Excerpt from "Pale Dim Light"

The Rover gathered the markers, hoping they had been whittled or carved into stakes but having an uneasy tumbling in his gut that they had been gnawed, and mounted his horse. His toes snagged under the thick vines of weeds and he almost fell with such a force it could have broken the horse's back and his own neck. He had never seen weeds like this before. Perhaps no man had. They had always been pulled from the earth before they could tangle you in them and hold you in their living tomb. They were wiry and flexible, like an unfrayed rope. He wasn’t certain they could be cut. He wasn’t certain if he should even try. He knelt to them, hands clasped together around his knife, and sawed the weedy twine into inch-long pieces. They were thin like string but strong like wire. He rolled them through his fingers and turned his head to that glowing white hill and tried to whistle his mother’s tune.

“You have to find them, son. I can’t just keep giving you stew for looking. You do nothing but look and there won’t be no stew to not give.”

The old man wrung his hands and leaned back in his doorway, eyeing his dwindling pile of pelts.

“I brought potatoes back today.”

“Always looking. Always going into town. But never finding them. Where you got those potatoes? You a thief, son?”

“I haven’t been. I ask for work. I trade my labor. I could ask for seeds. Borrow a plow. You could get to planting.”

“No. Can’t do no farming or planting or plowing until I tend to these gophers. There are still some out there. There has to be. They have to be.”

The young rover strolled back to guard the burial mound in his sleep. The old man tugged at the remains of his beard and counted the holes in his pocket. All spent on a stack of cartridges he might never fire. Maybe he could sell them back. Or trade them for later stews. No. The little devils would be popping out all over just as soon as he couldn’t shoot them.

The moon was half-bright. Nearing full in a few days. He wouldn’t need a candle. Only on these nights as fully black and empty as the slowing days had turned his saddening heart. He hitched a tattered coverall over patchworked long johns quilted from tiny pelts and slung his rifle over his spiny frame and crawled along the earth, dragging his ear. Feeling nothing. Hearing nothing.

“Where have they gone from me?”

The old man crawled on the ground desperately from already checked hole to already checked hole. Lurching like a shriveled slug praying to find salt.

A shrill, piercing shriek warbled through the night air and chilled into the old man’s bones. He had crawled to The Rover, his body leading him to the grim shining visage of what once was. Knowing, without the old man’s consent or desire, that that hollowed pile of polished bones was now what was and would always be.

The Rover flickered in the flame-soaked moonlight. His shadow was as disfigured and distorted as the air he forced through his teeth. A first full of twiney weeds, The Rover bent over the pile, smaller now than the old man could ever rebuild to, and plucked the nearest frame and shrieked and honked and wrapped the weeds around it. The pile sank and the little skeletons caved inwards, tumbling into themselves and clearing the sky behind them and filling the old man’s eyes with moonlight. Robbing him of all he had left. Leaving him with only his cartridges and visions of how they could have been spent.