Beyond the Horizon by Ryan Ireland

Author:Ryan Ireland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary Fiction, American West, Westerns, Anti-Westerns, Gothic, Nineteenth Century, American History, Bandits, Native Americans, Cowboys, The Lone Ranger, Forts, Homesteads, Duels, Grotesque, Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2015-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

Quite some time passed before the stranger saw anyone come near the village. Once or twice, well past dusk, when Ursa Major and Ursa Minor battled for the heavens, a fire would go alight in the dark horizon. The stranger gazed upon those encampments from afar, knowing those men huddled around the flames. They traveled together out of fear, not daring to go into these darkest of places by themselves. President Polk gave them vision, a sense of mission from his east coast house, saying this was it—this place was the destiny of the revolutionary grandchildren. A hundred years later another president would send men to the dark side of the moon, shadowed from even the glow of earthly lights. In a hundred more years, men would talk again around fires, telling stories of their grandfathers’ heroics. This is our history: periods of darkness with flares of light to gather around and build into myths.

Another time, a whole season later, two men passed on horseback. One pointed to the village, the other looked, holding a hand over his brow as if in a salute. The stranger, hidden in a tower, peeked out from a slitted window. In his mind he made a mental inventory of the buildings. Every blanket was folded, turned down. What straw he had was forked into neat piles by the stableyard. The well was now a sinkhole filled in with dirt. Any evidence of previous inhabitants was gone. After the two men rode off in the same direction whence they came, the stranger crawled out of his hiding spot, went to the shanty by the well and began digging at the floor. In his mind he calculated the folds in time, the movement of the earth’s crust—the things that would later be termed as plate tectonics. From the hole he extracted a clay pitcher. Though dusted over with age, the edges chipped and the handle long gone, it felt like it was a mere week ago he’d buried it. In a single action, he broke the pitcher and pulled out the garments from within. He beat the dust out of them until they resembled the shade of blue he recognized.

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