning paper.

When you first enter into Cotton Wood neighborhood, your eyes narrow in on a large white house, with a beautiful green manicured lawn, rose bushes lining the outside of the house, and a magnificent red Ferrari parked outside the garage just as a show to everyone entering that people live here in class. The next thing you see is a peach colored house, a white picket fence, and a blue corvette. And the next is just the same thing, in a different color.

Everyone runs around like robots. Everything is so organized and cleanly. So perfect, so suburban. However if haven’t already been turned into a mindless automaton after wondering further through Snorsville, you’ll slowly start to see dead trees. The dead trees become more and more abundant as you continue into the heart of the town, until most sunlight is gone.

And then just at the end of the street are the tall black gates of the Dentry Mansion. Dead brown and orange colored leaves gathered at the gates, and the limbs of blackened trees looming over the very top. Vines twist around each metal bar, and swallow up the sides of the concrete boundary line dividing Snorsville to real excitement.

Because just a few yards down the black concrete driveway is the most beautiful thing in history. The only thing that keeps me from begging my parents to get a job somewhere in a robot-less city: the mansion itself.

Whenever my feet carry me off towards the gate I press myself against each bar almost like I think I can slip through, and stare at the dark stoned fantasy home.

The grass leading up to the house is always yellow, whether it is summer or winter. The many windows of the house are blocked by what looked like red velvet curtains, and the door to the house isn’t even visible because of how introverted into the house it actually is. The roof is made of burnt orange shingles with multiple chimneys sprouting out here and there.

The Dentry Mansion looked haunting to any normal eye that was set on it, but to me it was a piece of art. It was mysterious, it was enchanting, and it held secrets that still carried on in the town gossip. It was part of history. Every cracked stone of the house. Every dead tree that lie in the middle of the unkempt lawn. It was all part of the rumors I only wished could be true.

Everyone around town said that George Gentry, the first owner of the mansion, was so rich that he bought Cotton Wood for himself, and was the one who started all the house construction around here that made the town what it was. It’s said that he wouldn’t start building houses until his own house was finished, right on top of the hill that lay at the end of Cotton Wood. And after he built it the progress of other houses began booming.

People began to take notice to the town’s charming look and perfectly formed houses so fast that before the year was over, almost every house was sold. But one particular customer was said to buy more than just property. Martha Glooms and George Gentry married each other shortly after meeting, and suddenly she was a permanent guest in the astonishing Gentry mansion.

However, Martha must not have been as crazy in love as George was because she kept a long going affair with the butler for three years of their marriage. One day George saw with his own eyes what was going on with his wife and his employee, and it drove him mad. It is said that he was so angry he set his guard dogs on them, cornering them both against an open window until they fell out, three stories down.