Twelve Miles Outside Kindred, North Dakota by Molly Weisgrau

I get a text from a friend saying that the woman from the internet, whom neither of us know, whose husband every day would update his page to say that she was still fighting, had died. I stop at a gas station, one of two in Kindred, and search her name. “Dead at 30” reads the headline. The comments do not like “Dead at 30.” They wish instead for “Passed Away Peacefully.” They call the writer insensitive, crass, cruel.

Back on the road, the land opens up out of nowhere, and all around are stacks of red and beige rock. They remind me of a toy I played with as a child, where I poured magic sand into a plastic tub of water and watched it squiggle all the way to the bottom and pile into mountains. The highway is empty but the rest stop is full, and the strangers looking out at the sights speak of bison in the valleys. I join the line of them squinting at the horizon, but I’d looked and looked for a moose in Montana, and these are just little brown dots, and soon enough everything is flat and four hours have passed, and when I cupped my hands around my underwater mountains and lifted them to my face the sand was a dry pile again.

Eventually I’m walking through a set of automatic doors and telling a woman sitting behind a counter my name. She slides over an envelope with two plastic cards, though there’s only one of me. “I like your glasses,” I tell her. They’re pink and cat-eye shaped. When she looks up at me there’s a stripe of brown in the blue iris of her left eye.

“What’s not to like?” she says. “Room 221.”

The bed is far too big and peeling back the starched sheets sounds like walking on packed snow and I think of the time I lay with a boy in a room just like this. Everything was so quiet and so still that I could hear the sound of his eyelashes brushing against the pillowcase when he blinked. I listened to those mothwing flutters like they were morse code, but soon the silence turned cold, and he got up and paced the room, asking where I wanted to go to dinner.

I ripped a loose thread off my t-shirt sleeve. “I wish you’d just pick.”

He sighed and pulled me out of bed and handed me a penny from his pocket. “Heads is pizza, tails is burgers,” he said, kneading my shoulders while I threw the coin in the air and caught it.

Tonight I’m at a mostly empty Chinese restaurant. There’s a paper lantern dangling low enough above the table that I think it may hit my forehead when I lean over my bowl of rice. A gray couple sits at a booth in the corner. He squeezes a lemon wedge into her iced tea and then his. She moves the flower centerpiece out of the way and grabs his hand, but they do not speak. When the waitress comes they order by pointing to items on the sticky menus. Then they begin to speak with their hands. I look at my own hands, which have never uttered a word, at the wispy lines that a woman in a velvet chair once told me meant I would live a happy life, but suffer from kidney problems. Four children, she said. A strong heart. I wonder, if I filled each crease with asphalt patch and started over, would they come back the same?

I lie in the middle of the too-big bed and flip through cable TV. Reports of unseasonably hot temperatures. Americans moving to Tunisia and Thailand for their foreign fiancés. Low-budget movies with oil-slicked men that wear big gold watches and get wrapped up in elaborate spy missions but always find time to fly beautiful women from the hotel bar around in helicopters.

Tomorrow I’ll be back on the highway. I’ll pass through a tiny town where, on my seventh birthday, I slurped spaghetti noodles coated in butter and felt the saccharine squish of a maraschino cherry between my molars. The last day I remember time feeling slow. When dinner was done we drove home alongside a cornfield that went for miles, past a clot of flashing police cars, the officers shining their lights off in the distance, searching for a fugitive that had disappeared into the stalks. On birthdays after that I discovered a frog with a mangled leg in the birdbath, the peachy heaviness of staying up until sunrise, the tickle of someone kissing the dandelion fuzz between my eyebrows, the hollow clink of opening an empty mailbox.

Sooner or later I’ll arrive at another place. Four new walls to wake up inside every morning, a window that bounces sunlight into zigzagging patterns in the late afternoon, a pile of dusty books on the floor. Perhaps I’ll stay there until I feel the first twinge of darkness in my kidneys. And I hope I’m not dead at thirty, but if I am, I’d prefer “Dead at 30,” because I don’t think there’s much peace in that sort of dying. Without moose, or bison, or even antelope, I have to settle for cows, fields and fields of them, and I remember that last slow night, watching out the window from the edge of my bed, waiting for a shimmer in the corn.

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MOLLY WEISGRAU — Molly is a writer from Lawrence, Kansas. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University and was managing editor of the literary magazine 45th Parallel. Her work appears in North Dakota Quarterly, Hobart, Waif Magazine, The Dodge, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Chicago with her cat, Mark Rothko. Read more at mollyweisgrau.com.

Art by FRANCESCA LEADER — Francesca Leader is a self-taught writer and artist whose images have appeared on the covers of Pithead Chapel, Cobra Milk, the Adanna Literary Review, the Harpy Hybrid Review, and Cream Scene Carnival. Her Cobra Milk cover was nominated for a 2023 Best of the Net award for visual art. Her debut poetry chapbook, “Like Wine or Like Pain,” is available from Bottlecap Press. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.