Indiana

Geographers have treated Indiana badly, naming the lake at its head and the river at its foot for other places. Naming Indiana's capital city after itself is pathetically self-referential, and seen as overcompensation. No other state has embarrassed itself in this way. Indiana is named after a people who were named by outsiders, after a place they didn't come from.

The very rock beneath Indiana is a rotten, porous mess; a Swiss cheese of caves, voids, cracks and sinkholes. The inhabitants have further assaulted the underlying fabric of the State with innumerable piercings: oil wells, gas wells, water wells, mines, pits, foundations, basements and quarries. The whole crumbling catastrophe could collapse into the mantle at any moment—sucking who knows how much of the neighborhood with it, and connecting the Ohio with the Niagara and St. Lawrence, thereby turning the Eastern U.S. into an island.

The explanation for Indiana is that God does not love it. Never has.

Indeed, no god loves Indiana, not a single one. Jehovah does not love it, for it is not desert; Poseidon does not, for it is neither sea nor sea coast; Thoth does not; and Isis spurns it, for it did nothing to reassemble Osiris, back in the day. Amaterasu-ōmikami loves it not, because it is not in Japan. Quetzalcoatl deplores it, as what god would not?

God has no place in her heart for thankless, selfish Indiana. The people there know it, and this has made so many of them peevish, aggressive, confused and self-righteous. They cannot even agree, among them, what time of day it is.

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Timons Esaias is a satirist, writer and poet living in Pittsburgh. His works, ranging from literary to genre, have been published in twenty-two languages. He has been a finalist for the British Science Fiction Award, and he won both the Winter Anthology Contest and the Asimov's Readers Award. His story "Norbert and the System" has appeared in a textbook, and in college curricula, so yes, he is required reading. He was shortlisted for the 2019 Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize. His full-length Louis-Award-winning collection of poetry—Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek—was brought out by Concrete Wolf.

He teaches in Seton Hill University's MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program. People who know him are not surprised to learn that he lived in a museum for eight years.