The past needs to be put in its place.

Abby returns home to small town Kentucky and to the stale atmosphere of the place where she grew up. Her town owns the scars of a battle that took place one-hundred and fifty years ago and is still struggling to move on from the trauma of that single day. Abby’s need to escape the boundaries of her upbringing becomes bound up with saving the town.

Battle Town won the 2015 Exeter Story Prize and was originally published in ‘The 2015 Exeter Story Prize Collection’ by Creative Writing Matters. The tale was born on a cold November day walking on an empty battlefield.  As with most stories, it’s a product of observation combined with personal experience plus, in this case, Richard Buxton’s obsession with how the echoes of the American Civil War still sound in many places, and live in many people, right up to today.