The Dark Prairie by John W. Jarrett

Author:John W. Jarrett [Jarrett, John W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liminal Books
Published: 2023-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Carl and I rode into a cold front that tightened my skin and sharpened my senses. We said nothing along the way. The butchery was so unnecessary, and those images would live in my memory forever. The gamey smell of fresh death clung to me like when Pa and I killed a pronghorn late last spring and he had me dress it by myself. Blood covered me to my shoulders and stained my arms a shade of earth red, leaving a stench that lingered into my dreams while we slept that night under a willow tree. I woke, retching, my body unadapted to the raw waters of the garnet river that flow on the boundary of life, encircling it, creating an isle that shelters every knowing creature from the vast insentience beyond. What lay out there in the borderland was terrifying, believing that when the waters emptied from my own moat, I’d be forced into that nether region, forever roaming a damnable land of empty shapes, meaningless patterns, and darkness. I mourned the loss of those good souls, but more than that, I pitied them.

My skin crawled as we advanced down the trail, and I wanted to scrub clean, to scour away the residue of what we experienced. I felt alone and yearned for Katie to join us soon, missing her presence more with every gallop. Life was so bleak, so fragile, so easily taken. Would it have been better if those families had never existed?

Spellbound, the undulating prairie returned my psyche to that deeper place I had ventured into the day before, gliding blind under an unseen and unmarked ocean—a liquid underworld: the precise and phenomenal at its shores demolishing overhead. As we rode, we passed the same pilgrims and migrants as yesterday—not literally the same, but folks in the same wagons, cooking the same food, wearing the same clothes, using the same oxen, performing the same tasks along their same journeys. They were all so similar, as if by plan. I looked at the ordinary world, no longer seeing it but seeing this plan, this underwater current pushing everything along, knowing the creatures may all be disparate, but the water was not. I was a creature, too, I reflected, and my autonomy—my belief in individuality—an illusion. With the tide at our backs, all of this, all of reality known and unknown, was united and singular, indivisible, precise, purposeful, and perfect. In truth, there was no borderland. Having held my breath, I inhaled the water, feeling a oneness with the prairie and its inhabitants, a oneness with Carl and Katie, and all those murdered folks, knowing we were each integral to the whole of reality. It wouldn’t have been better if they never existed—that was impossible. They couldn’t not have existed.

“Hey!” Carl yelled over. “Hey, James, can you hear me?”

I looked at him, disoriented, forgetting for a moment where I was and what I was doing. He rode his horse near mine and pulled on my reins, bringing both horses to a trot.

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