Rock River

The town was called Rock River, or had been, a green sign at the edge of it still saying so with the population under the name, a number from The Before, two hundred and some souls, a joke now, a headstone with the wrong figure on it. She lay in the grass above it a long while before she went down, the way Papa had taught her, watching, because a town was a box and the lid came down and you did not walk into a box you had not watched.

It was a small place, a grain elevator and a rail line and two streets of houses and a scatter of trailers, and nothing moved in it but a loose sheet of tin on a roof somewhere, lifting and slapping in the wind, and a magpie that crossed from one dead tree to another. She watched for the better part of an hour. No smoke. No dog. No track of a machine in the dust of the main street, which was the thing she was most watching for, because a machine meant the town kind and the town kind meant leave. There was only the wind and the tin and the enormous stillness of a place that had been full of people once and was not.