Text: In this town we have a macabre tradition. Every October twenty first, a townie is picked at random. Murdered, dismembered, and tossed in about five different haystacks all around town. The catch is that, if you can find all of their body parts, they will come back to life. As you can probably imagine, we are not like other towns. Our bodies have the ability to regenerate after anything. But after about twenty four hours, it will do no good. The first hour everyone is gathered together and you have to guess who it was who suddenly went missing. Then the twenty three hours after that, the friends and family search the heystacks in order to find them. This time I suspected I’d be next as it hadn’t happened to me before. I was nervous the day before and could not think straight. But the next evening when I was in one piece, I knew it wouldn’t be me. As everyone was gathering to the towns center I texted my boyfriend, Jason. He didn’t respond. I was hoping it wasn’t him, but as I was waiting for him to show up, I uncontrollably shouted “Jason Nottingham”. It was him, and I couldn’t breath. It was just me, my sister, and his three friends who bothered to look for his body. Me and Jason had the unfortunate distinction of being the only gay guys in our town. And it wasn’t like the other towns folk didn’t hide their disgust of us. Needless to say I didn’t expect to find him. I found a leg, Janet found an arm, Johnny found his torso, and head. We had to coax his neck, and other leg from some stray pets. His other arm, hands and feet were the hardest to find. When he came to, he could barely breath, and just didn’t look right for a long while. He never did recover, and was later diagnosed with HIV, only getting sicker and weaker. They wouldn’t prescribe him medicine to treat his illness, and I was forbidden from seeing him after that by my family. We were both only sixteen, and did would we could to meet in secret, but it was hard to do. Three months later he died of his condition. Three years later it would be found out how he contacted HIV. How it was injected into him after he was shot for the games. The mayor at the time oversaw it happen, with plans to do the same to me later. Illness is the only way any of us can realistically die. They picked HIV as its traditionally seen as the gay disease. They killed him and were going to infect me next, which is why I fled the town the day I turned eighteen, for the big city. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in town or spoken to my family. I have no intentions of returning. Every once in a while, I hear from old friends of people being mysteriously infected by some incurable disease, or refused medical care out right, like Jason was. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90lWfG6P9p0