There are places where you will find heaven on earth, but a town called Heaven's End isn’t one of them.

Heaven's End is a remote little town with surrounding woodlands that run deeper than most of us care to discover. Boasting a healthy population of approximately 7,000, the town is bisected by a river from the woodlands to its east end. Heaven’s End only connection to the outside world is via Interstate Highway, which is a long auxiliary route leading to the next town 77 miles to the north.

My name is Nell Harper, and during the whole of 13 years of my life, Heaven’s End has been my world entire. I have grown up watching in awe and wonder the Eastern River and the wilderness across it from the window of my room upstairs. It’s a high-density forest with its inner darkness impeachable for thousands of years, with blind trees keeping the mighty sun at bay, and preserving a sense of mystery not constrained by any human conception. A natural fortress unhindered for years by dry summers and rainy winters.

For one willing to go down that path, there is an Eastern River bridge running across the river leading to the outskirts of the woodlands. Men, looking to break the rigid routine called life in Heaven's End, often camp on that barren patch of land with their wives, kids, mothers and girlfriends.

They find the skeletal trees guarding them, keeping them at arm’s length against everything that exists within the recesses of that mysterious forest.

But the good folks of Heaven’s End like to mind their own business, they always have. It’s a town that prides in its own old fashioned ways. There is a very tightly knit community that still likes to hold its traditional town’s meeting. We like to live by adhering to our moral codes and by staying connected to our churches.

However, there are those who pay their debts to the devil by hanging out at the Dogg’s Inn come every Sunday and occasional weekday nights. Dogg's Inn is an assortment for every gambler, addict, burnout, angry and the starved slogging through life with their clogged shoes and deflated sense of pride. The place is an open secret.

I personally know most of those men. I have seen some of that crowd ever so often at our doorsteps and sometimes for an evening of poker and smoke and booze in the basement of our very house.

They are just a bunch of dreamers and schemers. Scheming and conniving for immeasurable amount of success in their not so distant future, ever illusive but always just around the corner. My father, a supervisor at the town's local factory, shares the same dreams and aspirations. Men of various age groups grace this pack of hungry wolves. Toothless and benign to the core, each of them lurk in the cover of their own comfort zones, living a life of despair and secretly famished for success that can help put an end to their day jobs.