by Carol Willis
Summer barked and scratched at the back door. The dog’s woofs rattled the windows in their little farmhouse. Maia glanced at Dan, still asleep next to her, his breathing even and regular. She reluctantly peeled the covers off and set her feet down on the cold hardwood floor, wrapping a robe across her shoulders. Padding barefoot to the kitchen, she stubbed her toe on a cardboard box.
“Hey, girl. What’s got you going this morning, huh?” Maia whispered, hopping on one foot.
Summer jumped up, pawing wildly. As soon as Maia opened the door, the dog bolted from the house, running past the barn and across the backfield. Sunrise—the hour of otherworldly splendor across the western plains of Nebraska—the sun, still low in the east, throbbed its way up the sky, leaving a stream of pinks and oranges in its wake. Early morning fog shrouded the fields and rose in thin wisps, looking for all the world like smoke from a prairie fire. The dog disappeared over the rise, her bark echoing in the distance.
Coyote, maybe.
It wasn’t like Summer to wake up early, let alone go off chasing a coyote. She was an old, lazy yellow lab, more lapdog than retriever.
Maia lingered at the door, clutching her robe. The rising sun spilled into the valley, splashing yellow and orange all over creation, turning the fields and the southern bluffs to gold and bronze.
The view always got to Maia.
She inhaled the early March air and watched her breath come out in puffs of steam. The first time she laid eyes on this farm, she thought it was the most beautiful place she’d ever seen.
And it still is. Nine acres, just outside of Gering, Nebraska—really a small scrap of land, full of scrub oak, rock, and poor soil—a left-over useless wedge of land between the Rohr’s cornfields to the west and the White’s cattle operation to the east. It had belonged to some sharecropper from long ago. The old white clapboard house and adjacent barn dilapidated and falling down.
But she hadn’t cared. It was hers. A patch of green earth she could call her own. The trains shook the house on its foundation as they chugged their way east or west on the railroad line a half-mile to the north, but that was no matter. She never tired of the view.
The ache, this terrible pain, deep inside feels like her heart is being ripped from her chest at the thought of losing it. And today is the day. The bank is foreclosing; taking her house, her nine acres, her sunrise, her whole heart and soul with it.
Even cobbling their savings together, she and Dan haven’t been able to make the payments anymore. She couldn’t even afford Summer’s rabies shot this year. The vet had done it for free.
Damn the pandemic.
Last December, Covid killed Dan’s parents. Killed her job at Frank Implement. Killed Dan’s job at Kelly Bean. Killed the economy. Killed her farm. Killed her dream.
Fresh tears stung her eyes just when she thought she was all cried out.
“Dammit,” she uttered too low for Dan to hear, wiping her nose.
Dan. He has been good to her and the farmhouse. After moving in a couple of years ago, he fixed things up. Without asking, repairing the roof, repainting the walls and the outside, refinishing the old pine floors. He added an island in the small kitchen, tacked corrugated tin to the sides; strung mason jars for lights, and made a bed frame from old fence posts. He even built Maia an outdoor shower; and turned the old grain bin into a gazebo complete with a firepit.
It was country kitsch, but Maia loved it. She really is just a country girl at heart.
The cardboard boxes in the kitchen and living room are stacked like buildings of some small city. She doesn’t know why she bothered. They won’t be able to take much in the truck. A few boxes of clothes; a box of dishes, maybe a few boxes of photos and mementos. Whatever can fit in the back of Dan’s pickup. They don’t have the money for a storage shed. They’d have to save room for sleeping bags, some bedding, and the tarp. Dog food.
Maia pressed her hands to her eyes and wiped her face and nose on the sleeve of her robe. She can no longer see or hear Summer. Closing the door, she filled the coffeemaker with water, and spooned the last of the Folgers into the filter. Today is the last day for the coffeepot, too. They would have to leave it behind, along with just about everything else. Marty, a friend of Dan’s old boss agreed to let them squat at Robidoux RV park for a couple of months until they got on their feet again. He’d done it out of pity, Maia knew.
She knows she should be grateful, but other people’s pity only makes her feel pitiful.
She’d kept her mouth shut, though. No point in making Dan feel any worse than he already does. They’d live out of the truck, but at least they would have access to city water, bathrooms with hot water, and a shower. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
And nothing was all that was left all the way around.
When Dan’s parents died, they left debts of their own. Land and a farmhouse that Dan’s parents had farmed and raised their kids in for over forty years, gone with the click of a pen to pay back taxes, probate, and a whole lot of convoluted legalese that Maia didn’t understand.
But she understood well enough.
The banks got all the power. They don’t care about the pandemic, economic downturns, farmers falling on hard times. The same bankers she and Dan had sat next to every Sunday morning at Immanuel Bible Church; hearing the same message about taking care of your neighbor, helping the poor, the downtrodden; Jesus upturning the table of the money changers outside the temple. The bankers nodded their heads during the sermons on Sunday but shook their heads come Monday morning when Maia and Dan asked for an extension. More time. A loan. Anything to get them through. Bankers were the modern-day money changers. The bank building their temple. A bunch of hypocrites. The lot of them.
Maia tiptoed to the bedroom and peeked in; Dan was still asleep. With no job to go to, and soon no house to come home to, Dan has disappeared into himself. Staying up half the night, sitting on the couch, staring off into space. Then when he finally does come to bed, he sleeps half the day. Maia knows depression when she sees it. She just doesn’t know what to do for him. For either of them.
Maia warmed her coffee from the pot and sat down on the couch. Might not get another chance at that either for a while. The coffee stirred her stomach juices, and the growls of hunger pains echo in the house. Restless and on edge, Maia got up and paced the kitchen running her hand along the butcher block and trying not to focus on the clock ticking above the sink.
Summer still hasn’t come back. The last thing they needed today of all days was for the dog to run off and get hurt. Maia slipped into a pair of old work pants, a sweater and shoved her arms into her overcoat. She jotted Dan a quick note, just in case he wakes before she gets back, before pulling on her work boots.
Heading out the back toward the barn, the smell of hay and chicken dung still clung to the air. She had sold the pullets a week ago to a neighbor. She misses the gentle clucks and trills of the hens almost more than the fresh eggs.
She disturbed a couple of sparrows from their nest, as she walked through the barn to the backfield. The next farm over, Seth Rohr is already on his tractor.
“Summer!” Maia shouts, but her voice is swallowed by the sea of prairie grass and scrub oaks. Her shouts will probably wake Dan, but it can’t be helped.
The morning is quiet except for the lazy whistle of a meadowlark and the low distant grumble of Seth Rohr’s tractor. Maia zigzagged through a copse of scrub oak and brush along the ditch bank. The irrigation canals have already begun to fill with water for the coming season. The morning is already growing heavier with the sun. A drake and his hen skim the surface, the water rippling and glittering in the morning light. Maia stopped to admire. The bluffs to the south were in full blaze, the morning mist dissipating lazily upward. Maia comes to the very end of her property, the tip of the wedge-shaped land in which the Rohr’s and the White’s fences meet.
Looking south and against the bluffs is a hazy outline of something. She can’t say what. It looks like heat waves rising from the ground. She can see the bluffs through the haze, but they are obscured by the wavy lines. She can see Summer through the haze, on the other side of the field.
“Summer, come here girl!”
The dog stood quietly amidst the field and didn’t come when called.
It’s too cold in the season and too early in the morning for heatwaves. The wavy lines have a distinct boundary—a roundness at the edges. The longer she stares, the wavy lines shimmer into a distinct spherical form the size of a barn or small house. The sphere pulses slightly, almost like a heart expanding and contracting at the fringed edges. It hovers slightly above the ground, the tan and green grasses beneath are undisturbed.
Summer is on the far side of this ball of heat waves, shimmering too, her shiny yellow coat pulsing in time with the sphere. The dog ignores her shouts, not even turning her head at Maia’s calls.
Maia approaches, trying to determine the source of it. As she nears, the edges of the sphere pulse rapidly. She puts out her hand but hesitates. The air is cool, yet glimmers and throbs as if heated by some invisible force. She reaches through the frayed edges of the haze astonished when her hand feels a hard coldness. She jerks her hand back.
So cold.
She reached out her hand toward the object again, slowly, coldness enveloping her hand, then arm. Firm yet pliable, it felt as though she is putting her hand through thick, cold gelatin. The substance compresses her hand and arm, a tugging draws her close.
She yanked her arm back, her heart thumping. It had not hurt, yet it was so cold and unexpected.
She searched her mind to describe this thing.
What was this invisible metal sphere in the middle of prairie grass and scrub? Is this some new or secret farming technique? She can’t conceive of it.
Maia braves her hand again and reaches out through the wavy edge to feel the cold. She runs her hand up and down the smooth, satiny surface, walking and running her hand along the contours of the sphere as she completes a circle around it. She tries pushing on the sphere, but it doesn’t budge, seeming to wait for Maia with an inexplicable magnetism pulling her close, drawing her inward.
***
The bank people came, handed them a folder with paperwork Maia didn’t want to read. Dan handed over the key to the front door. That was it; what has taken her years to save up for, years to fix up, gone in a matter of minutes. Seconds, really. Her stomach lurched, but she didn’t cry.
Somehow what happened in the backfield this morning has dried up the tears. Dan came looking for her when she hadn’t come home. He said he had found her standing in the middle of the field at the back of the property. Summer was sitting on the ground next to her. He said it had frightened him; both she and the dog were staring off into space and hadn’t responded when he yelled their names. He had come up to her, shaken her, yelling her name over and over again.
Maia handed Dan the keys to the truck. She doesn’t want to drive; doesn’t want to be the one to leave. It seems important, if only symbolic, that she is the passenger; the victim of some unjust crime. She slid into the passenger seat of the Ford truck; Dan pulled out of the gravel drive for the last time and drove the eight long miles west to Robidoux RV park.
“I thought maybe you had some kind of seizure,” Dan says.
Maia’s never had a seizure. Dan is simply grasping at explanations.
Maia tries to explain what she has seen; what Dan couldn’t see. She can barely explain it herself. It sounds so preposterous. A cold invisible metallic sphere in the middle of the field. She doesn’t actually know if it was metal. It had been so cold, so smooth; she hadn’t known what else to call it. Then the way her hand and arm disappeared inside it. It had been drawn in, sucked in by some pressure, just like the time she stuck her arm in a cow to turn a breeched calf. She’d pushed the calf back in, arm in all the way to the hilt.
After she had gotten over the initial shock, the sphere hadn’t frightened her; strangely she had felt drawn to it. She had wanted to put her whole body inside, lean forward, and let it absorb the whole of her.
She just might have if Dan hadn’t shown up when he did.
“What sphere? What are you talking about, hon?”
She had turned around and the spherical haziness was gone. Disappeared. Almost like it had dissolved instantaneously. Dan had walked across the field, trying to see what she had seen. She had taken him over to where the sphere had been, but it was gone. Not even an indentation in the grasses.
“I don’t see nothing.” He had only shaken his head. “Maybe it’s gone, honey.”
She hadn’t wanted to leave. She’d had an overwhelming desire, a need, to see the sphere again.
“We got to go now, the bank is coming,” he had finally said, taking her arm gently, leading her away with Summer trotting back home beside them. Her boots and the bottom of her jeans were soaked through when she got back to the house.
Dan thinks her a little crazy, probably just cracking up over the foreclosure. He would never say that to her. Dan’s a good man. Too good, sometimes.
Maia thinks Dan should have kicked the bankers in the teeth.
“What good would that do, honey?” He said with a big sigh.
Sometimes she wishes he would give in to his anger a little more. Why did he have to shake their hands, tip his hat to them?
“Just trying to be polite. I’ve known those guys my whole life. We still gotta live here. You never know when we might need them down the road.”
“We did need them, Dan,” she said, staring out the window of the truck, the newly sowed fields a bright blurry green and brown.
She’s been petulant; unforgiving and still is. It isn’t their fault they’re out of a job. She and Dan are looking. They’re good for the mortgage “down the road.” Bankers didn’t see it that way. She never wanted to borrow money again. She was sour on the whole deal. Bloodsuckers, every one of them.
Dan turned into the RV park and pulled up next to the bluffs, as far away from the road as possible. The truck gave a shudder and sighed when Dan turned the key in the ignition off. The rumble of the steady flow of traffic from the highway penetrated the cab, matching the rumble in her stomach. Breakfast and coffee were long gone. Maia simply stared out of the windshield toward the bluffs.
Summer perked up, barked and whined, pawing against Maia’s leg to be let out. As soon as Maia slides out of the truck, Summer jumped out of the cab and dashed off toward the bluffs. Following the dog with her eyes, Maia sees the familiar round sphere again. Hazy, like the background and slightly out of focus.
She hissed to Dan, still hunched behind the steering wheel, “Look! See that. It’s back. The sphere I was talking about.” She pointed, jabbing her finger toward the bluffs. The sphere shimmered at its fringe, hovering above the ground like before.
Dan squinted and peered out.
“See? Summer knows it’s there, too. Just like this morning. It’s got to be the reason she ran off barking,” Maia says.
“Maybe. I don’t know, hon. I admit the old girl’s going crazy over something. But she could just be chasing some rabbit or coyote.”
“Right there!” Maia points again. “I thought it was heat waves at first. But it’s perfectly round. It’s March. Heatwaves don’t explain that. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Dan shakes his head. “I really don’t see what you’re talking about. I have to square up with Marty. Let him know we’re here. Don’t let the dog run off like this morning, hon.”
“I didn’t let the dog run off. There’s something out there. Look!”
But Dan is already out of the cab and walking away.
Maia watches the back of him getting smaller as he makes his way to the squat, gray concrete office building by the highway. Dan’s a tall man. “Strapping,” she had thought when she first met him. But now, he stoops, his stature diminished along with their belongings and the rest of their savings.
Maia treaded along the ditch bank toward the sphere at the base of the tawny bluffs, careful not to kick up loose rock. The wind scatters clouds like broken promises. The fine, sandy dirt road follows the irrigation canal and wends its way westward, snaking through several family farms. The canals run for hundreds of miles in either direction. Maia could almost walk to Iowa if she had the mind to.
The sphere hovers inert and Summer sits on the ground wagging her tail, as she did this morning.
“Hey, old girl. You see it, too, don’t you?” Maia whispers for no good reason. The dog ignores her.
Not as hesitant this time, Maia puts her palm out toward one edge of the sphere and instantly feels the cold. Not a biting cold, but something deep and dense. Cold comfort, she thinks. She pushes through the fringed edge and it gives way to her arm, just as it did before, drawing her inward and pulling her closer. She allows it for a moment before pulling back.
Maia considers. Except for the pulsations, the sphere is motionless. Not a blade of grass moves under or around it, almost as if it absorbs the light and air around it. There are no other sounds but cars on the highway in the distance, maybe a rustle and rattle of some kind, rattlesnake or mocking bird or prairie dog. She listens for an electric hum but there isn’t any. It makes no sound at all, seeming to absorb sound as well as heat and energy from the surroundings.
Maia walks around the sphere and calls out. “What are you? Can you hear me?” But the sphere is silent.
Maia pushes again, using both arms this time. She shoves hard, like trying to get a mule to plow a field. Immobile, it only seems to draw her in. She alternates, putting in one arm, then the other. Each time, the cold, gentle pressure pulls and tugs at her. It’s a strange sensation, not unpleasant. Welcome almost.
She squats next to Summer. “What is that thing, huh? Watcha’ think, girl?” She puts her arms around the dog, scratching her neck and back. Summer licks Maia’s face, then the dog turns her attention back to the sphere. The dog is as bewitched as she is.
The soft chant of footsteps approach from behind. A woman is walking toward her, smoking a cigarette. She stops next to Maia, squints one eye, and takes a long draught.
“Hey,” the woman says, her voice low and scratchy like a veteran smoker. Gray smoke billows out of her nose and mouth like her insides are on fire. The woman’s black jacket has holes on both elbows and bleach stains splatter one sleeve. Strands of hair whip across her face and the woman keeps pushing them out of her eyes. Her hair is long and stringy, dark and gray roots visible where some crap dye job is growing out.
Maia briefly wonders why the woman doesn’t just pull her hair back with a rubber band and thinks of the box of rubber bands in the top drawer of her old desk at Frank Implement. The rubber bands are probably still there along with the paper clips and stapler and everything else.
Maia nods. “Hey.”
The woman’s face is weathered and lined. She looks to be about fifty by Maia’s reckoning, but then that could just be the cigarettes. Or the RV park. Or Covid or homelessness. Or all the above.
“Saw you drive up in the truck. That your husband?” The woman glances back over her shoulder.
Maia and Dan never married. Not officially, anyway. Besides, after his parents died, and the bank foreclosed on her farm, the details of a wedding and marriage certificate seemed unimportant. Maia fingers her mother’s gold band on her left ring finger. It’s close enough.
“Yeah. This is Summer, our dog.”
“I’m Crystal. Welcome to the neighborhood,” the woman says, drawing out “hood” long and low. “I’m in the tan little shit can by the shitter. Pardon my French. Come by for coffee later, if you want, and we can exchange our sad-sack little stories.” Crystal snorts and a smile plays on her thin, cracked lips. “Anyway, it’s coffee or Gering city water. I quit the hard stuff a while back.”
Maia stands up and looks over her shoulder behind her. Another low square, gray concrete building, similar to the front office, sits off to the far side. A small rusted tan camper juts out like a pimple from the south wall. Weeds and grass grow up around the wheels.
Maia brings her eyes back to Crystal. “I’m Maia and my husband’s Dan. Coffee is just fine. Thanks,” Maia says, turning her attention back to the sphere. It seems important to confirm that it’s still there and not dissolving away as it had with Dan.
“Well, Maia, I’m going to finish this cigarette and walk off my shakes. Oh, bring the dog, too.”
“Hey, Crystal,” Maia says, calling after her.
“Yeah?” Crystal turns around, her eyes wary.
“Do you see anything unusual?” Maia asks, instantly feeling foolish.
“What d’ya mean? Where?”
“There.” Maia points a limp finger in front of her. The sphere pulses and contracts above the grass as before.
Crystal looks past Maia toward the bluffs, scanning the grasses. The woman shrugs and throws her spent cigarette in the gravel, stubbing the butt with her heel. “I don’t suppose I do. Just you and your dog. Is there something else?” Crystal cocks her head and narrows her eyes.
Maia shakes her head. “No. Never mind, I just…it’s nothing.”
“Okay, well, see you later.” Crystal doesn’t wait for Maia to respond and walks away toward the clouds.
The sun dips behind the bluffs, and a gust of wind blows fine sandy dirt into Maia’s eyes. Dan hasn’t come back to the truck yet, so she pulls her jacket tighter and stays in the grass next to Summer. The sphere pulses at the edges, expanding, contracting to the rhythm of her beating heart. It comforts her in a way she can’t explain.
It didn’t use to be this way. She didn’t use to be this way. Even after she lost her job, got laid off like everybody else, she thought it temporary.
“It’s a pandemic thing. It’s a pandemic thing. It’s a pandemic thing,” everybody said, voices overlapping one another like they were singing a round.
Then Dan got laid off, too. Things started to feel serious then. Thin. They started watching every little bill. Every trip to the grocery store seemed filled with intent and import. Dog food. Gas for the truck. “It’s just a phase, hon,” Dan had said, trying to reassure her.
Then the bank took her farm.
Unemployment. Homelessness. Hunger. She had never realized how close they had been skirting the line.
She is slipping.
She has the sense she is embarrassing herself. Embarrassing others into walking away. Crystal had given her the same look Dan had given her this morning. Confusion mixed with pity and something else. Maybe Crystal regretted her earlier offer of coffee with story time.
Maia isn’t sure she wants to rehash her story with Crystal, anyway. Everyone at Robidoux probably has the same story or some version of it. They’re all just a bunch of sad sacks whose choices have been reduced to shitty coffee and tap water.
Maia wasn’t one for imaging things. How come no one else could see the sphere?
Was this a pandemic thing, too?
Had she slipped so far, she was losing her mind? Maybe the sphere was just for her. Somehow, it seemed to belong to her now. Because she had found it on her farm—while the farm had still had been hers—she felt an irrational sense of ownership. It had come for her. The dog, too, perhaps. She almost believed the sphere had followed her here.
Maia stood up and reached her arms out. She pushed both her arms inside up to the shoulders. The pressure of the cold embrace comforts her. She turned her head and laid her cheek against the cold.
All she has to do is lean in a bit, extend her neck and her head will disappear inside. She is so close. Skirting the edge of total immersion.
She pressed her ear to the cold. The sphere is quiet, inert. An absence of vibration and sound, an immense stillness passes through her.
She leans forward. Her face, arms, and shoulders are cold. So cold. The pressure feels good, peaceful. She closes her eyes, leans forward, and pushes her face inward. Into the cold. Into the deep quietude.
A deep, dark silence envelops her. A stillness like she has never known. She no longer knows where she begins or where she ends. Her body merges with that of the sphere.
Stepping up, she pushes all the way through. She floats suspended, weightless in some cold invisible substance.
When she opens her eyes, the outside is a haze of gold and green grasses waving in the late afternoon winds. The bluffs are in shadows, and the sun moves behind a choir of clouds. Summer barks and is running wild circles around the sphere, but Maia cannot hear a sound.
There is no sense of time. No sense of self. She is a part of the sphere, part of everything outside of the sphere. She is inside and outside, everywhere at once.
Summer’s haunches quiver, she crouches, then leaps into the sphere. The dog is beside her now, floating suspended; the dog’s legs swimming in the cold invisible space.
Time takes on a dreamy quality. The sky changes color and the prairie disappears. Day becomes night. Stars wink and glitter like jewels. Falling stars streak downward like fireworks and Maia and Summer fly up to meet them. Her body mingles with the clouds and she marvels as the ground beneath drops away.
The sphere spins, rotating on some invisible axis, sending Maia and Summer whirling, reeling as it turns and expands. Maia soars higher and higher, hurtling past the moon and twirling between Mars and Jupiter. She and Summer hop rocks in the asteroid belt and chase one another around the rings of Saturn. Maia grabs the tail of a comet and flies past the sun.
Then the Big Dipper tips, and the Milky Way spills out.
***
Robidoux RV park is shrouded in shadows as the sun sinks behind the bluffs. The temperature drops and the windows of the truck vibrate with a gust of wind. Dan grips the steering wheel as if he were at the helm of some great ship buffeting himself against a storm. An edge of the tarp comes loose and waves wildly across the truck bed. Something blows away, tumbling across the parking lot. A piece of clothing or some useless folder of paper. Dan ignores it and stares ahead, his eyes seeing nothing.
A woman approaches the truck. Her hair is loose and the wind whips it around her face. Dressed in a black raggedy old jacket and her face gaunt as death, she looks like some prairie witch blown in with the tumbleweeds.
Dan lowered the window. Just.
“Sorry to bother you,” the woman says. Her voice sounds like it comes from the bottom of a gravel pit. Her teeth are uneven and yellowed.
Dan nods and waits. He’s seen her around. Marty pointed her out. “Old-timer. She’s been here the longest. She goes around bumming cigarettes,” Marty had said. “She’s harmless.”
“You’re Dan, right?”
Dan nods. He isn’t in the mood for chitchat.
“I’m Crystal. Have you heard anything yet? About your wife? Dog? I met her the day you guys rolled in. She seemed real nice.”
Dan shakes his head and looks away. He grips the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turn white. He has the sudden urge to put the truck in reverse, peel out of the parking lot, and drive away. But he has nowhere to go. No parents, no job, no place to live.
Now, no Maia. No dog. Just up and gone by the time he’d come back from talking to Marty.
He’d lost it all.
Everything that had ever been good in his life, gone with the pandemic.
With her hands jammed in the back pockets of her jeans, Crystal rocked back on her heels. The woman looked like she’s been around the block a time or three. She seemed to be waiting for him to say something. But Dan knows she expects nothing.
The woman kicked at some invisible piece of trash on the ground and looked to the west. “She was sittin’ over there with the dog,” Crystal said, looking toward the base of the bluffs directly in front of the truck. “She seemed a little sad. Down in the dumps. I should’ve stayed and talked to her. But I had the shakes, you know. Get em’ real bad in the afternoons.” She screwed up her mouth and looked back at him. “This pandemic thing has twisted everything and everybody all up.”
Dan cleared his throat. “Sorry Crystal. Thanks for stopping by, but I’m not doing too good right now.”
Crystal nodded. “Yeah, okay. I won’t bother you no more unless I hear something.” She turned and started walking away. Looking back over her shoulder, she added, “Just holler if you need anything. I don’t got much, but I always got coffee.”
Dan gave her a curt nod, raised the window, and resumed staring out the windshield toward the west. A haziness materialized against the rocks. It looked like heat waves rising from the ground; gray and tan uneven bluffs obscured behind the wavy lines.
The longer he stares, the haziness takes on a distinct shape. A large ball, smooth and round, suspended above the grass. It pulsed; throbbing at the edges.
Drawn by some mysterious force, Dan gets out of his truck and walks toward the ball of wavy lines as if hypnotized. The prairie wind blows fine dust and gravel in his face. He feels a cold thrumming in his heart.
Carol Willis (she/her) is currently a candidate for an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts (summer 2023). She also served as a reader for VCFA’s literary journal, Hunger Mountain. You can find her short stories in the anthology, Crimeucopia: Tales from the Back Porch, and several online zines, Unlikely Stories.org, Cowboy Jamboree, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, Mulberry Literary, and forthcoming in Dark Horses. Please visit carolwillisauthor.com and on Instagram @carolswritelife.