I Heart Oklahoma! by Roy Scranton

Author:Roy Scranton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2019-06-05T00:53:59+00:00

The clouds come over and the heat shudders with the scream of cicadas. The crunch of gravel under tires. Hardly even a town, just a few old buildings peeling paint, the hotel, the church, the granary, a feed store, hardware store. Some nice old houses that once meant the world to somebody, now boarded and empty, or maybe the lights come on but it’s just some old couple, a man retired and his wife, or maybe their middle-aged daughter and her family, a woman with ovarian cancer, a man with a cleft palate and a scar across his forehead. You had to believe some day in the past boys in dark jeans with turned-up cuffs rolled hoops down the lane with sticks, laughing and playing, while girls double Dutched, two ropes flickering one inside the other. You had to believe because now there was nothing, no children, no life, and to think it was always like that, like it had never had a future even on the day it was built, would be too much.

The hotel stands back off the main street, on a gravel road, with an empty field to one side. It’s a simple, square two-story box with the word hotel painted over the door. She couldn’t imagine who might have stayed there in this nowhere town besides maybe traveling salesmen, itinerant preachers, and suicides.

Next to the hotel was an open garage where a thick man with pomaded hair stood in his overalls watching. He had a burgundy 1960 Impala parked in the grass, all lines and fins, a long cigarettey machine. Later she dreamed

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