Cataract City

Some places you just can’t leave. The specific gravity’s too strong, keeps you locked in orbit. You’ve got to be launched out, like a circus performer from a cannon.

Cataract City is a tourist town with an uncanny hold over those born within its borders, a place with more to it than first meets the eye: beyond the gaudy storefronts and sidewalk vendors, past the hawkers of tourist T-shirts and souvenirs, are the townspeople who toil at The Bisk, the local cookie factory. And behind that crumbling façade are the truly desperate: those drawn to gritty alleyways on both sides of the US-Canada border, inhabitants of a shadow world that runs on money exchanged over dog races, bare-knuckle brawls, and night-time smuggling.