Out There: a novel by Sarah Stark

Author:Sarah Stark
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Leaf Storm Press
Published: 2014-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

24

Jefferson was always bemused by people who thought they could protect themselves from trouble, people who told themselves they were living safe lives out of harm’s way. Bottled water in the basement. Travel insurance. A book on surviving bird flu. Jefferson understood that about tragedy: that at any time it can find you, enter your life through a door you didn’t know was there. There was no denying it when it came for you.

But could you identify a miracle? Were you in tune with the possibility of something very good coming out of something very bad? Of grace in tragedy? Of life kicking death into the stratosphere? This, Jefferson felt, was far more important—or in any case, it was how his brain worked. He tended to see light rather than dark.

Jefferson was thinking about miracles on that second day of riding through Mexico when he heard what he thought was a distant helicopter. The sky had turned a mesmerizing shade of turquoise, white voile wisps strewn across it. He was on his way to Torreón, a good bit past Chihuahua, where he’d begun that morning, but still at an unknown point between the two, somewhere in the middle of the high Sonoran Desert. And there were rocks—giant boulders, really—flanking the highway as he rode.

He was chanting an upbeat Torreón! Torreón! Olé! Torreón! Olé!—a chant he thought might be appropriate for the upcoming city, even though, in truth, Jefferson didn’t know a single thing about Torreón. The sound of the name reminded him of bullfighting, a tradition he guessed existed in Mexico, though he knew it was really a Spanish thing. He knew the difference between Mexico and Spain, but still. Part of the reason for the upbeat chant was his need to flush out all negative thoughts from his mind. Though he was trying to focus on the possibility of miracles—as he usually did—he had sensed in the last ten miles a change in the landscape. It felt as if the light on the rocks, the light of the beautiful sky, had suddenly turned stark, dissonant. Despite his efforts to resist them, stories of Mexican violence—a series of beheadings he’d heard about near San Miguel, clippings Auntie had passed along about child abductions—began to crowd into his mind.

But god, those beautiful rocks, lining the road for miles—so immense he found himself shaking his head at their size. They seemed like guardians of life, anchored so deeply to the earth that they made small human worries seem trivial. He rode on long enough to think about the people who tried to capture such beauty, all those artists, and to remember the name of that really old woman—Georgia O’Keeffe—and her paintings of bones. An English teacher he’d had in ninth grade—Jefferson couldn’t remember his name—had been crazy about Georgia O’Keeffe and the fact that she could spend so much time and energy perfecting the painting of a single bone or a single flower. The teacher related it to being a careful writer. Be like O’Keeffe! he’d shout from the front of the classroom.

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