Nevada by Evan Fleischer

Cacti growing in the bowling alley. Honky-tonk playing on a PA system that’s so weak it sounds like the music is coming from some distant shore. All this set amongst sunshine of drifting dust. A man reads a book by Tom Robbins behind the shoe counter with his feet up on the desk. He’s wearing cowboy boots, not bowling shoes. Nothing has happened. Nothing will happen. He is grateful for this. Potential bowlers come wandering in, take a look around, and wander out. His eyes drift back to the story of Sissy Hankshaw.

The man reading the book hasn’t slept in a hundred years. Might not sleep for a hundred more. It’s dark outside now, and he wanders over to the bar he installed some years ago to pour himself a drink. Cars rush past in the Nevadan dark, stars trying to sneak away from the overhanging gaze of a thousand more. Patsy Cline leads a jailbreak from all the car radios. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t need sleep, the man with the book and his boots on the counter, but he does suspect that—once he does finally find sleep—all the cacti in the bowling alley will bloom.

And maybe that is all the revelation the world needs. Or maybe those who come in will be beset by a kind of low-budget sci-fi doom, the plants turning on them as one. Or maybe coyotes will come wandering in because they just “like the smell.” Growing up, the expectation of his story was that he would be a kind of capital-M “Man” and drift over a landscape he couldn’t fully control.

A stretch of sand cracked by the sun. Unshaven sage brush you gently touch with your hand. Unherded, unheeded horse and cattle riding across the slope of the sky one by bright one. Ripples of light making azure runs. A highway that hasn’t been touched since Eisenhower, except by those who have want enough to pull into the lot of this one building, filling with what he’s decided are cacti, filling with dreams, filling.

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EVAN FLEISCHER — Evan is a writer, editor, and teacher.

Art by BEATRIZ SCATOLIN — One day, Beatriz felt the icy seawater pierce her ankles, awakening a sense of awareness about life within her. “I am here, alive,” she thought, “for I feel the water touching my skin.” Since then, her research has been grounded in the Russian Formalist concept of ostranenie—or “defamiliarization” (developed by Viktor Shklovsky)—which embodies the idea of ​​never becoming habituated to one’s surroundings, particularly the ordinary. She seeks to deepen and champion this theory within both academic circles and her own visual work, particularly in painting and ceramics.