Bonnie Nadzam - Lions

That broken little house.

The windbreak of dead trees.

A single chimney pipe.

Unremarkable.

Not a place you’d even notice if you passed by.

Can hardly even see it from the road.

Not unless you’re really looking.

Still, there it is, and there it’s always been.

The door will be locked, but there’ll be a small window, five feet from the ground. She’ll just see inside. Plates of blue light shifting in through cracks in the siding, gaps that years of rain and snow and wind opened in the mortar, now here and there stuffed with rags. A faded G.I. Joe sleeping bag on the dirt floor. An old Coleman lantern, caked with dust. A pile of paperback cowboy books. A single shot glass, opaque with dirt. Dust motes slowly sinking in the light. Behind her, the trees watching from their distant posts.

When the wind and the birds quiet, she’ll press her forehead against the locked door and listen for the sound of breath, of footsteps, of a hand behind the doorknob. Someone’s in there. Someone has to be in there. Over and over she’ll say it, then: I’m back. I’m so sorry. I’ve come back. Please, God. Let me in.

Tremendous thanks to Kate Johnson and Corinna Barsan; to Georges and Valerie Borchardt; to the whole team at Grove Atlantic; thanks to Georgianna Pulver, Emerson Perez, and Marybeth Sharpe, and thanks to the many who read and reread these pages and gave me incisive and generous feedback, especially Gregory Blake Smith, Kyla Carter, Katie Cassis, John Thorp, Bryan Hurt, Jeffrey Nadzam, and Jeremy Chignell. Thanks to all of my teachers in Los Angeles. As a fiction writer I’ve taken liberties with history and benefited from the influence of other sources. I am particularly indebted to Willa Cather (whose work inspired the story of the homeless man drowning himself in a water tower), to Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land , to David Lavender’s Bent’s Fort , to Perry Eberhart’s Ghosts of the Colorado Plains, and to Eric Twitty & SWCA Environmental Consultants’ Silver Wedge: The Sugar Beet Industry in Fort Collins