Prairie Adaptations
A Scene Sprung from 100 Words
If you skimmed my last post, you know that I drove from Massachusetts to Montana with a kid and dog in the backseat in late June. It was a trek I had done many times before with my spouse, but this was my first time taking it on as a solo driver. That experience, together with reading a book that I would soon blurb, led me back to a short-short story that I drafted in 2015, inspired then by a rest area somewhere on the Interstate along this route.
In 2015, I was a member of an informal micro-form writing group of women academics (including the Indigenous studies scholar Kim TallBear and the historian Martha Jones) convened by the anthropologist Circe Sturm. The method Circe introduced us to was drafting 100-word pieces of writing to be shared with the group on a chosen day each week. Group members committed to reading and responding with supportive silence or, if moved to do so, responding with words. There was a peacefulness to that method, as well as a sense of challenge stemming from the limitation of the form. My 100-word posts explored the feelings of an Afro-Native (Aaaniiih) fictional character who was going home to her reservation in Montana for the first time. (This character has not yet appeared in print; hers is an unfinished story.) I have just read a beautiful engagement with this form created by the Black|Indigenous 100s Collective (Circe Sturm, Jessi Quizar, Reid Gómez, Kimberly Williams Brown, Kelsey Dayle John, William Felepchuk, and Shanya Cordis). Their forthcoming book, Say, Listen: Writing as Care, will be published by NP Press next year. It will be well worth your attention when it arrives.
My story below, “Prairie Adaptations,” began with a 100-word piece written for that 2015 group. I offer it now, just revised in the aftermath of my recent trek and the inspiring example of Say, Listen, which explores personal relationships, spiritual lifelines (including gods/goddesses from Africa and the Americas) against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the aftershocks of colonialism, racial animosity, and current political and ecological crises.
Prairie Adaptations
Plum flicked her eyes to the rearview mirror, gripping the wheel. The road was dim and nearly empty due to a dangerous mystery virus that kept sensible people at home and set sinking souls adrift. She didn’t like driving alone, especially through the Midwestern prairie where the sky stretched in scar-tissue blue fading to black. She didn’t even know exactly where she was going or what she expected to find there. She had just known she had to escape the confines of her locked-down campus that left her with too much time to entertain dark thoughts. She rattled down the highway in her olive-green Cabriolet, feeling like she had forgotten something. She switched on the radio to crowd out the doubt in her mind. Garrison Keillor, recorded pre-#MeToo, was lazily reading a poem.
“Song,” he crooned, “by Adrienne Rich. You want to ask, am I lonely? / Well, of course, lonely.”
She breathed out at the sound of those words, thickening the windshield mist and noticing that the insects spattered there were not as dense as they once would have been.
“. . . As a woman driving across country/ day after day/leaving behind /mile after mile /little towns she might have stopped/ and lived and died in, lonely.”
She turned the radio off, rejecting the message that veered too close, chugging the rest of a bottled Frappuccino. Damn it. Now she had to pee. A Rest Stop sign glowed up ahead, reflective against the falling dusk, an artificial oasis in the desert of asphalt. She pulled off the highway and parked.
The nondescript building made of an orangish brick rose from a lake of tall native grasses marked with a detailed panel titled, “Prairie Adaptations.” Someone was trying to resuscitate the land in this middle-of-nowhere spot, to coax back the pollinators and other living things despite a radically changed environment.
She slid out of the car, arching her back and dragging along her purse like a carcass. She surveyed her surroundings. A slate gray, electric pick-up truck with the headlights on and an indecipherable license plate was slanted at the side of the lot. The headlights shone in the direction of the little prairie.
The appearance of the truck was odd. Angled, empty, all lit up. The driver was nowhere to be seen. She had better make this stop quick.
She ducked inside the women’s restroom and hustled into a stall, smelling the mingled scents of urine and bleach. What would stop some psycho from harassing a woman alone out here? Not everyplace was Lake Wobegon. No place was Lake Wobegon. Not even Lake Wobegon had turned out to be Lake Wobegon.
She hiked up and buttoned her jeans, stuffing the hem of her top inside. She grabbed her purse off the hook, washed her hands in frigid water, and dashed outside. She locked her car doors and started the engine.
Someone else exited the building. A man, she thought. He opened and shut the door of the pick-up, then holding a notepad, trowel, and camera, made for the patch of prairie. He dropped down into the high grass on blue-jean clad knees and started taking notes.
A researcher? Her gaze shifted to the license plate: Ah Muzen Cab. What did that mean? Curiosity stalled her departure. She swiped on her phone, tapped into the search bar, landing on geometric glyph-type drawings of the Mayan god of bees and honey. There was a Mayan god of bees? Her thoughts flickered, then flashed bright at the notion of an ancient Mesoamerican spirit conjured on this modern road.
She backed out of her spot, preparing to exit onto I-90, and found herself lowering her window as she approached the adaptation sign.
“Hey, your lights are on,” she called out to the man.
“Oh yeah?” he called back. “So are yours.”
*A necessary note: I am no expert on Mayan deities. This particular one for bees and honey makes an appearance in Say, Listen: Writing as Care (rendered in feminine form) and inspired my reference, which I then backed up with a Google search for the spelling. Please forgive any errors.
What a lovely piece of short writing! I could imagine myself driving alone across the prairie, while reading it. Thank you for sharing it.
I love this--and the writing method you describe. It sounds like something we could all practice on our own, and just collect pieces until they made sense as something larger. Or not :-)