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SUMMARY: What follows below is not a complete story. It is the prologue to my novel, entitled Peculiar, MO, which will be available through iUniverse in a few weeks. You can read more about the book in my blog here on ssfworld.

The stars fell over the Midwest.

Random streaks of light burned across the face of the stars, a storm of tumbling fire, and across the country people turned out to watch them.
The meteors were not much seen in the cities. Only the very brightest were visible through the glare of the urban lights. But in the countryside where darkness was not so greatly feared, the people only had to step outside their front doors and look up to see the eternal mystery. Here, parents reclined in lawn chairs and teenagers sprawled on the hoods of their cars to catch the sight. Children lay on their backs in the grass, oblivious to the ticks crawling into their hair as the falling stars kindled their dreams.

Trails of smoke criss-crossed the night sky. Some of the meteors passed so brightly that they left behind ghostly afterimages in the retinas of the people watching. Some of them exploded into fragments, and then the fragments themselves exploded, leaving the watchers breathless with wonder.

The part of America with the rather intimidating name of Tornado Alley received the best show. By chance, the turning of the Earth had brought it directly into the path of the falling stars. The town of Peculiar, Missouri stands in this land of storms like a flower growing through a crack in a highway.

Ask the residents how the town was named and you're likely to hear an oft-repeated story. Back in 1868, when the town was incorporated, the citizens assembled to decide on a name. As was usually the case with group decisions, nobody could agree on anything except that they wanted a unique name, one that would set the town apart from all others. After turning down "Excelsior" (that was already a town over in Atchison county), the postmaster, a man by the name of Edgar Thomson, wrote to the Postmaster General in Washington, D.C. asking him to name the town, saying "We don't care much what name you give us so long as it is sort of peculiar." And the town has been Peculiar ever since.

The people of Peculiar watched the meteor shower with mixed feelings. Most of them felt wonder and excitement; some were indifferent, some even trembled in superstitious fear. And some Peculiar citizens watched the meteor shower, but didn't really see it, for their minds were on other things.

Take the Ross widow, for instance. Sometimes gossips would nudge each other when she passed, and say, "Its hard to believe that pretty young thing is already a widow. She's only twenty-four, but she has an eight-year-old son and we can both do math, can't we? Lost her husband during the ice storm last year. He was an electrician, had an accident involving some downed power lines. Poor girl is having a hard time making ends meet since she lost her man. Bunch of us down at the Methodist church had a canned food drive for her, that helped a bit, but you can't pay the electric bill with pumpkin pie filling, can you?"

At the drive-in diner in the center of town, Delbert Cullim sat in in his beat-up Chevy pickup and cursed the service, oblivious to the falling stars.