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Short American Essay
published in Wigleaf, 2025
ARTIST PROOF.
Jackson McGrath
II. Crazy Horse Lightning Round
For millennia, pronghorn had to jump no higher than sagebrush. All the pronghorn in the fields that morning, as every morning, with the sun rising over their antlers, were on hands and knees, digging under fences. From above, God was considering his work. As dawn broke across a thousand dew-slick windshields, He counted the baseball diamonds (8) and the above-ground pools (∞); lamented His flightless terrier pronghorn. Crazy Horse stood in the parking lot, examining his portrait in the back of a convex milk-truck. Then he stepped inside. A man greeted him with a sport-fishing guide filled with fish he had never seen—fish drawn in profile: bird’s-eye, in a sense, as if set on a table beneath him—as though he were God, out in the parking lot, watching the dreams of sleeping truckers. Crazy Horse mouthed the names as he walked: “brown trout, rainbow trout, golden rainbow trout.” He mouthed them past the Deli and the Bakery (“…largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, spotted bass, striped bass…”), the cereals and dried fruits (“…bluegill, walleye, muskellunge…”). He mouthed them all the way to the Dairy Aisle, where miracle silenced him. The lid on an egg carton was flapping up and down behind the freezer-glass. He thought about Artaud. What do the eggs signal through the flames? he wondered. “That is why pronghorn are not buried,” God replied: “their spirits dig back up.”
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OUT of a cell into this darkened space— |
| The end at twenty-five! |
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My tongue could not speak what stirred within me, |
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And the village thought me a fool. |
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Yet at the start there was a clear vision, |
| A high and urgent purpose in my soul |
| Which drove me on trying to memorize |
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The Encyclopedia Britannica! |
--“Frank Drummer,”
Edgar Lee Masters,
Spoon River Anthology