Through the Knot Hole

A brief story.

Most of my childhood was spent in a small western town that was originally a stagecoach stop in the middle of the Arizona desert.

The desert’s inherent dislike for man, its death-like silence and unbearable heat is what I remember most. I am, however, thankful that my nostalgic moments for the “good o days” have been conveniently blessed with a sprinkling of amnesia: 

My hometown was typical of the early western setting: one narrow street, a general store that was post office and gossip center, a few hitching posts that hadn’t quite rotten away, plus an old blacksmith shop with its doors hanging in despair. 

If the wind was right, you could tell when one of the old prospectors showed up for his supplies. I often thought of them as a bag of wind, hating people soap and razorblades, their only pleasure being a bottle of whiskey, and their burden beast.

Winding in from nowhere, a small narrow road met the empty town, then rambled off again to even less. Sometimes the hand of the wind would escort a lonely tumbleweed in playing playfully along the street and before it was out of sight a funnel of air would pull the dry desert sand into spinning circle and chase blindly after it.

I can still remember a three-room house that offered a place of rest at night and became an unbearable oven in the day. The blistering earth drew life from my very soul, while overhead a burning fire that seemed to hang forever cut its way slowly through the empty sky. The earth was dead, life cooked out of every living thing, only man was here.

Surely hell was below and this was just it’s parlor.

DEVIOUS