1
I saw the dust before the truck, before I could hear its motor. A cloud like a dragon tearing down the road, the dust looked majestic, a plume of brown fire, because the highway was flat. Flat, flat. It spread to a point far off in the horizon, the sky so clear you could see a hawk swirling over the next town.
If there had been a next town.
I paused by the windows of the café. The truck might stop. The driver might come into the café for coffee; Louisa’s special was a latte with CBD oil. The truck might need fuel from the gas station next door, which meant my boss would take off her apron and hurry over. There was a chance we might actually get some business for once.
I felt a flutter of hope. I couldn’t always hear strangers, and people don’t like it when you don’t understand them. But I also felt starved of meeting another person. It might go the other way too. The stranger might be kind, speak loudly and clearly, let me see their mouth as they talked.
But the moment passed. The truck came too fast. It blurred past the discount grocery where my mom, Caroline, worked, stocking dented cans on the shelves. It blazed past Louisa’s Café and Gas Station, the tiny public library, and the even tinier post office. It continued down the road and far away.
“Thea,” Louisa said. “That floor ain’t gonna sweep itself.”
I looked away from the grimy front windows. That they were grimy was my fault. I was supposed to wash them, and the truck hadn’t done me any favors. Dust settled over the glass, stirred up by the truck. Against my legs, my skirt felt heavy.
I had worked at Louisa’s Café for a month, a little less than we had been living in the Bloodless Valley. Even so, the dust still surprised me. How it seemed to rise from the ground, skittering over the roads like the tumbleweeds that darted out from nowhere. On our drive out west from Ohio, when the first tumbleweed had hit our truck, I’d screamed, thinking we had hurt something: an animal, a child running into the road. Then the tumbleweed had scattered, broken to bits by the wind.
Tumbleweeds were dry plants, that was all, my dad, Abraham, had said. Dead.
The dust in Colorado got into my eyes, my hair. Sometimes I thought I felt dust in my teeth. I missed rain. I missed coolness. I even missed humidity. I missed my home in Ohio.
My family came to Colorado for land, cheap, advertised along with an old farmhouse in one of the newsletters my dad would read. The newsletters taught him how to live simply, told him to do more with less. Go back to the land, the newsletters urged, with their talk of earthworms for composting, woodstoves for heat. And so we went back, back to a place we had never been.
A flood had driven us away from our home.
The water coming over the hills then had looked gray, like the silt ponds from the coal mines. It had taken on their color, carried their debris, even fish, to stream through the houses in the lowlands, to stain the walls and leave.
My dad had dreamed the flood before it happened. Dreamed a wall of ashy water swelling over the fields, swallowing them. But he hadn’t dreamed what happened next. Our rent was raised. We didn’t have insurance. If you don’t own land, you are never free, the newsletters warned.
So, my dad had a vision of the next place. Our new home would be yellow, dry. It would be far away: westward, sitting at the foot of mountains like a child. Floods wouldn’t reach us all the way in Colorado. But no rain would.
And we came because we were poor, and this was a place poor farmers went: to the Bloodless Valley in southern Colorado where you could have a parcel of land for almost nothing, the newsletters swore. And what they didn’t say: where nothing grew, not without a fight.
In the valley, we had no neighbors. Dust was my company. My sister, Amelia, who was nine. Dogs. Our chickens, which my dad wouldn’t let us name, and which Amelia and I had named in secret: Taylor Swift, Billina, Lana Del Rey.
My dad hadn’t wanted me to work at the café, either, but we needed the money. Self-sufficiency apparently took a while. So, first my mom, then I, got jobs in town. What town there was, little more than the handful of ramshackle buildings the truck had blown past.
“Where do you think he was going?” I asked as I pushed the janitor’s broom across the checkered café floor.
“Who?” Louisa asked.
“That truck?”
“Sand Dunes National Park, probably.”
“Maybe not,” the lone customer at the café said, a man older than my dad, who sat at the counter, staring into a mug Louisa kept refilling. He wore his cowboy hat low, shading his eyes. His hand on the mug handle was creased with lines. “He was driving a little fast for a tourist.”
“Where else is there to go?” I asked.
“Lots of places, if you know them.”
I cast a look at the man, his dark eyes turned down to his coffee. He took another slow sip. How could I get anywhere? I couldn’t drive. My parents wouldn’t even let me practice. Colorado wasn’t like Ohio where I could walk to town; where I had ridden the school bus for a time, rattling over the hills.
But I had not been in school for two years.
In Colorado, the town felt as small as a speed bump, buildings spread far apart on the plain, unending road. My mom and I went to the café, to the store that sold damaged goods at a discount to farmers like my dad, and to our home: that skeletal ranch. My parents wanted me and Amelia to call it home, even though it didn’t feel like it. That was it. My dad didn’t even want me to cross the road the café was on. There was nothing for me over there, he said.
And besides, that highway was dangerous.
I glanced at it as I swept. The public library seemed so small, the windows dark. The post office looked like the fake storefront of a movie set. So tiny, I wondered how there was room inside for an employee and a customer.
Louisa said something. “Don’t just _______ that dirt around now.”
Something like that. I fought to make it make sense, to order her words, feeling the pressure of not responding in time, which grew heavier with each passing moment. It was too late to tell her I hadn’t heard. It would be worse now, more awkward, if I asked her to repeat herself, to fill in the blanks.
I was born half deaf. The left side of me was silence, and I felt I heard about half of the sounds swirling around me. Half I could only guess at, or didn’t know I had missed at all. I realized I had not heard something with Louisa, but it took me a moment or two of puzzling out the sounds to make sense of them. Sometimes I never could decode what someone had said. Most nights, I had a headache from trying.
My boss, older than my mom, her hair pulled severely into a black bun streaked with gray, had a habit of looking away when she spoke. She talked as she moved. And she moved constantly, doing over and over the little work the sleepy café seemed to require: stacking napkins under the counter, pushing through the swinging door in back to retrieve something from the kitchen or storage room.
It would have been easier if she had looked directly at me while speaking. I could have seen her lips move. But I had mentioned my hearing to her briefly, only in passing early on. I was quick to reassure Louisa that it rarely caused any problems, and didn’t mention it again.
My dad didn’t like it when I told people.
I was supposed to just pretend I could hear.
They could after all, everyone else in my family.
I went behind the counter to fetch the dustbin. The man sitting there tipped his hat to me. He was dressed nicely—what passed for nice around here—in a clean shirt with pearly white buttons and jeans with no dirt on them. Everyone wore cowboy boots or high rubber muck boots, I had noticed. Everyone, like this man, kept their hats on inside.
Louisa appeared behind me. I hadn’t heard her approach. “Another refill, Sam?” she asked the man.
He pushed his cup away and stood up from the stool. “No, thank you. I should finish my rounds.”
“When’s your boy coming home?”
“Tonight.”
“Planning something special?”
“Grilling _______. You want to come over? I know he’d like to see you.”
Louisa shook her head, talking as she dumped the coffee mug into the dirty dish tub. “Oh, no. Ray doesn’t want to have dinner with an old woman. You _______ have your time. I’ll see him around here soon enough.”
Sam stood and stepped carefully over the piles I had swept. But his eyes looked the way my mom’s did when she gazed over our long dirt driveway, at the land beyond our farm. It was filled with nothing but a spiky, clumpy weed called sedge. She missed home, I thought. We all did, except my dad.
What was Sam thinking about? And who was Ray? His boy, Louisa had said. The man looked Louisa’s age—and he acted like there was another reason he wanted her to come to dinner.
I brushed the piles into the dustbin, then emptied it into the trash. Every day I swept, and every day the dust came back. I turned to see my mom standing by the door that led to the kitchen and outside. “Ready to go?”
I nodded, untied my apron.
“How’s business?” Louisa asked her.
My mom had that look again. “Oh, about the same. Plenty of quiet so I can get a lot done.”
“That’s one way to think about it.”
“Does it ever pick up?”
I knew my mom was worried about losing her job. She had just gotten it. I was worried too. How could Louisa afford to pay me even the little she did?
My boss had been born here. She had a house out back behind the café, rows of photographs taped behind the counter of smiling cousins and nieces and nephews with black hair like hers. She had family. My parents had no one. I had no one, either, no connection to this flat place. If my parents could not get plants to grow in the valley, could not afford to pay for our water from the well, I was not sure we had enough money to go anywhere else.
“When it cools off a bit,” Louisa said, “we’ll get more tourists coming through. They need snacks and gas, and they’ve got to stop somewhere.” She grinned at me and my mom, like this was a fun joke we were in on.
But it didn’t feel like a joke to me.
* * *
When my mom and I stepped outside, the heat hit us. I didn’t understand what people meant about dry heat, the warmth of the desert without the humidity back in Ohio. It was still hot in the valley, unbearably so. It felt different, but no less awful.
Colorado had the kind of heat that seemed to get inside you through the pores of your skin. A heat that had a feel, gravelly like sandpaper, from the dirt that would blow, stinging my eyes and mouth. The heat had a taste like stale crackers, sticking my tongue to my mouth. My eyelids felt hot, like fingers pushed into them.
And the heat was only going to get worse—even I, new to the valley as a weed, could tell that. Louisa had a tiny TV on the counter by the espresso machine. She switched it on during slow times and we would watch the news together. A lot of news was about the weather, told in the deep, serious tone of a horror movie.
Maybe Louisa knew some things about me, without me having to say anything. It was a small valley; the arrival of a new family, even on the outskirts, and people might talk. How we girls didn’t go to school and wore long dresses most of the time. How we bathed in an old metal trough my mom dragged into the back room. How we didn’t even have power out there.
It might have surprised Louisa to learn my family had a TV. We had electricity too once my dad fired the generator up, which he did for a few hours every day to get the AC running, cool the fridge, and sometimes even to watch that TV. But we watched together as a family and only the shows my dad approved of: black-and-white dramas, classic musicals, cartoons.
Louisa let me watch the news. I felt she would have let me watch whatever I wanted—soap operas, music videos, things I barely remembered from before—but I hadn’t asked. The news unfolded on the café’s small screen. Floods, mudslides, fires, temperatures rising everywhere.
Like here in the valley.
My mom started the truck but left the driver’s door open to let the heat escape. She cranked the windows down. “Give it a minute.”
We waited as the engine rattled and the air conditioner steamed. After a moment, my mom said it was safe to get in the truck. But the seats still burned my legs as sharp as a slap. The air pouring in from the vents felt warm and stale.
Even the air didn’t want us in this place.
We left the AC on and the windows cracked as my mom drove onto the main road, the only road we ever took: Highway 17. The temperature gauge in the dashboard read 103. Hot wind out the windows whipped my face. The road sounds were too loud for me to really hear the radio, and there were hardly any stations, anyway. My mom didn’t want to listen to news. She wanted to believe my dad, and that was it, what he told her passing for law.
It was a long drive from the café to the acres of flat, brown earth with an even browner, flat house on them that my parents had bought sight unseen. I knew the trip pretty well by now. There was nothing—so much nothing, I had it memorized. Wire fences bisected fields. There were sections where the fences had bowed or been broken by animals or crashed cars. There were rust-colored gates and telephone poles. Sparse green clouds of brush. And the real clouds, huge and white, stretching endlessly in a sky that always seemed to be blue.
Nothing else until we hit the Alien Watchtower, the viewing platform someone had constructed in the middle of a far-off field. There was a museum accompanying the tower, a shrine where people left things for the aliens, and a labyrinth. That was what the sign advertised, anyway, a sign in the shape of an alien, pointing the way. I had glimpsed it from the highway only. I was not allowed to see any of it close-up.
But that was it, the only thing to look forward to on the drive home, to break up the landscape. Unrelenting, that’s what I would have called it to my friends back in Ohio, Ellee and Angie. If I could have written a letter to reach them. It was hard to convey just how plain and monotonous the valley was, and it felt shameful to admit to my friends how bored and lonely I felt, my mood as flat as the land.
And that was why the snakes stood out.
Most of the trees visible from the road grew far back by the low squares of houses or sheds, the mountains always in the distance like a jagged blue collar. Out here, trees were more bushes than real trees. Scraggly, undergrown. Trees needed water to live.
But two trees, their tops only slightly scorched brown, stood by the highway, behind a stretch of wire fence. Today, something hung from the fence.
On our drive out west, when we had hit the first tumbleweed, I had screamed. Amelia had screamed at the sight of her first prairie dog, thinking it was a stray, that we should stop for it. I shouted now. I couldn’t help it. “Mom!”
She tapped the brakes, the truck wobbling on the road. “What’s the matter? Are you hurt?”
“No. On the fence!”
She barely looked.
She knew, then. She knew they were there.
“They’re snakes,” she said.
We were already passing them. My mom had not stopped or even really slowed. I craned over my shoulder to try to see them more clearly. Lashed to the top of one fence rail, two tied on another.
“They’re dead. They found them dead,” my mom said.
“How do you know?”
“Old-timers at the grocery store—they told me. It’s bad luck to kill a snake. They have to find them _______ way.”
“Why are they there?”
It wasn’t natural. The snakes had been knotted with rope. They twisted in the hot breeze, against the fence like heavy, dead windchimes.
Now my mom looked surprised. Like I should have known this, like Louisa or someone should have warned me. “It’s a superstition,” my mom said, “to make it rain.”
Dear Ellee,
I hate it here.
Copyright © 2024 by Alison Stine
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