The Choptank Meteor

This story is fictitious. It is based entirely on the author’s observations of the indigenous people and their curious mores, folkways and goings on in an anonymous small town that the author made while driving past said town at 75 miles an hour on my way to the beach.

The Choptank River, on the eastern shore of Maryland, flows into the Chesapeake Bay after having been fed by various creeks, rills, rivulets, and open sewers. Near the Chesapeake Bay, the water is salty. Further upriver, it’s 100% marsh gas. It’s cut in several places by roads and a highway that transports cosmopolitan Washingtonians from 50 or so miles to the west to the beaches of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia, 50 or so miles to the east. Various settlements, unknown or forgotten to all but those who are unfortunate enough to live there or are unfortunate enough to run out of gas there, dot the area. One of them was Postum, MD.