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Atlantic, Iowa
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Dear Thano
New Hopes†
Doorbell Press
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Short American Essay
published in Wigleaf, September 2025
I.
Custer’s Last Ride
In the observation-car six women stood at the window waving to a man racing down the access road in a red corvette. One woman blew him kisses and he blew kisses back. It went on—too long, tens of minutes—waving and kissing and driving; waving, kissing, driving—until the corvette turned into the corn and the kisser turned to her friends and sighed “Oh, Bill,” giggling, and ushered the group toward their seats. Custer eavesdropped, twirling his mustache. Then he moved on to bigger things. The outriding Rockies were cropping up on the horizon like molars at the back of the world’s mouth, ready to chew, and he felt big inside, just like Kant said he should. That’s how the West made him feel: like he was supposed to feel. In the farm fields men were burning big piles of something—tires, maybe—and Custer sat there, watching the flames like many little suns settling into the darkness. He thought about his mother, then about his home. Come dark he was still seated, looking hard at the black window, as his eyes adjusted to something else: it was the numinous image of telephone wires veining the night—just as when the lines had first started to sing, and the Lakota rode along beneath them, hacking at the poles with axes and knives, until Custer came to stop them, and, for a time, did.
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.”