Nationhoods
- Feb 28, 2025
- 11 min read
by Jon Steinhagen
INTRODUCTION
After what was done to Grady Seppellant (as of this writing he is still on display, and the birds have been at him), we have been tasked with the creation of this guidebook not only for the use of hapless strangers and curious tourists, but for ourselves, as many of us may want to venture out once again, for fresh air, for exercise, for liberation, and everyone needs to be as well-informed as possible before this can happen, as no one knows when it all will return to normal, whatever normal may mean for our village.
HOW IT MAY HAVE BEGUN
I am reminded, by others, that actual beginnings are not always true beginnings. We agree that the actual beginning, our first Nationhood, can be traced to Hovessia, formerly the last house on the east side of Willow Street, owned by Arthur Hovess for over fifty years (and in which he has now lived for seventy-four years, it being his childhood years). Arthur, in his senescence, took to posting crudely lettered signs on his front yard that forbid his property to salespeople, religious visitors, children (and, eventually, anyone), village officials intending to survey, irrigate, or dig up his land for community improvements, and pets in urgent need of excremental relief. One Monday in February, Arthur declared independence from our village and established his home as the Sovereign State of Hovessia; days later, Arthur raised a flag of his own design, a livid purple H encircled in yellow against a white background.
Arthur has not been seen since, but the warning signs continue to sprout from Hovessia’s crowded front lawn.
The actual beginning of our Nationhoods, however, can be traced to the 700 block of Jimson Avenue on the west side of our village, when five homes seceded from our village during the same week. The Shellabarger, Netch, Grinualdi, Lopson, and Rimmington households — none of which were immediate neighbors, it must be noted — made their secessional intentions clear to the village board and hoisted their own somber flags and, in a few cases, outdid the example set by Hovessia and surrounded their properties with imposing fencing, stone walls topped with broken glass, or gleaming razor wire. To these new nations, the primitive hand-painted warning signs of Hovessia were unnecessary: their message was KEEP OUT.
OUR VILLAGE
As has been reported elsewhere, our village is the oldest in our state, even predating its statehood by six years. It is also the oldest village in the Midwest. It has been suggested, over the past two hundred years, that our village’s ideal and idyllic location should have been an omen that we are not where we belong or where we were meant to be, and as such we have been beset by enthusiasms, escalations, and other horrors either of our own making or by some otherworldly influence that does not has never wanted us here.
Our village numbers slightly over fourteen thousand souls. It is neatly bifurcated, east to west, by the railroad; many of us still like to refer to a “right” side and a “wrong” side of the tracks.
It should be noted that our Nationhoods began on the “right” side of the tracks, an observation rendered borderline trivial when the “wrong” side exhibited its first nationhood two days later (see The Principality of Venely, Dorogiva, et al).
Our village is mostly flat land with various small hills and rises. Along Pepper Creek is a steep ravine that is home to many oak savannas which are the primary ecosystem of our village and sprawl out from large, forested areas into small pockets in the village.
At the time of this writing, approximately five hundred homes have declared their independence from the village, all within a two-month period of the aforementioned establishment of the nationhood on the 700 block of Jimson Avenue.
THE GRAND DUCHY OF MARTY AND JOAN
In particular, the Grand Duchy of Marty and Joan (formerly 3711 Fillmore Avenue) was established when Marty and Joan Wilker took issue with their neighbor to their immediate south, a librarian (though not, unusually, in our own village library) named Henry Torsch. The Wilker’s issue with Torsch was not Torsch himself but rather with Torsch’s Irish Setter, Barksy, and the racket Barksy made at all hours, a constant medium-pitched bark that sounded like the dog was saying ROOP ROOP; ROOP ROOP. The Wilkers had complained.
Often.
“The dog’s name is Barksy,” Henry Tosch had said. “What did you expect?”
Marty and Joan did not appreciate Tosch’s remark, and Barksy continued to live up to her name.
Soon thereafter, Marty and Joan declared their home and property a grand duchy, flew their flag, and waited. All of us thought that the unceasing baying of Barksy (ROOP ROOP), unhappy at being left outside most of the time, was reason enough for Marty and Joan to take such a drastic step, but Marty and Joan indicated to those who listened that “there (were) other reasons.” Henry Tosch watched the Grand Duchy’s stark charcoal and silver flag shimmy up its pole from his bedroom window (which was directly opposite the bedroom of the Grand Duchy’s youngest daughter, the 12-year-old newly named Lady Chrissie) and wondered, not without trepidation, what would come next.
It was conceivable that the Grand Duchy would act against Barksy (handfuls of poisoned meat tossed her way, treats filled with sharp springs, etc.) and claim immunity from punishment or retaliation as the act of a sovereign nation taking what it considered to be necessary measures to ensure peace.
Tosch, meanwhile, sealed his bedroom window with blackout paper, lest the nubile Lady Chrissie make a false report of voyeurism or worse.
Tosch also investigated declaring Nationhood for himself and fretted over the design for its coat of arms, weighing the notion of a simple flag of brown splotches on a green background against a resplendent coat of arms showing a Wreath of Colors, an Irish Setter passant Or, grasping in the dexter forepaw an Umbrella proper (ROOP ROOP).
A BOOM IN COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY
It goes without saying that the advent of Nationhoods in our village caused a dramatic increase in both local and neighboring contractors, craftspeople, armorers, and landscapers. Some of the richer and more expansive Nationhoods (most notably the Kingdom of Morecost, an imposing collection of two dozen bungalows on the east side of the village, formerly two residential blocks bordered by Fillmore Avenue, Ash Avenue, Haven Street, and Deer Pine Court, bisected by a communal macadamized alley) tore up their lush lawns to accommodate an imposing, brackish moat with concomitant drawbridges for each residence. Lesser nations, principalities, and republics spent their money on newer, higher walls and fences, with a marginal but clever few defending their homes with ha-has that often flooded during heavy rainfall and thus could be considered makeshift, temporary moats that, ultimately, caused leakage in basement rec rooms and promoted unhealthy septic situations.
A great demand was placed on the construction of dungeons and other subterranean confinements; in one case, the Free Republic of Johnson-Colvig arranged to combine their dungeon with a sex room (sometimes referred to as a Fantasy Suite).
The call for arms, too, was key in an explosion of sales not only of basic firearms, grenades, and mines, but also of outdated although nonetheless still lethal springalds, mangonels, and trebuchets.
It is rumored that at least two attempts have been made to either requisition or fabricate cannonade, thus far without success.
THE PROBABLE TRAGEDY OF DAVEY AND ASHLEIGH
Among the many complications our village has faced during this era of Nationhoods is, naturally, Love. Over time, it became understood that members of warring or apposite households should not and, ultimately, could not entertain feelings of affection, lust, love, or other personally confusing and amorous urges for each other. Such couplings could prove disastrous and, at times, messy.
Take, for example, the young love of Davey Evers and Ashleigh Tiko, he sixteen and she fifteen at the time of their tragedy. Davey, a nice, clean young man of minor sport consequence (his track and field participation, while effective, was limited to short distances), was unaffiliated with any new Nationhood; in fact, his home stood in the middle of one of the few remaining unaffected blocks of our village, populated as it was by modest ranch homes of peeling, peach-colored brick that had undergone minimal (if any) upgrades in the seven decades since their construction; however, Ashleigh Tiko (styled Princess Ashleigh) was the youngest child (and only daughter) of the dark and adamantly gray stone Province of Tiko.
Their love, at first, burgeoned only in neutral conveyances (the # 307 bus, which they both caught at the corner of Pine Street and the Kingdom of Morecost, for which they had both been issued the necessary transit papers affixed with the Morecost seal) and buildings (the high school, the public library, assorted businesses that radiated from the railroad depot), but they soon found a need for privacy. Assignations at Davey’s house, it seemed, would be logical and reasonable, as his home was still just a home, but privacy was impossible in the small, 3-bedroom ranch thanks to the presence of Davey’s parents, three younger brothers (all gym socks and bicycles and spilled games and construction sets), various inquisitive cats, and a faulty sump pump that generally left the small rec room damp and reeking of mold.
This left the Province of Tiko, which was essentially impregnable, and Ashleigh’s skills at subterfuge were non-existent (while she had mastered her grandmother’s recipe for soft and chewy gingerbread men decorated with benign expressions of piped icing, she had about as much talent for deception as a facial tissue has for transporting a wet bowling ball), and smuggling Davey to her third floor bedroom (all coral and gauze) or anywhere else in the Province was out of the question.
Davey, to the astonishment of his track and field teammates and coach, applied himself with unusual rigor and determination to mastering jumping events, particularly that of the pole vault. As he was long and lean and bursting with desire for Princess Tiko, he excelled at the event, to the point where he was last seen (by a half dozen denizens of the Nationhoods to the immediate north of Ashleigh’s Province) trotting, an hour before midnight, through our village with a long and flexible carbon-fiber pole in his hands. Insiders knew Davey had to clear the Province’s new moat and high walls, and they wished him luck.
He hasn’t been seen since.
We assume he was successful in his breach and has been hidden by the fulfilled Princess Ashleigh, fed and bathed in silent joy until such time as the two can figure out how to escape, as the back yard of the Province isn’t big enough for Davey to gain enough momentum to pole jump back over the wall and moat.
We also assume that he was successful in his breach and immediately captured and thrust into the Province’s new dungeon. Where he is no doubt shackled to the damp, trickling stone wall and visited only by specially imported rats.
An inquiry party is, as I write this, being assembled.
The Princess Ashleigh, likewise, has not been seen since.
There have been reports of strange cries emanating from the block in which the Province looms, but these can’t be verified as coming from boy or beast (ROOP ROOP).
THE EXAMPLE OF GRADY SEPPELLANT
This pamphlet began by mentioning Grady Seppellant and an allusion to his fate.
With so many kingdoms in our village of Nationhoods, it is to be expected that there will be spies. Grady Seppellant liked to refer to himself as an infiltrator, which was most likely his first mistake, because a spy is not much of a spy if they tell everyone they’re a spy.
“But it also makes you think that they’re not a spy,” Grady had argued, “because a spy who announces himself as a spy is a spy who wants you to think no one can be that dumb, so he’s probably a loudmouth making fun of the whole idea of spying.”
“Why do you want to be a spy in the first place?” I had asked him.
“Infiltrator,” he had said. “Because people need to know what’s going on beyond those locked doors and thick walls and moats and towers, that’s why.”
“What if nothing is going on?” I had asked. “What if it’s just, I don’t know, normal lives?”
“Then people need to know that, too.”
Grady, as anyone will tell you, had an open, friendly manner and, according to those who knew him from his school days, an eager and intense student of anything that happened to interest him. Algebra, for instance, didn’t interest him; neither did fashion or marital fidelity. People — or, more exactly, the quirks and habits of people — interested him.
He soon learned what each Nationhood wished to exclude, if not why. A ban on tomatoes, for instance. A ban on political discourse. A requirement of white sneakers. A requirement of physical media marketed prior to the introduction of the Blu-ray. A predilection for cats. An enthusiasm for water sports. A liking for soft cheeses. A preference for instructional videos conducted by non-experts.
Thus, over time, Grady managed to work his way into many Nationhoods for dinner parties, birthday celebrations, backyard cookouts, minor domestic repairs. We waited for his reports. “Soon,” he would say. “I’m compiling everything into a book. A helpful, informative book. A monograph, at the very least.”
Grady was last seen, under his own steam, entering the Matriarchy of Marguerite, one of the earliest of our village’s Nationhoods and, ironically, the smallest. The cottage is one of the oldest structures in our village, nothing more than a wooden box with a front door and a window on either side of the door. It is surrounded by a yard the size of a field crowded with daisies. This enormous foul-smelling yard (“Daisies smell like ass,” I recall my wife saying to me before we were married) is surrounded by a high, spiked iron fence. Earlier, someone had noticed that those old iron spikes, black with age, had begun to sparkle at certain times on sunny days; closer investigation revealed that someone had honed the spikes to the sharpness of knives.
Grady had, beaming confidence and with a wink to us, opened the gate, traversed the yard and the nodding, reeking daisies, and rung the bell. Even before our village became consumed with Nationhoods, we all sensed that this cottage — the newly-named Matriarchy of Marguerite — did not want us there; not us, not Grady, not anyone.
The door had opened. Grady and gone inside.
Our village remained quiet.
At sunset, Grady’s severed head adorned a spike on the high iron fence.
We don’t know what became of the rest of Grady.
Nor could we find where he had kept all the notes he claimed to have compiled on the many interiors he had infiltrated.
This was three days ago.
OUR HOME
To a dwindling number of us, our homes are still our homes and not our nations. We do not assert this with pride or in defiance; we mention this only because we know that even with the sudden, inexplicable escalations our village has endured for over two centuries, no situation or attitude or trend is all-encompassing. Some of us don’t notice something is trending; some of us notice but haven’t decided on how we’re going to address it; some of us don’t care or care too much.
As for myself and my family, we are aware that we live next door to the Empire of Smithium and across the street (catty-corner, actually) from Crooperland, but we are also aware that we are not currently isolationist in our feelings and beliefs.
No one, yet, is making fun of us, nor are we being pressured to raise our colors and embed jagged glass in our fence tops and set the dogs on anyone who walks by, rings the doorbell, or wishes to writhe through the bodily tortures of adolescence with our own adolescents.
We also know that anything can lead to anything, to something. That loudmouth at the coffee shop who kept asking customers to excuse his French every time an expletive infiltrated his overlong anecdotes about his business, his wife, his pets, his in-laws? Those girls whose shirts seem too small for them? Those old farts who insist on using derogatory labels that should’ve gone out of style ages ago? Those men with the piercings? Those elderly ladies who shouldn’t be driving those enormous automobiles, those silver and maroon tanks from their youth?
Those bright colors. That music that isn’t music. This book. That preacher. This weather. That food.
Yes, it’s difficult to get around these days; we need to plan our routes in advance, and with cunning. There are blocks we can’t access if we haven’t a passport that can be stamped, doorbells we can’t ring, phones we can’t call. It’s difficult, but not impossible, and somebody is going to do something about Grady Seppellant’s severed head, and soon, before the first frost and before the holiday lights need to be strung up.
Generally, however, it is much quieter around here (ROOP ROOP).
Jon Steinhagen is a Chicago-based writer whose recent works include the novel THE HANGING ARTIST and the story collection THE BIG BOOK OF SOUNDS; his stage works include BLIZZARD ’67 and THE TEAPOT SCANDALS, and the screenplay for the comedy PARTY FAVORS.
