Emily Cleaver

Prairie

Otto stood, arms folded. A man can’t outrun a prairie fire once it has a hunger. He threw this observation over his shoulder to Ma and the baby in a placid manner. Not out loud. A man doesn’t talk out loud to ghosts, even when he is alone for ten miles in every direction. That kind of behavior leads only one place.

In front of him the smoke advanced, a row of grey specters walking swiftly. The crackling grass at their feet was bright with orange creatures. It was only tens of feet from the house, just behind the ring of dirt he’d flung up when he’d first seen the low cloud advancing over the unbroken prairie.

When they’d sliced up this green desert, nicking the sod into neat 160 acre parcels and handing them out, he’d taken what was his by right. Now he was damned if he’d run.

The house was the one thing he’d built that endured, the long sod bricks shoulder to shoulder, leaning heavy and determined against each other. They’d curled thick under the plough in one unbroken length, ten feet at a time. Good sod here, south of the Platte. Ma used to say it was like living inside the prairie itself, cradled by the grass roots that held the walls together. It had been a fine spot, until last spring when the wheat didn’t push through the dark soil for two months after planting. He’d thought they’d come far enough from the river to escape the mosquitoes, but the baby had sickened till it gave up breathing, and Ma had followed it, hollowed out by grief. Grief hadn’t taken Otto, but he could hear it pouring away from him of an evening, sighing into the sand-colored fall buffalo grass.

With a drumming sound a deer burst through the wall of smoke, expressionless as it skidded and bolted round him. Fire or man was much the same to those empty brown eyes. Otto knew he should start running too, but the curving, mocking smile of fire before him gave him a mind to stay put.

The flames leapt the dirt ring after the deer, paling the evening sky and suffusing Otto’s face with orange light. Behind him he could hear Ma singing to the baby in the house.

Emily Cleaver lives in London and is trying to be a writer. Her dreams of being an astronaut never came to much and this is her back-up plan. She’s been published in a few places online so far and can be contacted here.