I wrote this today as part of my commitment to the Clarion West Write-a-thon. A dedication means that person sponsored it by donating to CW, and then provided me a writing prompt that sparked the piece. If you would like something written especially for you, please consider sponsoring me.
Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.
Enjoy.
The Far West
for Sharon Woodbury. I love you, Mum.
Great and terrible things come from the Far West; great and terrible things flock to it. The road through the desert brings them all past the Last Chance for Whatever, where Beth Harvey sells gasoline and milk, men’s ties, dog whistles, a selection of stuffed animals, sometimes herself. “The sign says Whatever, Lucas,” she told me once. “People need what they need.”
There’s a snow shovel in the hardware section. “It’s the desert,” I said once, a long time ago. “What does anyone need that for?”
She shrugged. “Works on sand, too,” was all she said. I didn’t get it at the time. Now, of course, I know the point of a snow shovel. It is not made sharp for digging down into a thing; it is made flat to push aside whatever’s in your way. The snow shovel is a tool to keep things moving.
Most every day, I sit at one of the three small cafe tables near the picture window. I drink a bottle of Bud and maybe eat one of Beth’s egg salad sandwiches, and I watch the road and what goes by on it. Sometimes I see things that make me want another bottle, that make me want to count my dead soldiers by sixes rather than singles; but after what happened that one time, I have never opened the cooler more than once on any given day. I won’t tell you what happened that day, not yet, but I will say that most great and terrible things are not obvious monsters or demons or gods. They are people who are trying to move something out of their way so they can get to another place, and will do whatever they must to make that happen. That is when people become great and terrible; when they know exactly what they need.
Some places are small. Some places are green and smell of springwater and secrets. Some places are a whirl of neon and human noise. The Far West is none of those things. The Far West is every dream you ever had of sky and ancient stone and silence, of possibility, of finally, finally finding someplace big enough for all the things you ever want to be. The Far West is the place of greatest pain you can imagine, where people dash each other down to the bedrock and wet their cereal with their children’s blood. People crawl across burning sand to reach it. People chew their own hearts out to escape it, and then they spend years finding their way back; because the Far West is never the same place twice. And that’s the power and the pull: once you get these notions into your heart or head, they muscle all your sensible self out of the way. And then things might get great, or terrible.
On the day I won’t tell you about yet, Beth was in the storeroom and I was drinking my beer. The road and the desert and the sky were empty of everything except sun and the sense of waiting that sometimes comes upon the land. Something is coming. Then I heard a small engine, and saw a motorscooter buzzing in from the West. A man drove; a woman held on behind him, her hair streaming hot and dusty, her eyes bright with sun. She was beautiful. One of the great ones.
My dearest one! It is all there just as I knew it would be. You have made my memory dimensional — you tell me more of what I remember than what I imagine. My scars and my love are the proof. What’s love got to do with it? Everything. The Far West has always been my home.
I really loved this.
Both stories made me remember Elizabeth Bishop’s short stories, especially “Pre Brunch Special”. I first read her short stories in the 1970s, and have carried a love for them all these years. It was like reading truth, then, and I have always been afraid to go back to reread them, in case they weren’t as wonderful as I remember.
But now I can reread them, because there is someone writing like that, whose work I can look forward to, instead of only looking back.
Mum, you are most welcome.
Evan, thank you!
Jane, I’ll go reread Bishop too, with thanks for the reminder of her work. And thank you also for your sponsorship. I shall hope that whatever I write for you pleases you as much!