Jeremiah Tolbert

A pack of coy­otes howl in the dis­tance as the sun dips behind the foothills behind me. Moisture-​​heavy clouds have gath­ered atop the hills in a nepho­log­i­cal traf­fic jam. They’re car­ry­ing snow and lots of it. It’s over­due here–the month has been far too warm, and one has a sense of impend­ing dread, that the weather karma must be bal­anced, and soon, or it will begin to rain frogs, it will freeze in July, or a super-​​tornado will form among the Rockies and sweep down through the plains, leav­ing a bar­ren land­scape in its wake.

Prairie dogs scream in ter­ror as the coy­ote cries grow louder and yet some­how no closer. They could be over the next ridge, or a dozen miles away. Today you can see for eter­nity. To be able to hear nearly as far would not sur­prise one.

Gravel crunches under my feet as I walk down the nar­row road across the prairie, back down from the hills. The sun has nearly set now, and I am in the shadow of the foothills. The land­scape takes on a gray-​​blue tint, but the sky is still lit up in bril­liant whites, grays, and blues. The sun punches through the jammed clouds and throws out beams that seem to point towards the south­ern sub­urbs of the city, a trick of the van­ish­ing point, and not some kind of heav­enly bless­ing upon the row after row of beige boxes. No deity worth wor­ship would con­done liv­ing that way, iso­lated from your com­mu­nity, your neigh­bors. No ser­vices, no gro­cery store, no parks for chil­dren. These hous­ing devel­op­ments will be the slums of the American West one day, mis­takes that blot that land­scape and remind our future selves of the folly of wealth and unearned prosperity.

The rays don’t bless that place. They merely point at it, as if to say, “get a load of that crap, huh?”

The coy­otes express their scorn, and I walk slower, to lis­ten more care­fully. After all, they’re singing my song.

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