Two red heifers, a fence that had given up, and a sky the color of a dirty lantern globe.
The rails came out on a section line that still believed in wheat. The wheat did not believe in itself. Wind had taken the top of the county and was looking for the rest. The heifers stood on the wrong side of a wire that no longer remembered being a boundary. They were not wonders. They were hungry, which is older than wonder.
Charlotte took the flank. Dolly took the gate that was only a gap. The caboose — ridiculous, red, smelling faintly of Ozarks oak — sat on rails that had no business being there, and the heifers walked toward the only upright thing that was not dust.
The Snawfus stood on the far hill with dogwood in its antlers and did not come down. It did not need to. This was not its kind of lost.
Inside, the aisle made a pasture. Water first. Hay second. Names later. When the bell rang for home the trucks found the farm spur as if they had only been around the bend.
On the porch that night the heifers still had the manners of 1936. By the next evening the Dodecahedron’s company had done the second work, and one of them asked, in a low voice, whether the grass here always kept its color. Dolly said yes, for now. Charlotte said the fence would be walked at dawn.