In the morning before the sun rises, the little gas stove projects the classic flicker of flame on the ceiling of the cabin: real flame slowed down, blurred, large scale. Usually it proves to be enough for me to get water going for coffee, feed the dog, navigate to the bathroom, and return to sit in front of. I’ve made it partway through winter navigating by the stove light in the morning. Sometimes the wind knocks the power out and it becomes a necessity, and sometimes for no real reason, I make myself bumble in the dark.
On this morning I stay in bed. Still lying down I know that on one side of the house the sun will be a pink strip below the horizon. On the other side, that pink strip will reflect itself in a lighter shade across the Laramie Plains and up the flank of Sheep Mountain. When I sit up the blush has already started itself. By the time I put layers over my layers and make it downstairs, Sheep Mountain no longer looks pink, just kind of like a mountain in the light. In the kitchen the sun comes in directly, makes the fake brass handles on the kitchen cupboards glare. When I look at them then look away I can’t see anything else.
•
On the coldest mornings the horses shiver, leave their stalls in a hurry, buck in place in the paddock, then fall into line running single file along the single track cut through belly-deep snow. Fanning out in the hayfield at a tense run they quickly become dots. To slow down, they bunch up and turn in a big circle. Circling tighter and tighter, they wind themselves down; they drop their heads and begin to paw.
On the windiest days they graze for only a few minutes before one of them starts the herd moving back toward me in the cabin, over to the willow thicket’s protection. They line up like rummy tick marks. Heads lower than haunches, haunches to the wind. Sometimes I see the words endure and surrender as being sisters. Horses take both shapes.
•
When it’s coldest, I make walls within these walls, hang blankets in doorways to unneeded rooms. The house closes in. Jack’s been over often from his place across the barnyard — stayed and talked for an hour yesterday, moving about the kitchen, leaning on different things. Under two layers of pants and three shirts, under the blanket, under this roof: wind undermines my self-burial, sniffs me out like a fox does a mouse under the snow. Even Jack has put on his hat and gloves and a wool coat I’ve never seen. Mincemeat the barn cat gets ever fluffier, a wad of gray lacing my steps together as I walk towards the food bin in the barn.
•
One morning the horses are glazed over in a frosting of ice. Some have more than others. Maybe on account of their hair length. Maybe because they were the ones to move around less. Long icicles hang from their jaws and barrels where the last rib is. They are all itchy. Gypsy rubs hard into my hands. Possum makes sweet mother noises as I take a long gray ear in both hands as if it were the cold fingers of a child. After, she walks over to the buckskin colt, who I hear she never doted over as a new mother, and begins to nibble the ice off his jaw. They all begin to nose each other and I leave without them noticing, or rather, without them caring.
•
When the wind comes on sometimes it’s a gradual and imperceptible rise. An hour might pass, and I’ll be inside, doing something or other, and I’ll look up — suddenly realize that the wind has come. That anticlimactic feeling of a birthday; another year gone by, one ahead, too. Or how sometimes you aren’t aware the sun has set until it has set. Change registered by the blocky passing of time.
Other times the wind comes on like a light comes on. It hits the house. It is a collision. It is one thing running into another. If this kind of wind could be seen, it would be a thunderhead stretched out — a clear mass moving across the prairie. Sometimes you can see it; the mountains caught up in a cloud that is not a cloud per se but just the wind whipping things up, whatever is most loosely attached to the ground, growing bigger like smoke. Doesn’t look good, Lydia says one morning, pointing in the opposite direction from where we were heading, toward where we would return later that night.
•
Technically, wind is just air moving. When the wind forces itself down throats and noses, fills lungs without asking, this isn’t breathing and this isn’t air. Not only breathless, but airless. It’s true: there used to be an ocean here.
•
In a blue vase is a handful of last year’s grass; this fall I took a picture of the shadow of my hand holding the handful, already wilting, not yet dried. Months later I took a picture of it sitting very still on my kitchen table as if it existed as a picture before the picture was even taken. These days when the wind blows open the front door and finds its way through cracks in the walls and electrical outlets, the handful of grass rattles, each seed head its own chandelier in an empty house, eventually dropping onto unfertile ground of table or carpet.
•
Someone asked if it was possible to not be haunted by loneliness. The question moves about the rooms of the house like drafts; the question forgets it might have an answer and begins its own life of haunting.
•
I could have moved the white truck and manure spreader to get out yesterday; I think I could have left this place if I really needed to. But as machinery rested, there was no way to leave. I was drifted in, marooned amongst snowdrifts breaking the ground’s rippled surface like a pod of whales.
Jack wasn’t interested in getting into town or anything, but must have gotten antsy midday and tried to drive his truck through the drift that blocked the field to the horses. He rocked himself halfway into the white mass until the snow reached the middle of his driver’s side door, then he backed out. Another day I heard the diesel wop wop of his truck over at his house. It grew louder quickly, then he was flying by my windows at a speed unusual for the barnyard. His truck crashed into the drift, sunk quickly with wheels spinning. Jack shimmied out and walked back across my view to his house.
•
One day, I make myself go out in it — the wind. I watch it curl over and around the blunt end of a drift. The blunt end rounds into an elegant S, curves deepening like an old river’s oxbows. Then the drift starts to erode at its base; it starts to leave itself, empty itself, and a delicate lip like that of a wave is all that is left hanging over the increasing cavity. Curling petal lip of snow, once just a suggestion, is now exaggerated, is now collapsing.
Out on the prairie, the horizon is smudged, as if someone tried to erase it. The grass is sharp, and the snow, which was just yesterday sparkling and fluffy as it fell, is now a hard rippled surface I recognize as something I don’t recognize: hardened lava, the moon, the belly of a great fish. Everything underfoot is hard. The wind is burying the already buried and scouring the already scoured.
•
Inside, after, I move from the chair to the floor, never more than ten feet from the gas stove. I do small tasks — wash a few dishes, move the pile of coats that’s accumulated on chair backs to the coat rack, sweep the obvious flies and dog hair clumps. Outside, the field of snow changes shape, moves along at thirty miles an hour.
•
Jack must have seen me walking around in the wind and snow, walking over drifts. The next time he sees me, he tells me about how when he lived in town a horse tried walking over a drift that appeared to offer an arched bridge across the fence that kept him in. When the snow gave way, it gave way over the sharp point of the metal t-post. He tells the story with meaning I can’t place.
•
The dogs make a fast loop around the house one morning and by the time they get to where they began, which is where I have been looking the whole time, there is only a clean white surface. They do it again.
Similarly, every morning walking to the barn to feed, bunny tracks spill from hiding spots under structures like creases in a hand. Here and there a little amber pee spot, evidence of paws working at a hay bale left out. Rabbit turds roll across the hard crust, sometimes get caught in a divot. Walking back from the barn the lines that told the story of the bunnies’ night are gone.
The day after he tried to cut a path with his truck out to the field Jack goes out with a shovel, makes some headway then quits. The next day the drift is bigger, no evidence of truck or shovel. No evidence of me or Jack out here either.
•
Stuck my Christmas tree, little spindly lady, outside in the woodpile. Upright, but reddening, she still looked like a tree — a nice and different color amidst all this white and gray-brown. One morning the wind had knocked her over — no surprise really, and she rested on her side for a good couple of months. Became a place where the dogs lifted their legs and I tossed my dead mice.
This morning, the house is a gopher whistling through his teeth. Eighty-mile-per-hour winds, the little red radio says. The truck is rocking; I put it in neutral just to see, and it begins to move. The roof blew off the horse shed — a tangled mess of nails and splinters and raw metal edges — never seen anything look so sharp, so eager to tear my clothes. Outside the bathroom window, clear on the other side of the house from where the tree just last night rested amongst its woodpile, is the tree. Wild girl! Jumped over the house? Or skipped along on the ground, threading the needle between house and truck, rounding two corners before taking a little rest?
•
There’s a mouse that’s been evading the traps. Three are set under the sink, all loaded up with peanut butter. In the morning all three traps are licked clean of peanut butter, two mouse shits where the peanut butter was. Tonight, I’ve been watching the mouse come out into the kitchen. I’m sitting on the floor with my back to the stove again. The dog is half off his bed, dream twitches coursing through him. Likely mouse dream twitches. If only he knew.
In the corner below the sink, the mouse drips out from under the cabinet overhang and plops silently onto the ground. Looks right at me, blinks once. It actually kind of looks like the dog — more specifically the mouse’s eyes look like the dog’s eyes when I’m winding up to throw a ball or when I accidentally say the word “mouse.” The mouse is of the very cute and round variety — big ears, eyes, and whiskers, and a soft oatmeal-colored back with a white belly like prairie grass poking out of snow. Quick to retreat in the manner he appeared, he goes back and forth a few times, then begins to feel comfortable enough to patter around looking for crumbs.
•
Jack’s finger is bleeding again, like it seems to be every time we do a job together. It’s getting on everything we touch or move past: the pitchfork, the gravel ground, the snow ground, the hay-layered floor of the barn, the steering wheel, the cart handle, his phone, my gloves, his hat, my dog’s head, his dog’s back, the fencepost, the manure that we moved from stalls to the wheelbarrow, up a ramp, into the manure spreader that is now being pulled by a truck. Belts kick the mass of manure back and through rotating blades, which send up a geyser that is moving slowly through the field. It’s a kind of spectacular sight. We turn in our seats to watch out the back window, and passing drivers turn to watch out their side windows.
•
I hadn’t seen him in days, and his phone remained off. I knew he was in his house and moving around at least somewhat (only on account of seeing his red dog shoot out the door once or twice a day, run around barking at everything, shake himself off, shit, then go back in). Finally one day he was in the driveway with his red dog, and looked like he had just woken up, but like he was excited to be up. Said getting old isn’t for the faint of heart. It was as if he was explaining his absence, and as if reporting on a trip and its findings, and as if apologizing.
•
I thought it’d be quieter here. When ears hear a sound that is constant they search for variability within the constant. It’s too much to accept that something is the same, so they siphon for and sometimes imagine blips. Something always fractures a consistent sound. Silence is always broken, but broken silence can be sustained for a long time. Consistently inconsistent, I thought, walking across the winter prairie, like a river, like a flame.
The stove sounds like wearing a raincoat. A steady metronome swish. The stove sounds like the sound of someone next to you in bed, maybe they rolled over toward you again and you reach out and their breath indicates that they subconsciously registered the touch, and it is the thing to knock them deeper into the dream they were in before they moved, and their breath comes from deep within, caught in the net of the back of the throat — almost a snore, almost words, a higher note on the inhale than the exhale.
The fridge will kick on if you pay attention. The same sound every fridge everywhere makes. A sound you would only tune into if alone in a place, or if awake when everyone else was asleep, or perhaps if there were other people around but nobody really had anything to say, or couldn’t say the things they wanted to.
When the stove starts ticking, it is beginning to shut itself off. The high orange flames shrink down behind the fake logs whose orange-hot color also begins to leave from the top-down, or perhaps outside-in. After a couple minutes, sitting in front of the stove will no longer be warm but the top of the stove will have cooled down enough to sit on, and after a couple more minutes it too will no longer be warm at all.
•
Jack led Sierra and I led Pillow through a deep snowdrift to the hay field. We took halters off at the same time, and the two took off at a gallop. I was standing in front of Jack, lost in the sight of them running, the two sprays of snow. There was joy in watching their joy. Simple. Once they disappeared behind the willows, I turned around, about to say something to Jack about the joy, but he was still looking past me.
•
Some days things seem so clear and sure. All the lines on the land seem sharp, drawn with a fine tipped pencil. The place where horizon meets sky, the straight black road, my square house with a triangle for a roof, a white cloud in a blue sky, me, my dog, this life. But that is an illusion. Look close enough and the horizon is wavy, indistinct; the grass pokes up and the wind blows the grass and the grass lurches. Look close enough at the silhouettes of the horses and you’ll see their hair is bent and moving too. Stand on a drift for a second, and before your eyes the wind will gnaw at the snow you stand on, hollowing out your footing while also folding you in. Funny how things can seem so still, eerily still, and then you look down and even the fibers of the afghan on your lap are vibrating in the morning sun. In the summer the land kicks off heat waves and where the brown earth meets the blue air, there is not stagnant separation, not the clarity of one thing starting and another ending. Rather it is just gray, just gray moving — surely it must move — along.
•
When the sun sets the horses trot in as soon as the direct light leaves and the fading light begins. Wind picks up in the same way it picks up as the sun is rising — daylight lately comes and goes with a force. Here fading light is uncomfortable. The whole night ahead of me carries a different feeling. I am neither a gracious host nor lively company within my own nights.
•
Watching out the back window, the Laramie range turns from dark blue to black. Plane tails become brighter white in the loss of light. Between Sheep and Jelm, where the sun sets this time of year, an arc of gold remains, still reaches up into the fading blue, but sinks quickly into the inverse arc of the valley. I’m curious about the point at which blue becomes black. There’s no way to orient yourself within it. As if we’re not allowed access into it, rather must remain outside of it, only watching, only capable of seeing the sky as blue, then the sky as black. To look at the sky changing color is to look at something we can’t see. Below it, the objects on the ground are distinct in a way that they aren’t when awash in daylight. The air seems thin. The jagged fringe of horizon honest.
A jackrabbit emerges from the willows. I only see him when he moves across patches of white. On one snow patch, the rabbit stretches like a dog — ass in the air, front paws stretched out. Then it switches to tucking its rear and stretching it back paws out. It holds the second pose for a long time and I realize it is peeing. Tomorrow in the light, I will look for the orange spot.
I watch the jackleg fence for what feels like quite a long time, wondering when I won’t be able to see it anymore. Eyes dart faster, strain harder catching up to the night they won’t ever catch. It’s finally dark enough, but not as dark as night, so that I don’t really see the fence line, but of course I know it’s there, so in a way I still think I can see it. There’s a greenish light between Sheep and Jelm now, and I imagine the sun leaving a trail it around the belly of the earth and its unpinnable western horizon.
I move into the kitchen, and on this side of the house the moon is up enough to cast long angled shadows of blue-white light on the floor. I turn on a kitchen light, the blue on the floor disappears, the windows become black, reflecting the inside of my house back at me.
•
Today I sat under a blanket by the stove, listening to the birds. Stepped outside to find the dog and found it was warmer outside than in — only 8:30 in the morning too.
Drifts are melting, the white bulges sinking day by day under the brown surface, where they leave dark stains, muddy ground in the shape of themselves. There are different bird sounds — light, upbeat chatter, soft little voices. I find the horses pawing into the damp earth, nibbling at roots; they lift their heads when I approach, languidly blink, and I swear they are smiling behind muzzles covered in dirt. This might be the edge of spring, which itself is a season of waiting for summer.
A fly buzzes in the window, and I see one crawling along in the grass outside too.
It’s a morning where wind and direct sun take turns interrupting each other, but it feels warm nonetheless. The horses stand out in the cut portion of the field because the snow doesn’t catch there. Those who stand lower their heads like they would in the wind, but the pose is relaxed, almost prayerful, almost too forgiving, certainly not bracing. Their bodies just hang off their spines, like a coat too big for their bones. They’re there all morning long. I never do see them move, but every time I look up they’re in different positions. It’s as if when I wasn’t looking they were gathered up, shaken, and rolled again.
•••
Carly Fraysier received an MFA in Creative Writing/Environment and Natural Resources from the University of Wyoming. She’s the recipient of a 2018 Creative Writing Fellowship from the Wyoming Arts Council. Her writing has been named a finalist for contests at The Missouri Review and Black Warrior Review, and has appeared in Western Confluence Magazine and Green Mountains Review, among others. She lives on a ranch in the High Plains of Northeast Wyoming, and works for the artist residency program, Ucross.