A Town Called Sacrament.

People seem to doubt me when I tell them stories of Sacrament, sometimes I even believe them, until I talk to others who grew up there. A town where you were crazy not to tell your children how to get away from certain death. A town where you had to establish yourself as dangerous if you wanted to see adulthood without trauma.

As a child alongside talks about dental hygiene in kindergarten you would receive self defense lessons and talks about how to get away from a kidnapper, or how to disable a rapist. We learned this so casually we all thought that everyone learned this regardless of where they were born. We never realized how much danger our parents birthed us into. The girls grew up knowing we would be raped before 18, and there was no point in reporting it. The police were just for show, rarely truly protecting anyone.

The police killed good people in an attempt to be feared, an attempts to get the "right people in check". Our political officials refused to stay in Sacrament, knowing the kind of filth they discarded here, knowing what kind of corruption bubbled through the cracks indiscriminately. That should have been a red flag to us, but it was simply normal for the residents. Nobody important ever stayed here if they knew what was good for them.

I never realized until I left, but people in Sacrament always seemed to be looking at you. Always watching, following you home if you are alone, especially as a woman. When I was in first grade my dad taught me how to shake someone who was chasing me in a car. I thought I was watched because of paranoia, or because of how I dressed...until I moved and nobody stared at me or followed. The locals in Santa Cruz think it's dangerous here, but in Sacrament there seems to be a trend of serial killers getting away with it and nobody bringing it up.

When we left Sacrament, we all got to talking and slowly pieced together the full picture. People seem to become swallowed by corruption, pain, and illness in an unprecedented way. People get lost in their own self pity, perpetuated by their lives, horrendous lives, where human kind is simply there to play our stories. When you leave Sacrament for good it almost seems as though you have been Atlas this whole time, carrying the world with you everywhere you went. Sacrament needs you to bear this weight, unwavering and unquestioning as long as you should stay in this God forsaken town.

We all know that there is an entire town, abandoned in a panic below the city, it would flood every year as the river swelled above any levy built. The river would blanket the town in water consumed by leeches and a persistent smell of fear. Earth quakes are a constant threat, a danger grinning in the corner of our minds, taunting us with the unseen city, the city we had no time to destroy. As you go about your errands, any kind of life could be carried out under your very feet. Hell, there's even been talk of a group of cannibals making it their home, a city all for them in the pale darkness.

Sacrament is so much worse than we thought, Sacrament is built on the gates to Hell. Sacrament, the whole town, is an offering to the demons, it's a play ground for Hell's residents to keep them away from the rest of the world. Sacrament is an ongoing sacrifice, part of a pact that was made as they were building the second layer of this town. We are unsure who allowed this, but we believe the floods were not what we would call natural.

God help us, if you believe in such things, if this town ever gets drowned by the ocean. Your town may become the next sacrifice.