The Mystery of Delcliff(Maya) The clock struck twelve and the whole town went pitch black. Delcliff turned into something sort of like a ghost town after twelve, except of course our town wasn’t vacant. We had a pretty decent size population which only seemed to be growing, we weren’t too big or too small. There were approximately twenty thousand people who lived there and somehow between midnight and six AM, not a soul could be seen or heard for miles. This was before it actually did turn into a ghost town. How it turned into a ghost town is actually a pretty funny story. I’ll start from the beginning...

I had to have been around ten when the new head sheriff was appointed. Boy was he a scary fella. He was not the type of guy that you wanted to mess around with. Things were bad before he came. Now I don’t remember too much, but from what my momma told me, he was the best thing that ever happened to this town. I’m not sure if she’d still say that now, things have changed dramatically since then.

Before, Sheriff Wynford came to town there used to be gangs on every street corner and it was a rare occasion if you weren’t robbed while walking down the street. The fire department could probably do their route with their eyes closed, they had done it so many times in the past year. The ambulances didn’t even attempt to get to the patients because they knew it would be too late by the time that they got there. Most deaths were caused by drug overdoses and that’s what Sheriff Wynford came to Delcliff to stop.

Sure it took him time, but it wasn’t long before he had a grip on the town. Somehow he knew everything. He knew who, what, where, when, why, and how, faster than some of the other guys who were supposed to be at the meet up did. He shut those things down faster than you could even think about planning one.

Needless to say, many of the town members were not happy with the way he was running things. Rather than only stop all the bad things that go on in the city, Sheriff Wynford shut down nearly all city activity. We almost changed our name from Delcliff to Dullcliff, that shows how extreme these reforms were. The goal with bringing in a new sheriff was not to kill everyone’s vibes but to boost their spirits and increase safety levels.
As a matter of fact, it seems to have done the exact opposite. The most controversial thing that Sheriff Wynford has done is to order everyone to stay inside (and remain quiet) from twelve PM to six AM. Not only does he do this, but he also shuts off the power strips so that there is no access to phones, computers, radios, or televisions during this time period. The purpose, while not only to keep the community safer, is to increase the number of hours that people are sleeping per night because what else would you do in the dark while being quiet without any power?

One day, a friend of mine, Derek, decided that enough is enough. He was sick of following all these crazy rules for no particular reason, for he had never done anything bad. He wanted to leave Delcliff and he wanted me to come with him. I was torn because I loved him and didn’t want him to go alone, but I also did not want to leave my family.

After thinking long and hard, and weighing all the pros and cons. I decided that I was going to join Derek on his excursion. I promised my family that I would find them a place to live with no limitations on power or activity. Somewhere where, if we wanted to, we could be up all night making as much noise as we please with every single light on in the house.
One does not realize how much of a hassle these limitations are until they have to live with them year after year. Eventually, yes we did become accustomed to them, but it wasn’t because we wanted to. We didn’t have much of a choice when it came to following the rules, especially with Sheriff Wynford around. He was so intimidating that no one even wanted to know what he would do to you if you didn’t follow the rules.

Since I was so young when these guidelines where first put into place, I didn’t know any other way. And it was weird for me to think that people would stay up past twelve with their lights on and music blasting. So, leaving Delcliff was really weird for me. Derek, though only a few years older than I was, remembered a little bit of what it was like before Delcliff went dead between twelve and six. After talking it over with our parents, they both agreed to let us leave Delcliff and visit the next town over for a weekend.

Wildhedge was the next town over about twenty-five miles south of us. They had no restrictions on what time everyone had to be quiet with everything off in their households. They were able to party all night, which was a new concept to me. I can’t remember the last time that there was a social gathering in Delcliff where music was playing and people were just laughing, enjoying themselves and having a good time. From our trip we learned what we had been missing basically our whole lives. It made us think about how we would be different people if we were exposed to this. Would we be more wild? more disrespectful?

Derek and I decided that the rest of our town had to experience what we had been missing since Sheriff Wynford came to town. So, we created a plan to bring the fun back to Delcliff. But we couldn’t do it on our own. It took some persuading but we eventually convinced our classmates to join us on another trip to Wildhedge. Our hope was that after the trip they would be convinced that we needed to bring the fun back into Delcliff.

After our trip, our classmates felt the same way that we did. So we all made a plan to bring fun and activity back into the Delcliff community, believing we would all become happier more enjoyable human beings.

Although we can not just decide to bring the fun in all at once, it has to be a gradual process. If this process is not gradual then we will not be successful in our endeavours. And that was our issue.

After we returned from our ‘fun’ trip to Wildhedge, everyone was hungry for more fun and unwilling to wait to receive it. This caused chaos to break out. Everyone was rebelling against the rules. It didn’t matter that there was no power and we were in complete darkness, we made our own fun. This caused Sheriff Wynford to go psychotic.

We weren’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing, that this was the first time that Sheriff Wynford had to deal with a large group of people who were rebelling. But, it didn’t take us long to figure out that not only was it a bad thing, but a very, VERY bad thing. Sheriff Wynford had very extreme anger management problems which we were just learning about through experience. This experience is one that we will never have again because now we are all gone.

As head Sheriff, Wynford has access to large amounts of weaponry. His anger grew so large that he felt it would be best if Delcliff no longer existed. And just like that Delcliff became a ghost town. No life forms can be found, no housing or stores either. All that is left is dry, brown, dead grass.

This grass represents the people who used to live in Delcliff. Much like the grass and other vegetation which is slowly beginning to grow, the people of Delcliff are given a fresh start. A clean slate. They are no longer trapped in the horrible town of Delcliff and are able to have as much fun as they want. There are no limitations in heaven. You can stay up as long as you want, and be as loud as you want, and the power never goes off.

Here the people of Delcliff are rejoicing as they are free to do as they please. To experience things which they had never even known existed previously. This allows them to grow and prosper in ways which they were unable to before.

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