IOWAY

That new ghost story, as promised

Okay, now it’s ready.

A little late for Halloween. But that just means the fun gets extended? Anyway, hope you enjoy it.

And if you do…and if you want there to be more art…,please consider supporting the art you love— whether that’s mine or whoever’s—in any way you can. Spread the word. Refer people. Start discussions. Subscribe below, in any way that’s comfortable for you. Or buy me a cup of coffee.

Music round-up will be next. Coming soon are what I think will be the last set of pieces in A Bittersweet, Keening Goneness, my series about my dad (the link, by the way, is to the most recent installment, but you’ll find many more if you scroll down my posts), plus more new fiction, ghostly and otherwise.

Assuming you’re still here.

Let me know what you think. Sorry for the delay. Took me a bit of extra time to get this where I wanted it.

IOWAY

for GH1A

Phillipa hadn’t even planned to go. The bat-mitzvah was in the middle of Nebraska, and she’d hardly met this cousin, hadn’t even seen this cousin’s family in maybe twenty years, and plane fares were insane, and she’d had to have rented a car, etc., etc.

And then, apropos of nothing, she’d thought of Ellie. Remembered flying to Wichita years and years ago, for some other Nebraska-cousin event, and Ellie picking her up so they could drive and laugh and shout and sing across the Plains together.

“Are you going?” Phil had asked, as soon as she got Ellie on the phone. “To the bat-mitzvah?”

“I am now!” Ellie chirped. Always, perpetually on the verge of squeaking. Same as ever.

Or at least same as whenever they’d spoken last. Not twenty years ago. But more than ten, though they’d stayed in texting contact. So strange to think they hadn’t heard each other’s voices practically since they were kids. Since back when Ellie didn’t have kids. Pre-teen kids. Jesus.

“See you soon, Prairie Mouse,” Phil had told her.

“Get on that plane. Get on it now, C.E.M.”

Cultural Elite Mouse. A recent text-y evolution from City Mouse.

Phil had bought tickets that very day.           

Six weeks later, here they are. Driving, driving, driving through the endless flat, past WalMart towns and closed-WalMart towns, water towers, brown grass strangling in the relentless August heat, giant red TRUMP COUNTRY = OUR COUNTRY billboards.

They’ve chattered some. Phil has teased Ellie about her hair, which has gone all the way white, at age 33. And which is weirdly stunning. Beautiful. Mounded in curls around her freckled ears, and framing her face like a wool hoodie. Ellie has teased Phil about her pants. Asked if she bought them at Bloomingdale’s, and if they are gabardine.

“Do you even know what gabardine is?” Phil shoots back.

“I think?”

“Well, that would make one of us.”

“Ha!”

“Know what I do know? Gabardine’s a Jew-thing.”

“What?”

“It’s what those robes observant Jews wore were made of. Maybe still do. It’s in Shakespeare.”

“C.E.M., back in Kansas!” Ellie grabs Phil’s wrist and squeezes it, veering their car into the next lane in the process. Which would feel dangerous if there were another car anywhere in sight.

Then come long, surprising stretches of quiet. Phil asks about Ellie’s kids, and then about having kids, period. Ellie asks about not-having-kids. About immigrant-activist lawyer life.   

In between, and for the better part of the last hour, Ellie has been singing Doja Cat, bobbing and ducking and cooing and rapping like the teenager she no longer is. Wasn’t ever, really, even when she was. Not that Phi remembers.

It’s hilarious. Delightful. Like coming...not home, this was never home. Phil’s family is from Pittsburgh.

But coming back, to some part of herself even she had forgotten was there. And had not realized she missed.

“How is it that you know Doja Cat and I don’t?” she blurts.

And Ellie laughs. At her. “Gotta get out more, C.E.M. Be where the real world is. Come on, you know the words by now, I know you do. Chant it with me.”

So she does. And they do. And the sun beats down on the flaking blue hood of Ellie’s decade-old Chevy. The air conditioning blasts, and the landscape slides past without ever changing. Without any more towns, even. Corn field, corn field, fallow field, barn. Falling-down barn, corn field, THANK GOD MY MOTHER CHOSE LIFE billboard. Corn field, fallow field, barn. As though they’re not really driving, but riding one of those Disneyworld people movers that slide past still life after still life. Or else it’s the still lifes that are moving, not the car at all.

Abruptly, Ellie shoots out an arm, touches the windshield. “Beat you to Nebraska,” she says, as WELCOME TO THE CORN STATE flashes past. She laughs, wiggles her fingers in the stripe of sun. Her curls ripple with the movement.

A few hundred miles and a thousand sliding still-lifes later, in the midst of what Phil supposes qualifies here as forest—she counts at least five cottonwoods out there in the grass—Ellie slows, eases them onto the shoulder, and pauses her playlist.

“Whoops,” she says.

“What whoops?”

“Need gas. Soon.” She fishes her phone out of the well in the door.

Except for the cottonwoods, Phil sees nothing but fields. The road unspools to the horizon, utterly flat. No towns. No more barns. Not even falling-down barns. Phillipa would be less surprised to spot a woolly mammoth than a Mobil.

“Exactly how whoops are we talking?”

“Relax. Just looking up the nearest place.” Ellie’s scrunches up her mouth as she scrolls her map screen.

“Nearest, in what sense? I haven’t seen anywhere since...”

“Keep your gabardine on, C.E.M.”

“You get cell service out here?”

“Cell service. Doja Cat. Some of our boutiques even have gabardine. At least that’s what I’m told.”

She scrolls some more. Phil remembers Ellie at her own bat-mitzvah. Positively seeded with freckles Shy, too. Only the way she has been today—singing, sassing, eyes flashing as though inhabited by a thousand fireflies—when no one but Phil was watching.

“Again. Nothing I am wearing is gabardine,” she says.

“Me either.”

Phil rolls down her window. In the fields stand rows of stumpy plants, their leaves half-raised, half-extended, and drooping. Like chain gang prisoners being marched at gunpoint. Beyond them, or among them, something is buzzing. But way out there.

“What even are these crops?” she asks. She can feel her cousin’s grin, as lopsided as when they were kids, suspended from one dimple like a badly hung sheet on a clothesline. She does not turn to meet it.

“Uh,” Ellie says. “You mean the corn?”

“I thought corn was bigger. By August, I mean.”

“It used to be.”

Outside air, hot and sticky, has oozed over the edge of the window into the car, like old oil bubbling up from the ground. It carries absolutely no smell, though. Unless this is what hot and sticky smells like. Leaning out, Phil listens for the corn-leaf rustle she remembers from childhood visits. But all she hears is buzz, which could well be her own blood in her ear canals. The sound of nothing else to hear. Audible only when all the other sounds that fill her life—most people’s lives—are a thousand miles away.

On the horizon, cumulus clouds are stacking, and the sky has changed color. Turned turquoise, slate gray, aquamarine, like a coastal ocean viewed from a plane. Except upside down.

The police car appears so silently behind them that Phillipa only realizes she saw it coming once it has stopped. She feels like she’s watching a movie. A silent one. The cop getting out, wearing one of those wide-brimmed hats that hide his face. Gun holster heavy on his hip, bumping against his pants—are those gabardine, she thinks abruptly? She starts to laugh, but shudders instead. The words sundown town surface in her brain like a title card. Along with the memory of the Temple Beth-El bumper sticker she’d noted a few hours ago when dumping her carry-on in Ellie’s trunk.

“El?” she murmurs. Chiding herself for being nervous. Which doesn’t help.

The cop leans down and taps the glass.

The change in Ellie is sudden, but subtle. All that sass just blows off her face, like a milkweed cloud. She’s smiling, but a different smile, as she rolls the window down.

“Everything okay?” says the cop. He drops a hand on the roof and leans in.

Just a kid. Cartoon Nebraska, redheaded under that hat, broad-shouldered but narrow through the hips. Almost nothing for that holster to hook to. His face feels too big, or too close. The proportion wrong. Inflated. Like the baby on that THANK GOD MY MOTHER CHOSE LIFE billboard.

Ellie holds up her phone. “Just running low. Pulled over to figure out where there’s gas.”

“You should never drive and use your phone,” says the cop. Kid-cop.

Phil starts to point out that they weren’t driving, that’s why they pulled over. But Ellie only nods. Her hair wilting in the heat, curls sagging toward her shoulders. So white. Her skin, Phillipa notes, is full of little cracks. Dry as dust.

Hovering like a yellowjacket, the cop taps the roof. “Well. We got Ween eighteen miles straight ahead.”

Ween? Phil starts to laugh. But Ellie just nods, which stops her.

The cop leans further into the car. Peering at the gas meter, possibly. As though checking their story. “Mmm. Or, you saw, you got Ironwood Rapids back behind you. Not more than eight miles.”

You mean that collapsed barn? Phillipa thinks. But definitely doesn’t say that. When, exactly, had she actually become Cultural Elite Mouse? This cop-kid has only tried to help, hasn’t done or said a single thing to make her edgy or defensive.

Except pull up behind them.

Where, exactly, had he even come from? They hadn’t passed another car in at least an hour. No town or inhabited building either.

Other than Ironwood Rapids. Apparently.

Ellie tilts her phone toward the cop. “Iaway?”

For a second, the guy looks startled. “Iaway.” He taps the roof twice this time, as though completing some Great Plains Freemason greeting. Iaway, Youaway, wealloneday away, away... “You bet, Iaway. There is a pump there. Was, at least. You could try it. Little off your route.”

“Closer than Ween.”

“Oh, much.” With a nod, he withdraws his outsized head and straightens. ”I’ll let you get on. Drive safe, now. No texting.”

In the mirror, Phil watches him meander back to his car. He doesn’t glance around, doesn’t appear to be noting Ellie’s license plate. But having settled in his vehicle, he just sits there. Doesn’t even turn it on.

“Okay, here’s what I want to know,” Phil says, as Ellie drops the phone into her lap and restarts the engine. “How did that guy even know we stopped?”

Only when they’re back on the road does the cop car lurch to life. It spits gravel as it leaves the shoulder, speeds up. Phil tenses, waiting for the red-and-blue flash. But the cop just sweeps up alongside, sketches a wave, and hurtles off.          

“What are you babbling about?” says Ellie, staring down at the map on her phone in exactly the way she shouldn’t. “There’s a right turn coming up here somewhere. Watch for it.”

“I mean, how did he know?”

“He saw us?”

“When? From where? We haven’t seen anyone else for like—”

“Oops, shit.” Ellie slams on the brakes. They skid to a stop, slightly sideways in the middle of the road.

Phil forces her hands down from where they’ve been gripping the dashboard. Which is cracked, peeling. Coated in dust.

Ellie flicks on the blinker.

“Oh, yeah,” Phil snaps. “Good thing you let everyone know we’re turning.”

“Shut up, dick. I told you to watch for the turn.”

“That’s a turn? There’s no sign. You really think that’s a road?”

“C.E.M.,” Ellie says, and spins them off the highway into the corn.

The road, to Phil’s surprise, turns out to be road. Well paved, newly lined. The broken yellow down the center like a freshly seeded furrow. Almost as though actual people drive this. Live here.

“It is weird,” Ellie says. “Now that you mention it. That cop. Where did he pop out of?”

“Right?”

“He got there so fast.”

“Like, ten seconds after we stopped moving.”

“Like he sensed us.”

“A disturbance in the force.”

Ellie laughs. “An intruder in the hive.”

They drive for what seems a long time. The land stays flat. The sky ahead darkening, now, as the storm—way out there, counties away—closes over the blue and swallows it. No buildings anywhere.

“You sure Iron Lung’s not closer?” Phil says eventually.

Ellie swats her. “Iaway’s our place. You’ll see. It’s going to be the county jewel. Wall Drug of Nebraska. Tourist mecca. All roads lead there.”

“So this is a road?”

She’s playing her role, now. Delivering lines. Right on cue, Ellie swats her again. Lightning cracks open the clouds over the fields. Instinctively, Phil starts to count. Old childhood habit. Seconds between lightning and thunder equals miles between you and storm. But the thunder never comes.

“What kind of name is Iaway?” she says eventually. “Maybe that cop was just saying, ‘I’m away.’ Prairie phantom-cop lingo for Thattaway.”

“It’s on Google Maps, dick. I was the one who found it, remember? Also, yes, it’s a name. A totally appropriate one. They’re the tribe that was here, I think. Or near here. One of the tribes. Although I think the tribe name is spelled I-O—”

“Whoa, what? Stop!”

Jamming the brakes again, Ellie hurls them both into their seatbelts, which yank taught, snap them back.

“Ow!” Phil snaps. “Could you cut that out?”

To Phil’s surprise, redness flares in her cousin’s cheeks like flame at the edges of paper. “Hey, El, I was only kid—”

“Why did you do that? I really thought I was about to hit something.”

Phil lets go of her seatbelt strap. Her gaze flicks to the empty road. Another twenty, thirty miles, and maybe they’d have smashed into some rain. “Like what?”

“How would I know? Cat? Deer? You’re the one who yelled stop.”

“There are corn deer? Do deers eat corn?”

“Phil. Why’d you yell stop?”

She gestures behind them. “That.”

The building really does look freshly yanked out of the ground, like one of those just-constructed Amish house frames. Its wood is the same color as the stumpy corn. Almost no color at all.

“What does that sign say?” Ellie leans out sideways, anger forgotten. Or at least gone. She squints into her rearview mirror. “Donuts? Ooh. Donuts.”

“Also greeting cards. Which is why I yelled stop.”

“You’re excited about greeting cards? Are you a collector or something?”

“I forgot one. I need one, for the little bat-mitzvot. Come on.”

For a second, Ellie just looks at her. That lopsided smile sneaks up the side of her face. “Sure. Let’s go see.” Pulling a U, she points them back down the road. There’s no parking lot, per se, only a turnout. The kind of place you stop to take pictures, Phil thinks. If there were anything to photograph.

 Breadbasket of the Earth. Phil tries to remember where she learned that phrase, and whether it applies here. The place that sustains all other places.

But is no actual place itself?

Ellie is already out on the gravel, waiting. Lopsided-smiling. With a sigh, Phil joins her. They move together toward the shop.

Up close, it does have color. Pink trim around the doorway, dull green fading into the shingles, with splotches of darker green spattered across it like lily pads on the surface of a pond. Except dry. Flaking. And old. The screen door is tight black mesh, impossible to see through. Other than faint wind, and a couple far away birds, all Phil hears is buzz. Or hum. Possibly from inside.

“Okay, okay,” she says. “You’re right. Let’s go. They won’t have bat-mitzvah cards.”

But Ellie already has a hand on the door handle. “They might. And they definitely have donuts.” She takes a big inhale, closes her eyes.

“Ellie.”

But her cousin has vanished. Phil resists an impulse to spin on her heel, go back to the car. Let Ellie bring her a donut. Or not, and laugh at her. Whatever. Grabbing the door before it shuts, she marches into the shop.

Which is green-carpeted, clean, brightly lit. Like a pharmacy. In fact, given the white metal shelves full of dispensary drawers and stacked pill bottles behind the counter, that’s exactly what this is. Of course it is. The only one in the county, probably. No need to advertise or sign it. Everyone knows.

The hum, Phil realizes, might be the fluorescents overhead. It’s the sort of sound they make when they twitch, though these don’t.

“Help you?” says the woman behind the counter, to Phil. Ellie has already made her way to the rack of greeting cards on the back wall.

Phil starts to move that way, but tries smiling at the woman—women—gathered at the counter. Three of them, all that weird no-age she has always associated with visits to Wichita. That is, their ages are impossible to discern. Their hair could be white—the color of Ellie’s, now, though Ellie’s is brighter—or white-blonde. Their skin weathered, but not wrinkled. Like worn-in canvas. Canvas serving purpose, whatever that might be. They’re all watching Phil, not Ellie.

The shopkeeper—pharmacist?—lifts a hinged section of countertop to step out. No lab coat. Blue cardigan, machine made, from a department store somewhere, not hand-knitted.

“It’s okay,” Phil says quickly. “Is it okay if we just...”

From the greeting card rack, Ellie glances around. Quirk-smile blooming. Phil feels herself blush. Not just fish out of water, but hooked fish, flapping pointlessly. Hoisted in mid-air.

Which could be why Ellie insisted they come in.

The woman shrugs, lowers the countertop and leans on it next to her friends. Customers.

Is this Ioway? Phil wonders. She starts to ask if the pump’s out back, but decides to leave negotiating with the natives to her cousin. As she makes her way to the back, she wonders when she last blushed. About anything, or anyone.

The women watch. Of course they do, what else is there to look at? The pharmacist has her palms on the counter, and keeps tapping one index finger up and down, but not hard enough to make sound. Like an insect proboscis probing for nectar.

Ellie hands some cards to Phil.

“We have a wide selection,” calls the counter woman.

“You do,” Ellie calls back.

“Looking for anything particular?”

For a second—only noticeable because somehow Phil still really knows her cousin, or at least her rhythm—Ellie hesitates. Then says, “Just the right one. If we see it.”

“You’ll let me know.”

Phil looks at the cards Ellie gave her. The women resume their conversation, but continue watching, the way you would flies crawling up a window, when you’re too tired or bored to swat them.

“What are you doing?” Phil half-whispers. Ellie keeps handing her cards.

You Made It to the Top! says the first, over a crayon-style sketch of a graduation tassel atop a mountain of sparkles. Inside, the card reads, “Welcome to the long, long descent!”

The next card just says, DAD, with a picture of a tie on the front. And inside: You said you didn’t want another darned tie. So we got you this!”

The third has braided flower wreaths against a light blue background. With clouds. No writing on the front. Inside, more wreaths on blank white backdrop, and the words, “We’re sorry for your loss.”

As though the sky got lost.

“Wedding, more bereavement—lot of bereavement—Mother’s Day, ooh, wow, getting a jump on the Valentines,” Ellie’s not whispering, exactly. But keeping her voice down. “Hey, Confirmation! Getting closer.”

Phil doesn’t glance around. Doesn’t say, Sssh. The hum, whatever’s making it, seems quieter back here. As though there’s a bulb out. Which there isn’t.

“Here you go.” Holding out her latest find, Ellie looks remarkably like Phil remembers her at age eight, on ice-cream truck days in the park near her family’s Wichita house, passing Phil a Drumstick she’d just bought with money their mothers gave them. It’s the same face, Phil thinks. Just paler. Etched with those papery lines. Like a Polaroid of that face.

Cautiously, as though expecting her touch to trigger some embedded sensor and set the card laughing or flapping, Phil takes it. This one’s surprisingly pretty. A watery, Impressionist-style wash of red and green bulbs. Gestural flowers, or maybe balloons. Or fish. The only words are on the inside.

IT’S YOUR BIG DAY.

“Your best option. Closest they’ve got,” Ellie says.

“Not close enough.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“I didn’t beg.”

“Forgetters can’t be choosers.”

Phil replaces the card in the rack, half-expecting the lights to twitch, for some reason. Or the hum to intensify. Neither happens. “You’re enjoying this too much,” she murmurs.

“And I don’t even have my donut, yet.”

Ellie strolls off toward the women. Almost as if she’s from here. Which she is. Kind of.

“Oh,” says the pharmacist when Ellie asks. “These two just chowed ‘em all.”

That sentence sounds all wrong in the pharmacist’s voice. Drained of meaning. As though read from a cue card by an untutored actress. But she nods. “Can turn the fryer back on, if you like. Heat the oil up, if you want to wait.”

Those sentences, on the other hand, sound practiced, and communicate everything they’re meant to. All the layers: You won’t ask that, though, will you; You’re probably in a hurry; Got to get back to that busy life you’re living out there...

What was it that cop had said? I’ll let you get on?

Same exact thing. Whatever that is.

Phil starts for the door. Ellie follows, but turns back. “Iaway?” she calls, gesturing up the road.

The pharmacist raises one plucked eyebrow. “Iaway?”

“The town?”

All three women laugh. It’s the first sound Phil has heard from the other two. One of them positively beams. “Long time since anyone’s asked about Iaway.”

Her companion nods. “Only people in Iaway are in Iaway. And the only ones going there know where it is.”

Even Ellie seems unsure how to answer that. “Thanks,” she says eventually, but like it’s a question.

The pharmacist points up the road.

“Can’t miss it?” Ellie says.

“Drive safe.”

The screen door swings shut, sealing pill bottles and Sorry for Your Loss cards and all three women inside. Phil catches a last glimpse of them at the counter. Hovering. She wonders how long they’ve been there, today. And how often they come. Or leave.

Back in the car, even Ellie sits silent for a few seconds. Then she keys the ignition and aims them down the road, deeper into the fields. The corn seems to be shrinking with each passing mile, and also losing color. Through the glass, the land doesn’t look tilled or fertile; more like a diorama in some rarely visited natural history museum.

Corn fields. Early 21st Century Anthropocene. Diminished Reserve.

Is that this area? Phil vaguely remembers Ellie’s dad using the term once, for somewhere around here. For land designated for one of the indigenous groups, then taken back, bit by bit. Or something.

“That was weird,” Phil murmurs. Another sign flashes past. Handmade, staked on a post at the edge of a corn row. Both the wood and the lettering perfectly straight. Like a sign in a diorama. Again.

ALL LIVES MATTER.

After a few seconds, when Ellie hasn’t answered, Phil reconsiders. “Was that weird? I mean, obviously, everyone here has occasions to mark, too. Of course they do.”

“Exactly.”

“It’s just...that was a lot of confirmation cards.”

“More bereavements.”

Which makes sense. Though Phil isn’t sure why it should. Maybe just because they haven’t seen any kids, in this whole state? On the other hand, where would they have? Picnicking in the collapsed barns? Playing kick the can in corn not even tall enough to hide them?

Ellie is frowning at the dashboard again.

“Hey, El? Just how ‘whoops’ is our fuel situation?”

“Steady there, C.E.M. Wayz says Ioway’z not even two miles farther.”

Phil forces a grin of her own. “I’m supposed to hear that you spelled that with a ‘z’, right? Cute.”

“Alway-z,” Ellie murmurs. Still watching the gas gauge.

Out in the fields, two of those giant metal irrigators tilt into the rows like the aliens in War of the Worlds. There’s a tractor, too. Also not moving. And a guy? One guy, in a baseball hat, all by himself. Possibly a scarecrow.

No crows, though. Phil hasn’t seen a single crow.

Is that weird?

“Okay, good, phew,” Ellie says, and suddenly they’re here.  Not that there are signs or anything.

But what else could this be?

“Holy cow...” Phil murmurs, and Ellie slows. Then they just float. And stare.

There’s a post office. Or at least a dusty brick building with a sign over the door that says, POST OFFICE. The brick building next to it has no roof.

The street they’re on is MAIN. The green, weathered sign at the intersection with the road they’d come in on says so, though the I is just a shadow, a paler imprint where an I was once. A long time ago. The asphalt ahead looks pitted with potholes, but drivable. On both sides of the street, stunted Cottonwoods thrust out of buckled pavement like gnarled hands clawing toward light. 

They pass an A-frame, its roof and windows intact, though layers of dust have rendered the glass completely opaque. Across the front door, masking-taped to the wood, Phil sees another cardboard sign.  It says, FOR.

The building next to the A-frame looks like a 7/11, its door open. Fluorescent light, the same twitch-less hospital white as the light in the pharmacy, spills into the dirt parking lot. Actual cars have parked there. Two of them. From one, a square, no-color Buick, a woman with a walker has just emerged. Her companion—attendant? husband?—moves slowly around beside her, leaves one hand hovering near but not touching her back. His red-and-gray beard looks less grown than flung against his neck like an old wash cloth. The woman glances up as Ellie and Phil pass, but the guy doesn’t. Their movements seem automatic, purposeful but free of conscious direction. The dust that rises around them makes them seem to flicker.

Like we’re watching old film, Phil thinks. Home movies. So fragile that she half expects that sudden bloom of white as even this hazy sunlight burns right through them.

“Jesus Christ,” she says.

“What?” says Ellie.

She’s going maybe ten miles an hour, even though they’ve just passed a dust-crusted sign that read 25. They pass a double lot overrun with prairie grass. Assuming that was ever a lot, and not just grass.

“Ioway,” Phil hears herself say

“Keep your eyes open for that pump.”

“What a dumb white-people tradition. Naming places after the people who were there before you chased them off or penned them in or annihilated them.”

“I think that’s a most-people dumb.”

Ellie slows further. To conserve gas, Phil realizes, not in response to what they’re seeing. This impossible place. Ghost of a place. “What do people even do here?”

“This,” Ellie says. As if that explains anything.

They stop. For a second, Phil thinks the worst has happened. They’ve waited too long, and now they’re going to have to get out and talk to people. Find...jerrycans. Whatever those are. Assuming anyone here will actually talk to them. Then she sees the deer.

It’s standing maybe ten feet ahead, straddling a pothole. Its coat surprisingly shaggy, the dusty color of the corn, and all the windows in town, and the people. Both its antlers have broken off near the nubs, and because of that, and the way it stands—one back leg up, less poised than posed—it reminds Phil more of an abandoned bike than an animal.

Except for its eyes, which are dark, and wet. And alive. Watching, to see what they’ll do.

Beautiful, Phil thinks. “Hello,” she whispers. She can feel her cousin’s glance. Awaits the mockery.

Instead, Ellie also says, “Hello. Little thing.”

It is little, Phil realizes. Is it little? It’s thin, for sure. Ribs protruding, and not even symmetrically. Like bent spokes.

They all watch each other. Deer, city mouse, prairie mouse. The deer blinks. Slowly. To Phil, that feels almost like a nod. Practically a welcome. Gingerly, barely touching that back leg to what’s left of the asphalt, it limps the rest of the way across the street, and then, at some unseen signal, vaults into the long grass.

“Oh, Phil, phew. There it is!”

At first, following where Ellie points, she sees only bright blue sky, framed by the doorway of another roofless building. A long time ago, during her junior year abroad, Phil and her fellow exchange students took a tramp up the Welsh coast, and they kept coming across the ruins of castles in fields. Mostly just piles of stone. Crumbling frames for the sky and the rolling hills. Gestural castles, or stage ones, left open so the audience could see inside. Memories of castles.

That’s what every single structure here reminds her of. Except for ever having been castles.

Her gaze drifts past the doorway, along the jagged top of another crumbling stone wall, and she finally sees.

“Ah. Phew, indeed. Why are we waiting?”

Backing up, Ellie turns down that street toward the gas pump. There’s just the one, on a cement island beside a wooden hut that could, maybe, be a tiny shop. It looks more like an outhouse. The kind found near frontier homesteads dug out of the plains. Half-buried, like prairie dog burrows. If there’s a window, it’s around the other side. There’s a door, and it’s intact, but it’s closed.

Ellie eases the car up to the pump and parks. The second she turns off the engine, Phil becomes aware again of the heat. It doesn’t so much blaze down as seal around them, as though there’s a grass fire somewhere close. Nevertheless, Phil props open her door as Ellie climbs out. From overhead, or maybe down the block, she hears that hum again. Or a hum. Faulty or failing power lines, possibly. Unless that’s the sound power lines always make, but everything else is quiet enough that you can hear them, here.

Back on Ma(i)n Street, the woman with the walker and her companion have come out of the sort-of-7/11. But instead of getting back in their Buick, they lean against it. Gazing this way.

And again, why wouldn’t they? Practically a parade, we are. State visit from Out There. Only now does Phil note the plastic American flag tacked to the antenna on the Buick’s roof. The Stars & Stripes, not Stars & Bars.

So why is her skin prickling?

“Shit,” Ellie says, and smacks the nozzle she has plugged into the gas tank. “Shit, shit.”

“What?” says Phil.

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you saying shit?”

“No. Shit, comma, nothing. No gas. Dead pump. We’re not going to make it back to the freeway, Phil.”

Past the gas station hut, way down the block—if “block” is the right word, since there are no more structures out there, just pitted road emptying into grass—three more people have appeared. Two wear baseball caps, and carry long-neck bottles. Between them, an arm linked in each of their elbows, strolls a barefoot woman, her hair limp on her shoulders. They advance, slowly. Phil can’t make out their faces. Their arms stay linked, as though playing Red Rover Come Over.

As though daring Phil and Ellie to try.

Or else paying no attention to them at all.

“Come on,” Phil mutters. “Maybe...” She leans over the pump. It looks like something from a vintage Route 66 postcard. Or a Fischer-Price playset. Its body metal, but mummified in rust, and fragile somehow. As if it could blow away with the next wind. Its glass face furred, like the windows on the FOR building back on Ma(i)n. Through this dust, though, Phil can still make out the number display. It’s the kind that ticks as you fill your tank, the numbers flipping upward as though someone were in there turning them.

Or they would. If the pump still worked.

Overhead—or just nearby—the hum intensifies.

“What if...” Phil circles the pump, glances toward the closed door of the hut. Probably, one of them should go knock. Or just go in there. This being a gas station. She reaches out, half-expecting the pump to shrink back like a stray cat. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but the whole thing does seem to give off...not heat, exactly. But not deadness. And yet, she can’t quite make herself touch it. Behind her, from the street, comes the slow churn of tires.

“Hey. Phil?’ Ellie whispers. Right as Phil finds what she’s looking for.

A switch. Just a little metal knuckle, sticking out. Underneath, still legible through the fur, is the word OFF. There’s a word above the switch, too, even more obscured, barely there, like the Ma(i)n Street ‘I’. But it still says ON.

The lever looks almost melted, too soft. Like a spider sac. On a dead spider. But it’s solid enough when Phil’s skin comes in contact. And warm, though that obviously could be from the heat in the air. She flicks the switch.

“Need help?” calls a buzzy male voice.

For one disorienting second, Phil thinks she has triggered something inside the pump. As though it really is an old children’s toy. Pull the string, and it moos. Quacks. Asks if they need help.

“Oh!” Ellie chirps, her hand back on the nozzle still stuck into her Chevy’s gas tank. “Good one, Phil.” She squeezes the nozzle. Phil can’t hear or see anything that suggests gas flowing. But she can smell it.

The pick-up truck that has glided down the street to them is a dark blue Dodge, not that old. But coated, like everything here. The guy who called to them hangs out the passenger window, his cap MAGA-red, though the cursive scrawled across its brim says HUSK.

Not -ers, Phil thinks. At least, not anymore. Just HUSK.

The guy waves. His bare arm completely encased in thin, white down, as though he just got tarred and feathered. His eyes invisible under the hat, but his smile plain enough. Age impossible to guess. Not a kid, that’s all Phil can discern.

“Know how to work that?” the guy says.

“Just figured it out.”

Silence. For just a beat too long for normal conversation rhythm. Phil’s conversation rhythm, anyway.

“Okay!” calls the guy. The furred arm retracts, and the window rolls halfway up. But the truck doesn’t move. Stays parked across the dip in the pavement that constitutes the gas station’s entrance. And exit.

Not that it would be hard, or do any damage to anything, for Ellie to drive across across the strip of dead grass and over the little lip of curb to get back to the road.

In Ellie’s hands, the nozzle twitches, and the black hose connecting it to the pump jumps, slithers in mid-air like a snake. Settles. Coughs out more gas.

“Um...” Phil says.

“Sssh,” says Ellie, not looking up. As though she’s talking to the fuel hose. Coaxing it. She makes a show of fishing her phone out of her pocket. Only as she puts it to her ear does she glance toward the truck. Sketch a wave. “Thanks, guys,” she calls.

The truck stays where it is. The downy arm does not reappear. The driver remains in shadow.

If there was a breeze, it’s gone, now. The light hasn’t changed, is still the same hazy, mid-summer white it has been all day.

The exact same. Phil feels almost grateful for the hum. For the sensation of hearing it, since that’s almost the only sensation she has.

The downy arm unfolds again from the truck’s window, and HUSK leans out over it. “You take care,” he calls.

The arm retracts. The window rolls up. There’s another pause. Which could be so that whoever’s in there can unwrap gum, for all Phil knows. Or key an address into a GPS. She isn’t sure why that thought makes her laugh. It just does.

The truck shudders into motion. Heads out of town toward the Red Rover Three, who’ve stopped maybe fifty yards away. They’re standing right in the middle of the road. Like that deer was. Except nothing like that deer. Phil thinks she hears the barefoot woman laugh. But they’re too far for that to be true.

“We away?” she murmurs.

“Away-z.” With a triumphant flourish, Ellie extracts the nozzle, wheels to hook it back to the pump, and freezes. “Fuck me,” she whispers.

At first, Phil thinks Ellie is looking at the hut. That when she turns around, she’ll see the door open, and people spilling out. The women from the greeting card store. With linked arms, caked in down. Like husks, she thinks, and feels ridiculous. Makes herself turn, and sees the door of the hut. Still closed.

And not what Ellie is looking at.

She’s staring at the pump. Right into its face.

“El,” Phil snaps. And then sees.

The bee—wasp, of course it’s a wasp, what else moves like that, has a stinger like that, is that fucking long, the length of her middle finger at least—is crawling up the furred glass. The other side of the glass.

Inside the pump. Which should be a relief.

Isn’t.

Also—absurdly—she can definitely hear the pump, now that they’re done using it. Unless they’ve been hearing it all along. Because that’s where the hum is coming from.

Some of it, anyway. Not all. This whole town—whole county—hums.

A second wasp crawls out from between the numbers. Moves down the glass toward the first, and passes it. Both of them just going about their business. Little prairie wasp gas station attendants.

Except not little.

“Think we pay them?” Ellie asks, her hand clutched to her chest. She’s smiling, sort of. Trying to.

Phil’s grateful, all the same. “Does one tip?”

Down the block, the Dodge has stopped beside the Red Rover Three. To talk, or whatever. But none of them seem to be doing that, or even acknowledging each other. They’re just...in the road.

Across it. Like a roadblock.

Fishing two twenties out of her purse, Ellie leaves them on top of the pump, weighted down with pebbles. She doesn’t exactly flinch as her hands brush metal, but her movement kicks a cloud of floating white specks into the air. They halo around her. Hover over her beautiful hair like a gnat cloud. As though the pump is flaking away.

Like the roofs, Phil thinks. The ‘i’ on Ma(i)n Street. The corn, in its rows. The skin on HUSK-guy’s arm. The very light.

“Freeway time?” she mutters, moving her lips as little as possible. As though she doesn’t want the group down there, or the old people in the Buick behind them, to overhear. As though any of them could.

“Freeway. Coffee. Doja Cat. First Thai restaurant we come to for lupper.”

They don’t rush, just climb back in the car. Don’t lock the doors, why should they? Phil doesn’t hold her breath as Ellie keys the ignition, eases them out of the station. Ellie doesn’t, either. She doesn’t turn on music, though, and she goes slow. So slow. Don’t mind us. Nothing to see here. In the sideview mirror, Phil watches the Red Rover Three. They’re where they were. Not moving. Not flaking away. Surprisingly solid, in fact. Though weirdly translucent in the hazy summer sun.

In the parking lot of the not-7/11, the Buick sits in its space. The old woman and the guy are in it, but the car isn’t on. Through the window, Phil can still hear hum. Thinks she can. Past the store, down Ma(i)n, she sees more houses. Ruins of houses.

These people’s houses?

Only a few. Wood and brick. All of them tilting on their foundations, roofs drawing back from their corners like old gums. Phil can see sky through the gaps. And yet they’re all still standing.

The deer has returned to the grass in that abandoned lot. Or it’s the same deer, and it never left. Is scavenging there, for anything still edible. It looks up as they pass. Its skin stretched back from its mouth and down its ribs. Like paper.

Be safe, little thing, Phil thinks again. Little hungry thing. It occurs to her that she understands this deer’s life more than the lives of anyone who lives here. And can communicate with it more clearly.

What is the difference between left alone and left behind?

That’s what she’s thinking as Ellie turns off Ma(i)n, back onto the freshly paved, well-tended street through the cornfields. The straight shot back to the highway. Phil doesn’t comment as Ellie presses down the pedal. Increases their speed. But she notices.

“They really have Thai food in Nebraska?” she says.

Ellie’s laugh positively bursts from her. Because she’s relieved, too. Though all she says is, “C.E.M., unleashed.”

“Will it be edible Thai food?”

“Just wait to you taste our pad see ewwwwww.”

“Ewwww,” Phil says.

They both laugh, which drowns out the hum. Or would, except the hum gets louder. Phil rolls her window more tightly shut, staring through it at the hunched-over corn. Dwarf-corn army, all in rows. Baking to death. Leaves flaking, but not away. Dust in their earth. Wasps in their ears.

Like paper, Phil is thinking. Wasps in their ears. Inside the pump. This whole world humming...

“Mango sticky rice,” Ellie says. “What I wouldn’t do right now for...”

She stops talking. Pumps the brakes.

They both just stare.

The police car is at the turnout for the pharmacy. But it’s parked sideways across the road. Red and blue light flashing. The redheaded cop from earlier leans against it, arms folded, next to the counter-woman from the pharmacy and both of her friends. All of them faded as the corn. Just standing there. Motionless as wax figures in their own Natural History diorama. Skin dusted with the white specks roiling all around them. Sinking into them.

Nesting?

For just a second, when the wasp crawls off the roof of the Chevy onto the windshield, Phil thinks it’s in here with them. She almost screams.

Ellie does scream.

But the wasp is outside. It scuttles down the glass, stops right at eye level, watching. If that’s what wasps do.

“El,” Phil says, and turns to her cousin. Sees her face.

Expressionless. Motionless. Her arms extended, seemingly glued by the palms to the steering wheel. White curls drooping, and the white specks pouring out of the air conditioning vents swirling into them and down her neck. Hovering all over her. Vibrating with her breath.

Like wings.