LAURA PRITCHETT
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BLUESTEM
We’ve passed John Wayne’s birthplace, the Russell Stover Candy Factory, home of Astronaut Gus Grissom, the House of Corn. Various billboards announce this to us, plus also that Jesus Loves, Abortion Stops a Beating Heart, and Seatbelts Save Lives. “Our lives are tenuous.” Nova nods at a series of small billboards that warn of the dangers of drinking and driving. “This planet is fucked. We just like to mark it in various ways. Or amuse ourselves in the meantime.” Then we pass a small white cross that verifies the flimsy world she speaks of, and I know she’s lonely and therefore angry, and so I say, “Yeah, think about that lost life, what dreams went unrealized.” “Exactly,” she says. “That’s true even for us who go on living.” Then, as she intended, I register the fact she’s referring to herself. I nod to let her know she’s been heard and turn to put my arm out the window and wave my hand up and down against the rushing air. The car is loud with windroar, a noise created not just by the current wind but the air that’s been rushing in for hundreds of miles, some combo of heat and wind and land and salience of our own demise and fundamental unimportance and it all makes me feel dazed and I wonder what this trip would be like in a new, air-conditioned car. I can’t imagine it, can’t imagine us not being sticky and smelly and burnt with the heat and noise, can’t imagine not having tangles in my long raspy hair, her not having tangles in her long black hair, can’t imagine being sleek and elegant or looking cared for. I equally can’t imagine being fully happy, fully content, and I hate that about me and so I reach out to touch her thigh and say, “There is no wealth but time,” but I don’t actually want to hear her answer, which will be, “No, Ruthie, there is no wealth but love,” or some other bitterness, so I turn up the music to fill the air even more. The prairie stretches out of sight and the dimming rays of the sun light up the fields in a soft glow. The wheat has started to turn. The green fields are streaked with gold, and there’s a few places where the stalks are a little of both, caught up in the space between living and dying, which is what the song is about, which is what the billboards are about, and I think to say something about this when I see a flash, a brown blur. It happens at once: Nova slams on the brakes, a deep thud sounds through the car, my body is thrown forward, air escapes my mouth in a cry, the car jolts to a stop. A quiet follows, a buzzing silence that presses at my ears. Nova and
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Volume 17 • 2022
