Aeneas Leaves Kansas

I will tell you, then, of my husband, a man who loved guns, who spent hours stroking an old petticoat along the barrel of his shotgun until it gleamed coldly, like the moon in December. Even then he might have been imagining the petticoat’s ruffles were the foam of waves curving their way into shore.

Some saw in his silence a man of singular virtue, strong will. I saw in his silence an absence. A longing in him that the great fields of wheat dying in the drought tindered, as did the sound of locusts that descended in punishment for what sin, I don’t know.