Oceanview is a small, quaint town on an island just off the U.S. mainland. It is not recognized by any post office, nor can it easily be identified on any map. Oceanview is a name only acknowledged by its living citizens—people who fear its official name and what it insinuates.
The story that probably would have been told at the Visitor Center, had there been any eager tourists thirsty for a good ghost story, would’ve been that the town was founded in the early 1900s by a man named Kermit, a sea captain whose true existence is debatable. Kermit captained a fishing schooner appropriately named Net that disappeared on a fishing expedition in mid-October 1869. For thirty years, the vessel was assumed to be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. However, on a foggy morning in November 1900, Net and its unaged crew and captain mysteriously appeared on the shore of an unmapped plot of land. Well aware of their condition, the men settled and founded a small village named Necropolis meant only to be a temporary settlement while they waited for the Day of Judgment. Unfortunately, that day never came.
The only individuals to ever enter Necropolis are people like its founders: lost at sea. Whether those people are alive or dead, it doesn’t matter. They are all frozen in a town nonexistent to the rest of the world. However, one can always spot the living, or rather, those who refuse to believe they are dead, because they will never acknowledge the town’s true name, only calling it Oceanview. Although that name is equally as eerie. Never is the view of the ocean void of walking corpses looking for citizenship.
© 2014 Nortina Simmons
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