Prose
Clay Arthur
Once the clutter had cleared and the ruckus died down with one last gulping breath all was sedate and ambulant in the everlasting prairie. Beneath that rolling sky were drives of grass and wheat as gold as a locket of hair. Clay Arthur had been dead for three days. He lay flat on his back. For three days only the wind rustled or the only things that rustled were because of the wind. He was lucky he had been shot because the grass passed over him now like a laying of hands and threatened to swallow him whole. It’s a kinder violence to pass from a gunshot because that is a death that is manmade. When the earth eats you up as it is liable to in these parts you never really stop dying. You get swallowed up by God and you’ll just keep on dying over and over as the mud and the bugs reclaim you and make you theirs.
That man Clay Arthur who lay flat on his back dead sat right up as if nothing had happened. He rose up out the dirt and patted off the dust and the smell of rot. It was a kind of waking with no yawning. Who he was came back to him piecemeal and not all at once as he pinched the feeling into his numb and dead fingers. I could go for a drink of water or a cigarette, he thought.
He blinked his eyes and the prairie for the first time appeared hacked away as if by some brutal force. Deep in his slumber he had seen the world as it was on the other side. It now felt to him a great void. There was a gnawing feeling that he knew something and had seen the great face of evil but it was unknown to him again. He couldn’t remember what it was or what it looked like. His bones bristled and his body felt brand new. He blinked his eyes again rattling the sockets and it was as if it was for the second time ever. He took an incompetent step and followed it with another until the lurch gained speed to compel him across that golden field. A dot moving against the landscape.
His tongue plied to the roof of his mouth sticky and dry. I would kill for a cigarette and do something even worse for a drink a water, he thought.
Clay Arthur remembered his name again and remembered he had been born and then he remembered a horse, a chestnut bay bearing the branding of Lazarus Ranch on its scarified haunch.
With the sun’s heat and whiteness like a prolonged assault, the wind which he had come to believe had roused him in the first place was still a salvation. It swept through his shirts giving a form to the denim and the fabric leaped and danced while the cool air snuggled his pickled, dying skin. It unbuttoned him.
Where in the hell is that horse?
He was sore for the saddle.
The dead body of Clay Arthur walked on. With each wrenching movement stiff legs and arms akimbo that living corpse lumbered through the pastures calling out for a damned horse, clumsy but sure having cheated death.
Cecilia O’Mara is a painter and writer from Minnesota.