Into the Rust

a short story

art by Kody Kohlman

She liked things old because of that farmhouse.

Where she grew up barefoot on creaking floors, playing in the lace draperies with her barn cats, lying at night in her four-post bed listening to conversations drift through the transom above the door . . . sometimes conversations she wasn’t supposed to hear.

And so, when it came time to leave, the shine of the city held no luster in her eyes. She pushed away the highrise job her wits could have landed, bought a 1987 Volkswagon camper van and pointed its snub nose west. Taking off for those vast and open spaces in pursuit of something more ruthless: her past.

With dust in the air, bouncing down the old highway, listening to the groan of the coil springs beneath her van, she drove deep into the desert toward the edge of the reservation.

She had discovered her Navajo blood after her mother had stuffed a DNA test in her Christmas stocking and she desperately wondered what love had put those drops into her Scotch-Irish line.

Signs of it had been bleached by generations like bones in the sun. But the question—that vacant, tearing silence of her ancestors—burned in her like a rising juniper ember, flickering orange against the inky night.

Sagebrush musk rolled through her windows. The red sandstone towers rose proud and stoic into the valley of monuments like ancient elders holding space in the round and turquoise sky.

A deserted roadside stall appeared in the heat. She stopped and read the faded sign: cold drinks, fry bread, jewelry, native crafts. A frayed American flag wrapped itself lazily around its post. She stepped under the tin roof, thick with patina from winter storms and summer suns.

The long empty table creaked under her weight as she leaned against it, and she stared at the stone towers miles away. The wind whispered through the empty stall, playing with the tips of her hair, drifting out unchanged . . . like a conversation she wasn’t supposed to hear.

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“Fiction is the lie that tells the truth.” Neil Gaiman said that. Sometimes I write short stories (instead of essays). It’s nice to forget the facts once in a while, you know? I’ll throw these out every so often, mix it up.

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