the unfirm line – Sarah Rose Etter

“Then the pinholes move and I can only see the wall, but I know he is still there …”
Sarah Rose Etter, Chicken Father.

Every now and then, the simplest lines mean the most to a reader. They pull memories from long ago, things forgotten but for some reason now mean something.

When I was younger, we travelled through the Arizona desert on the way to the coast. One of our back windows was busted out, cardboard taped in with cut slivers. Small views of the outside world. I had woke from a dream about an old Indian man who was tending wounds, his horse walking away. When I open my eyes, through the slits of the cardboard, I saw the Gakolik mountains after sunset. It looked like God had torn the sky, jagged and dead black.

I stared and stared, wondering if the sky was still there, wondering what would happen if we turned south and hit the gas.