Scottie counted each step across the street to his front door. Eleven. His sleeves had unrolled, and they swung past his hands. He had played the Scarecrow once, in a middle school production of The Wizard of Oz. His mother had altered one of his father’s old suits, took in the arms and legs, and added rough patches and bits of straw. He’d sung and danced, pointing at his head and saying, “If I only had a brain.” He was a mediocre singer, and not much better as a dancer. But in becoming someone else, and having it acknowledged and applauded, Scottie had lost that feeling of displacement that he carried with him. As he flapped awkwardly, and sang, and pointed at his head with a goofy expression, he forgot how his clothes were separate from his body, his bones separate from his vocal chords. It all worked together, for a purpose—the message he conveyed was straightforward and disturbing and yet the audience was charmed. I am missing something. I am not whole. Bravo! He had swung his arms wide across his body as he’d bowed, letting the loose cuffs of his oversized shirtsleeves fling into the air. Bravo! The parents and teachers and siblings had given the performers an ovation at the end of the show.
He turned to face Mondragon’s. The power lines hummed. His young Scarecrow self stood catty-corner across the street, in the shadow of the old bank building. Scottie spread his arms and bowed. His ghost bowed back, and then stepped out of sight around the corner.
Inside, the boards across the windows made his place dim and close. A semblance of night had entered the store, and in the darkness the shoes lined his dusty shelves like a bodiless, expectant army. Scottie flipped the sign to Closed and headed straight to the back. He flicked on the overhead light in his stockroom and it fell in a warm, yellow circle onto his table and cot. Shoeboxes rose darkly around him, and his tiny skeleton figures seemed one beat from animating, circling overhead, and demanding flesh.
He sat at his worktable and made tiny cracks, crevices in Ward’s shoe sole, wondering what message to hide within. He had to think about what to say when Ward asked again about the cutting. Ward would ask, when enough time had passed, his voice even and full of regret, a resigned downward slope to his shoulders. Can’t you feel your stuckness, Ward?
The note. He’d forgotten to give it to Ward. He pulled it from his pocket and reread it: Rose’s handwriting sprawled, as many lines scribbled out as were left readable. They described a few domestic details of her life on the farm, and no mention of Lance, all in a snotty tone addressed to Stella. P.S. she’d written. The Browns are circling. The Browns—they must be doing an interesting dance, sussing out whether Rose’s land was up for grabs. With the note, she was pushing Stella away and also pulling her closer. He shoved the paper under a stack of magazines, wanting to be done with these people, his neighbors and their complications.
Scottie attached sturdy new leather soles to Ward’s oxfords and wrote in tiny perfect script along the seams. On the right, Who are you really? On the left, Wouldn’t you like to know? He pushed back from the table, regarding his work. Dogberry’s eyes grew wider and even more golden. All of it—the shoes, the bones, the tiny slices he made at Mondragon’s—he was a master of the microcosm, imperceptible seismic events centering on the same question: how small could his impact be yet still be felt?
He pressed his palm into the worktable and looked at the veins on the back of his hand. If he had once been primarily made of water, now an element with less weight composed him. “Dust,” he whispered. “I’m a fool too.” There was more work to do but he could not focus. He set Ward’s shoes onto a shelf.
“Well,” he said, and Dogberry, hackles raised, arched his back and hissed in a kind of triumph. The overhead light swung gently in the cloistered room.
The clock read 3:15. Scottie had never switched off the transistor radio, and he heard, faintly, Ted Waite talking about a tornado, pace urgent, reciting names of alerted counties. The weather felt far away inside this quiet, though he knew it wasn’t. Elements felt different: dust and decaying leather, slackening skin and mammal odors, the sharp clean scent of his indelible ink, and papery air. Now outside pressed in—the atmosphere was heavy and his skin, save for his lips, felt plush. Dogberry’s scratch on the back of his hand had faded to a dull pink. He warmed a can of greasy noodles on the hotplate and quickly ate, rubbing his lips together to feel the soothing oil work its way into the crevices.
He picked up the cleaned blackbird bones, wanting to etch sentences onto the white calcium. There wouldn’t be room, of course. So instead he wrote sunken on one wing, waiting on the other. Then he reset the pieces in perfect formation and pinned them together. He would add this to the flock perched on his shelves, skeletons with secrets embedded in their bones. Eventually he would bury them all.
He wondered what Rose’s boy, Lance, would have thought that day last year if he’d stumbled upon this message instead of the tiny one that Scottie had etched under the sign on the front window. The world makes fools of us all. Wishing that the boy had spotted one of his more elaborate creations was a kind of weakness and it unsettled him, like hearing the Scarecrow applause. Lance’s ghost had not shown himself earlier today when Rose went into Mondragon’s. Scottie had chalked this up to the weather, but now he wondered if it was due to some greater failure on his part. He could have looked harder for the boy, after all. He could have beckoned.
“Ask me about my winnowing shot at happiness,” Scottie whispered. “I am a fuckwad.” Dogberry arched his back and jumped onto Scottie’s table, knocking the reconstructed blackbird bones flat. It was too quiet. The light flickered overhead. A great rumbling drowned out the voice of Ted Waite on the radio, and the light clicked out with a definitive pop. Dogberry leapt to the floor with a low growl. “Time to flee,” Scottie said, grabbing the cat as he bent to yank up the trap door in the floor. He chucked Dogberry, still yowling, down the hole, pulled a battery-operated lantern from the shelf over his cot, and followed.
Above them, all of them, out in the world, the storm drew into a fist.
*
Leaves flutter and upturn. Branches gather toward their trunks. Trees reach further into the ground seeking anchor, their roots giving off a slow knell, a frequency felt by the earthworms—not a warning, an acknowledgement: something is coming.
Stalwart birches planted as windbreaks around farmhouses stand like pale soldiers. Wildflowers clasp their thin petals shut. The well-kept kitchen gardens of farmers’ wives pause their fecund celebration: Early Girl tomatoes, sweet peas, and spinach shoots curl their heads toward the earth.
Prairie grasses, where they’re left, undulate, though there is not yet wind to move them. The settlers had scrabbled life out of the land in bad years and walked through seas of golden wheat in the plum years. But they never truly claimed it—and sensing this, they cleared and plowed more vigorously, wore themselves out and died young. Before the great-great-grandparents came, before stakes went into the ground and lines were drawn and feuds begun and forgotten, this land and the people on it were all apiece. So vast it terrified the new ones in their tiny wagons, clutching colicky babies and leather-bound Bibles. Some descendants feel it underfoot like a breathing thing, roads and borders mere scars crisscrossing thick hide.
Abutting Rose’s place, Perry Brown’s house stands proud on its hill. His rocky untilled acre is solid and unmoved, and he feels the weight of one stone more than any other. Two limbs of the Infamous Elm rub together, giving off an imperceptible sigh, and corn prepares itself to lie flat in great waves.
Perry Brown
On the morning of the storm Perry woke at 4:00 a.m. as if to the click of a light. He made a fist and rubbed at a sore spot on his knuckle, and then swung his feet down to the rag rug. Nina rolled over in sleep. It was a morning like any other: the cold splash of water on his face and the first heavy yellow piss of the day. Then into jeans and a t-shirt. His shoulder brushed the plaster wall on the stairwell and steps creaked underfoot. He wasn’t the first one up—that honor went to the Old Man, Perry’s father, a rattling cough downstairs in the back of the house.
In the kitchen, Perry ate rolled oats with raisins and milk, his spoon scraping the bowl for the dried fruit and his jaw aching a bit from chewing. The radio