Episode 1 — “After the Culling”
Culling doesn’t forgive. It files you. Labels you. Shelves you with the rest of its hauntings.
Jimmy Gillmore Jr. was catalogued at birth—Gillmore, son of the mortician who knew every family in town by their grief. His father, Jimmy Sr., taught him two things: how to hold still when the world shakes, and how to keep the dead from looking like the dead. Then the unthinkable: a murder that stole Sr. from the living and turned the Gillmore name into a campfire curse no one had to whisper anymore.
The Annual Culling came and went, the kind of night when the town purges its sins with rituals older than the highway out. By dawn, Jr. chose his own ritual: leaving. He bought a one-way to Flora, Florida—a place that sounded like it might grow something inside him besides emptiness.
Flora isn’t paradise. It’s honest. Palms that sweat. Neon that hums. A diner with a broken O that reads PEN 24 H URS, which feels about right.
That’s where Al “Alchopya” found him. Al isn’t a saint. He’s a fixer with a compass that points to people, not places. Al didn’t ask about Culling. He slid a coffee across the counter, then a truth: “You don’t look like someone who wants to live. Lucky for you, wanting is optional. Showing up is the job.”
Al became mentor, map, and mirror—showing Jimmy the work that keeps a man breathing: odd jobs in the shadows between legal and necessary; learning how to read a room before it reads you; keeping score with kindness you don’t advertise. In Flora, the dead don’t need makeup—they need answers. And Al knows where answers hide.
By week’s end, word reached them: something old from Culling had followed Jimmy south. Not a person—a practice. The kind that chews up small towns and spits out legends. If Jimmy won’t be a legend, he’ll have to become a lesson.
Tomorrow: Al opens a locked drawer. Inside is the first favor Jimmy will never forget.