I can finally announce today that I am the second-ever recipient of the Tony & Herb Rainbow Award through the Saskatchewan Foundation for the Arts! This award came in today, and is a whopping $5000 to support me at this moment in my writing career.
I can say so much, and I will, but in the mean time I’ll say I’m overjoyed to live in this province and to call this Saskatchewan arts scene my home. Lots of gratitude today.
But, as a little treat I’m sharing another snippet of my now fully-drafted manuscript for 273 Days below, for which I received this award. Please enjoy, and be gentle, still many rounds of revisions to go, but I want to share the process with all you lovely folks!
[4 Days until the Loft] – Day 139
“Wait, pull over,” I say. We are in the literal and metaphorical middle of nowhere again. The end of another day; black asphalt ribbons weave through butter yellow and sky-blue fields. Canola. Flax. Ahead, there is an either long abandoned hamlet, or it’s been recently abandoned. It’s empty all the same, spare a few families loading vans full of belongings and heading somewhere.
There are a few things that serve as proof of life: a dilapidated grain elevator, torn up rail tracks, boarded up houses missing shingles, gravel streets ribbed with washboard, broken cement that crumbles like sand beneath the tires.
“Here?” Dakota asks, guiding in the van to rest at old baseball diamonds. When we stop, the dust following the tires continues and bathes the windows in a cloud; a cloud mirrored to the west as a fat, blackening storm takes another breath and swells. There is lightning striking somewhere in the distance.
“Yes. It’ll make a pretty picture.”
“We’re stopping for a pretty picture?”
“Yes. What else would we stop for?”
The humidity and the heat is deepening. There is a hot wind that carries on it the metal-wet flavour of rain: stirred dirt, fire, ozone, and the purr of grasshoppers. A few vans turn into ants as they climb out of the valley, heading West for better lives as Dakota takes a piss on the car tire. After, he leans through the open window to turn up the radio: crackling, static-rich, and it’s shaking the dirt on the ball diamonds. Country music my great-grandmother would have listened to on the same crackle-rich radio. I swallow hard and roll my eyes.
“I’ll make a country fan of you yet.”
“I doubt it.”
“Let me try.”
The camera is lying in the dirt soon. And he’s pulled me closer, and his feet are moving. There is dust. Only dust. Dust. Dust. Dust. we’re the only people on earth, right now. The war has come and gone. Humanity has fallen. And we’re dancing, cry-laughing, choking on dust, listening to country music and thunder. The dirt is stuck to me now, in a fine layer because of sweat, and the last few streetlights in this hamlet light as evening strengthens.
The storm is shifting south. My flesh pimples when I see empty dark houses; they once held dreams, stories. The town reeks of despair.
“Did you take your picture?” Dakota asks.
“Yes.”
“We can at least say we’re the last people to see this place standing. Doesn’t mean much to anyone else, but it means something. To us anyway,” Dakota says, as night keeps falling. No bedside lamps come on, no living lights, no televisions.
“Isaiah, look,” Dakota whispers then as the van is alive again, like Frankenstein’s Monster.
There’s a deer standing on the edge of the ball diamonds with a pair of babies. And we see each other as equals for the first time, if that’s possible. Another photo that my family will add to a trash can somewhere down the road, as if being here and tasting the raindrops with my tongue and feeling his arm on the small of my back is somehow not enough.
And the deer leave, the streetlights burn out, and we leave the hamlet to its destruction and let the wind dance by itself in the ball diamonds. In all this, this simple, unassuming moment, I can still glimpse humanity.