The City of Durney, Oklahoma, sent Larry Dobbins a two-hundred-dollar citation. It used the word encroach.

Larry looked it up. To intrude gradually upon the rights or property of another. That is what it says, in his daughter’s tenth-grade dictionary, in print, and if that is what the city has put its own name to, then the only question left is who intruded on who. So he does not pay it.

By the fourth day there is a bedsheet on an eighteen-foot pole with a hand drawn on it. By the eighth there is a currency: one beer is one Larry. The dachshunds are sworn in as Customs and Immigration. A badly stuffed pig is sheriff. A box turtle named Taco is president, and no decision in the Republic of Larryland gets made without him.

Larry’s daughter, Megan, is an employment lawyer in Tulsa who sues cities for a living. She has read the ordinance. She knows exactly how this ends. And she cannot make her father hear a single word of it, because he is not trying to win.

He only wants somebody from that building to drive out, put their hands on the thing he built, and sign their name to it.

For readers of Fredrik Backman, Shelby Van Pelt, and J. Ryan Stradal.