In the morning, however, when the town began to awake, things were different. The first person who noticed the difference was Hans, who was a candle maker by trade. Hans had to arrive at his shop very early in the morning to get the big pots of wax melted for his days work. He wasn?t a very alert man, in fact, most of the townspeople would say that you could set your watch by his comings and goings, he was so set in his routine. That?s why it surprised him so much when he tripped and fell flat on his face in front of the town church. He lay on the ground for a moment, wondering what it was that he had tripped over.
Hans got up and looked at the sidewalk. There was a crack, a pretty big crack that definitely had not been there the day before, or the day before that. One side of the crack was about an inch higher than the other side, which is why he tripped. The crack extended the whole width of the sidewalk and across the street, disappearing under the old five and dime store. Hans got up and brushed himself off. He wanted to be more concerned about this sudden development, but he was now late, so he hurried on his way.
By the time the store clerks and managers arrived at the five and dime across the street from the church, the crack had become larger, still. It had cracked the foundation of the five and dime and even from outside of the store, through the two large front windows, the crack in the tile floor could be seen. The manager and clerks entered the store and busily went about trying to place little signs and markers around the crack to warn customers so they would not fall. No one thought of asking why the crack was there. ?Safety First,? had always been the motto of the little five and dime and the owner would have been proud of his staff had he come in that day.
The first person to really ask questions about the crack was the pastor, who wondered what was happening when he opened the side door to the church and saw the altar leaning to one side. He then noticed the crack in the floor and began to pray. It had split the church right down the main isle, and the northern half of the church was a good two feet lower than it?s southern counterpart. It was the pastor who called the police.
The police arrived just as the first automobile attempted to cross the crack and ended up crashing. It?s front bumper hanging on the edge of a four-foot wide separation. Witnesses in the five and dime stated later that they had actually seen the crack expand as the car drove over it, which was the only way, really, to explain why anyone would attempt to drive an automobile over a four-foot crack in the road.
By three o?clock that afternoon, it was widely known throughout the little town of New Almarìa that the crack had extended itself well beyond the town lines on both the East and West ends of town. In fact, a few boys had tried to run around the western edge of the crack and one of them had been lost in the woods that surrounded the town to the east, west and north. It had taken search parties two hours to discover that the boy was fine. He was on the northern side of the crack, however, and since his home and his very worried mother were on the southern side of the crack he had to be taken all the way to the center of town in front of the church where the fire department had extended the ladder of it?s ladder truck across the crack so those that had to could get across.
By eight the next morning, the ladder had fallen into the crack, leaving three of the departments five men stranded on the southern edge of the crack with their truck and partners on the northern edge. The five and dime had long since split in two and it?s employees, in the interest of safety, spent the morning boarding up the sides of the store. The southern half employees, since their manager was trapped in the northern half of the store, decided to make light of the situation by having a five-cent sale. The hurriedly made signs that said something like, ?All of the dime stuffs in the northern half!? and sold everything for five cents.
Over the next three months, there were seven attempts to build a bridge over the crack, all seven ending in disaster. The worst was the Leavenworth project, a large suspension bridge that snapped suddenly when the crack grew a bit, killing three workers and seriously injuring an old widow, who was watching the construction. It turned out that all of her Bridge-playing friends lived on the north side of the crack and she was anxiously awaiting a chance to strike up a game. The pun was not lost on the staff of the southern ?five? store, which promptly had a sale on all playing cards.
By winter, two years later, all hope of building any kind of permanent structure to cross the crack was abandoned. There were attempts to provide a ferry of sorts, the most successful of which was the Franklin Ferry. For $1.25 plus tax, you could board a hot air balloon with about 12 other people and be pulled by very long ropes to the other side. On December 24th of that year, in what has become known as the Black Christmas Affair, one of the ropes on the northern end got loose and the balloon spent two hours being tossed about in a sudden winter storm like a kite, as the southern ferry operators struggled mightily to haul it in. It was quite a spectacle, but aside from a few cases of the cold, no one was seriously injured.
There was an attempt made a few years ago to fill in the crack. A construction company in the northern half of town decided that they would fill it in by digging a large quarry-like hole on the Northwest side of town, hauling the debris from the dig to the crack, and dumping it in. They worked on the project for about six months before giving up. It seems that even after dumping six months worth of land fill into the crack, you still could not see the bottom. Not only that, but the spreading of the crack seemed to get worse as they dumped, making the job counterproductive as well.
The fact that you could not see the bottom made for interesting stories surrounding the crack. It was rumored for a while, in stories to young children, that the crack led to Hell itself. It was referred to as the Devil?s Doorway. The church on both halves of town didn?t like this reference and put up a campaign against any evil implications of the crack. They were very insistent that the crack was not a gateway to Hell, mostly because they just didn?t like the idea of scarring little children with stories to get them to behave unless the stories came directly from the Bible. They also didn?t like the fact that the crack had become a favorite spot for scorned young lovers to leap from. The idea of church members choosing to kill themselves was bad enough; the idea that they choose to leap into the mouth of Hell itself was just too much.
The Crack, as it has come to be known, is now over two miles wide at it?s widest. Its growth has slowed to the rate of only 4.7 feet per year. The Church has been fully restored. The northern half is now a Lutheran congregation, though, which still slightly irritates the southern Baptists. The store on the southern side is now officially called the Five Cent Store and is run by a new manager names James, who has made the sale on playing cards an annual event and expanded it to include all games and miscellaneous children?s toys.
Most people don?t really talk about it much any more. It has become a way of life. There?s a saying around both halves of town about being the first town in history to be divided without a fight, or a vote, or something to that effect. Conversations about North New Almarìa and South New Almarìa now are as natural as drinking a fig soda. It is, after all, just a big crack in the ground.
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