Lucy sat in her tree, just as the sun was going down in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. She laid there on her stomach where the trunk split off into another wide extending branch and looked down at the hair atop her brothers head. It swirled around and around to a still point at its center.
In a similar way, Devil's Lake was the still point of a mighty continent that spun around its quiet axis.
"Its gonna get cold Lucy, come down." Bill said. He stood up, his little rifle with him.
"Just a little more?" She looked out over the prairie. The hill rolled down and the road trimmed its side vertical toward the horizon, across its boundry a little waste land of swampy grass.
"You're not gonna get sick on my watch, Lucy. Besides, there's a storm coming."
"I can't hear it," she said. Out in that field, the cyclone twisted in on itself so quiet and still. At its edge, very close, a ring of dust danced in circles in the sun, so close and so obvious, you could never imagine such a thing to ever be dangerous. Lucy slid down, never looking away, the orange sun in her eyes.
They said nothing more. Bill took her hand and they walked quickly to the cellar, opening the grey wooden doors and latching them behind them. Their white house in the descending sun, as the wind whistled slow and calm in the prairie afternoon. Behind, the dark night peeking over the roof.
Our camera lies low in the grass and presses weight against the thin stalks. It moves through, across the open road to the marshy side, stepping in the water past where the barbed wire fence once was before the flood. In the grass is a man on his stomach with not much of a head left. It melts into the dirt, overwealmed in sight by his large body.
No matter where you go, there are places where your thoughts stay and build little homes. And in little suburbs dark in the night, celebrating before the 4th of July, people are drunk and laughing but not here. This is a place far from any ocean. You drive outward on the spiral road from the city but it leads only inward, more lost than ever on its galactic edge. There is a town here, but even in the diner the sun leaves its letters on the tablecloth stealing our attention again.
The young man sitting at the bar reads the newspaper. The buffalo are coming back only to be dying of some disease. Behind the bar, the white light exposes a refridgerator door. He's waiting for the signs of someone behind the counter to notice his presence. We'll leave him here. We know what happens next.