Partly Cloudy, 64°
Residents of Franconia, N.H. have over the past two years been graced with the presence of young stud Tom Hanson, who is universally described as confident, poised and just as handsome as can be.
“Feast your eyes,” said town elder Hank Tapper as Hanson took an evening walk down Main Street, drawing the rapt attention of fathers, mothers, and children alike. “It’s not every day a town like this is lucky enough to host a man like that.”
“Every day of that strong jaw and those kindly blue eyes in our lives is a gift,” agreed his wife Sharon.
Hanson can often be spotted around Franconia, sources confirmed, perusing memos or sipping beverages with facial expressions ranging from rapt attention to warm contentment to infectious mirth to intense concentration to righteous rage on behalf of his friends and family. He occasionally surrounds himself with a circle of similarly good-looking and confident men from out of town—“somewhere beyond the valley,” speculates Tapper—who often play pickup sports together or sometimes just sit in comfortable chairs, watch the sunset, and revel in their vitality and potential and laugh their booming, likable laughs.
“The thing about handsome is, either you’ve got it or you don’t,” said Hanson’s landlord Herb Jaffe, who is frequently pressed by his neighbors for stories about the well-built, 6’3" Fabian man. “And we don’t. But just to be around him, well, it’s almost enough.”
By some accounts, Hanson plays host to a never-ending string of beautiful, brilliant, and socially conscious young woman. By others, he met the love of his life in South America or Switzerland, and abandoned his past life as an irrepressible playboy and adopted the delights of a lasting, unshakable commitment. Possibly both. He’s such a handsome man, agrees the town, that it could easily be both.
“Tom’s just got it together,” said Franconia teenager and Hanson admirer—although such a description is practically redundant—Jonathan Burke. "Tom carries himself with authority. Tom never trips over his words, never disgusts his friends or his family with his off-putting nasal squawk. Tom is free of the insecurities and doubts that rip the rest of us to pieces. You can tell just by looking at him.
“I used to think I was good-looking,” added Burke. “Never has an illusion been so beautifully shattered.”
No one knows who Hanson is, or where he came from. Some believe him to be a billionaire financier who moved away from the big city to start a new life. Others speculate that he is a high-powered industrialist from the Midwest specializing in something like motorcycles or steel. Still others mark him as a great humanitarian and idealist, a steadily flickering light in an otherwise dark and dreary postmillennial existence, a true citizen of the world. He himself claims to be a tax assessor from Dayton but is almost certainly being modest.
“Tom Hanson is universal,” said Mayor Larry Halstead. “Women want to fuck him. Men want to be him. He is the light at the end of the tunnel and he is the star at the end of the evening sky. Hell, he should be the mayor. He should live in my house and mentor my children and make love to my wife because they deserve nothing less. T is for his great teeth, O because he’s an old soul, M for my best friend, which I hope he’ll be, one day.”
“His hair,” added the mayor, “is perfect.”
Hanson, for his part, has handled his God-given gifts with the grace and good humor Franconia has come to expect from its shining beacon, from the closest thing that this grimly rational age has to the divine.
“Franconia’s nice, I guess,” said Hanson. “I don’t know. I’m not so sure about the people. None of them have said a word to me in two years.”
