by Nannette Vernon
“Across the Vast and Unforgiving Landscape” is an honorable mention in Southern New Hampshire University’s 2024 Fall Fiction Contest.
The sun glinted off a car in the distance, a little blip of light, an occasional shimmer along the dull gray highway dissecting the vast Wyoming plains. The landscape fought back relentlessly against the artificial intrusion, retaliating with wind and rain and snow and weeds that sprang up through the asphalt in an unending war, but the men in orange hi-vis vests returned year after year, season after season without end. They marched with their lumbering yellow beasts to smother dandelions and prairie fire and anything else unlucky enough to get in their way.
It was along this re-paved lonely stretch of road that April May Johnson drove, pushing her middle-aged station wagon nearly to its limit of 80 miles per hour.
It was an ugly car, and it wore its ugliness proudly: settling heavy on a squat frame, its dull olive green paint chipping in more places than not, the first signs of rust crept in along the edges, and its seats were upholstered in a dusty tan fabric that hadn’t been appealing when it was new and had only grown more yellow and faded with time. Its lone and staunch defender, April would never admit its ugliness, insisting that beauty was in the eye of the beholder and that she thought her dated hatchback was adorable—but that didn’t change that it was ugly.
April May Johnson was not ugly. She was perfectly average which rendered her forgettable, unremarkable in either direction. She started going gray at 25, her mother’s fault like everything else, and the only saving grace there was that she’d also inherited her mothers dusty blonde hair which, for the time being, disguised the gray at her temples well enough.
Her denial worked in her favor; so long as she could ignore the signs of aging she could likewise ignore the mounting despair that time moved too fast. Despite everything, despite the years and the grays and the wrinkles, she felt perpetually sixteen and enormous inside, still just as unevenly footed.
Outside the plains rolled along, keeping pace with her car. The enormous alien windmills had long since disappeared from her rear view mirror, and any interesting landmarks seemed to be purposely keeping out of sight. Out here under the sky as huge and blue as the eye of God (as her mother’s eyes), she felt as if that Great Eye in the Sky fixed its yawning pupil on her car, watching as she drove through what felt like an eternal field beneath the endless sky. The last bird she’d seen had been an hour back, a little creature with shining black feathers and red patches on its wings. Gabriel would have recognized it, would have started chattering about the red patches, what its diet consisted of, everything he knew.
Now there was only silence and an empty passenger seat. Goddamn, but had it been nine years already? She couldn’t believe it had been nearly a decade, and the years settled in her stomach all at once like a stone. Nine years going on ten and she was, oh Jesus, still in the same place. Still alone, loneliness dogging her heels like a starved beast.
She glanced at the passenger seat. Some of her wispy hair fell out of her loose misshapen bun, brushing against her cheek with tickling lightness that set her nerves raging. She’d gotten so close, almost gotten married, only she wanted kids and Gabe hadn’t after all and so she’d left. God, but she’d wanted it so badly it made her ache, and now she had no kids and no husband, and there were still times she wondered if she wouldn’t have been better off staying anyway. Sure, she’d grown more accustomed to the loneliness over the years, but it still had teeth most nights and not the good kind, not the blunt ones in her shoulder but the kind a mountain lion sank into your throat before it snapped your neck.
Now here she was, April May Johnson driving alone across the empty state of Wyoming, heading towards her parent’s house but not towards home.
At least out here her loneliness didn’t sting so bad. Being under the sky blunted its teeth, dwarfed it, shrank it down even smaller than she was. She only hoped that lasted the next few days as she wended her way towards St. Cloud, a place she didn’t know and didn’t care to learn, the place where her parents finally settled and thus demolished the only real home she’d ever known.
April pulled off the first chance she got at a collection of gas stations, three different ones as if most travelers cared beyond the sign advertising the price per gallon. It felt like bad play-acting, a false luxury: what will you choose, it asked with a patronizing leer, the Exxon? How about the Loaf N Jug? Feeling fancy enough for the Flying J? Sorry, no Love’s till Cheyenne, no love until St. Cloud, Minnesota.
What do you even call a group of gas stations, she wondered. There were herds of deer, flocks of birds, clouds of grasshoppers; a gaggle of gas stations, maybe. She leaned against her car, arms crossed against the faint but cutting wind. Dirty white paint peeled off the exterior walls. A drab of gas stations, she thought.
The inside was better maintained, sun-faded instead of peeling. Some more vibrant hues peeked out from behind a framed painting sitting askew on the wall, revealing the truth of robin’s egg blue instead of dingy blue-gray. April imagined the station as it was in its heyday (if such a day had ever existed), and decided she liked it better as it was now; in an instant its shabby corners blossomed into charming signs of character rather than disrepair.
The lights flickered to life as she opened the restroom door, filling the moderately clean bathroom with low insectile light. A glance in the mirror revealed her mother’s face, her mother’s wrinkles, and then April blinked and only she remained—or she mostly remained, anyway. Between one fluorescent flicker and the next, April imagined that she could see the tiled wall through her stomach.
A little antsy, feeling impatient, itchy, April didn’t linger, grabbing the first items she touched as she zipped through the aisles once more. She wasn’t even really hungry, but she wanted something and anyway beef jerky was road trip food, right?
“Hi.” April laid her items on the counter and smiled.
The girl behind the counter was as faded as the building itself, with wan skin and dull gray eyes and hair so blonde it was almost white. Her black polo shirt washed her out further beneath the harsh lights.
“Hello.” Her name tag read SHELLY in chipped white paint. “Did you find everything today.”
“I did, thanks.”
Shelly blinked slow like a cat, and reached over to slide the items over as if moving in honey. She scanned the bag of beef jerky. Beep.
“How’s the commute to get here?” April asked. The last town she’d passed was fifty miles back, maybe more, a real blink-and-you-miss-it place, the kind of town with one whole intersection and one whole stoplight, with people haunting their porches like ghosts. “Is it pretty manageable?”
“Yeah. It’s fine.”
The black pepper sunflower seeds were next, beep. She frowned at the screen, tapped out a series of numbers on the keyboard, turned back. She scanned them a second time, beep. The silence stretched thinly into awkwardness.
“Do you like living out here, at least?”
The bottle of electric blue Gatorade, beep.
“Well enough, I guess.” Her phone buzzed out of sight behind the counter. Shelly didn’t so much as glance its way, hitting enter on the keypad. “That’ll be ten-fifty.”
“Great.”
Resigned, April pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. Shelly took the bill with disinterest and a slight air of annoyance as she opened the till to count out change. April’s mood soured, taking on a rank edge as the only human contact in eight hours fizzled into disappointment.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Yup,” Shelly responded, and April slammed the door shut on her way out. The bell rang in her wake, high and harsh, jangling on her nerves, and she slammed the car door shut too for good measure. Peeling out of the parking lot, she kept her eyes forward and didn’t spare the gloom of gas stations (yes, that was it) a glance backward.
Good riddance, she thought. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel, knuckles going white, tension settling in like a flock of birds on a wire. Kids these days.
The light followed the sun over the edge of the world in her rear view mirror, diving down like a falcon, blanketing the sky in gray-blue. There, in the distant distance, orange lights glittered—a town on the horizon.
April hit the gas.
Category: Competition, Featured, Short Story, SNHU Student