Harrowing

You arrive in Red Cloud, Nebraska, at noon, like an agent awaiting a secret communiqué. The tour guide tells you about Willa Cather’s real-life friend, Annie Pavelka, the one she wrote into Ántonia Shimerda. She is you. Is Ántonia why you’re here, now? Earlier today when the darkness still felt like night, you read about a back-lit plow heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun. You stretched your hand to the empty half of your bed and then to your still-flat belly. Reasons enough to read into the new day. Next, you read Maps on your phone: a few taps, one pin. Six hours’ drive. You listened to the audiobook of My Àntonia the whole way. The woman whose head turned bald and translucent before she died named you Lena after another Cather character. Even now, in the emptiness, you believe in happy endings. That other Lena sewed her way to San Francisco. Ántonia bore a child. Has your center quickened yet? Later, you melt into the grassy divide, trying to become part of Cather’s sun, air, goodness, knowledge. Dissolved into something complete and great. Where is that damned heroic plow, anyway, and whatever might be written for you on that daylight star? The Nebraska prairie sunset cracks your shriveled heart wide open. The molten disc becomes a sliver, leaving a shadowy purple wake. Then you’re asking Àntonia or Annie, Should I name her Martha or Lucille after yours? How did you know? If you could see yourself from the meadowlark’s eye, you would know you’re the plow; the picture writing your own happiness on the sun.