Our Lady of the Rockies

Photo by Gelatin / Pexels

Sarah and I met in the usual way at the Silver Saddle Club. She was dancing with her knees, and I was moving change around on the counter. Her bony shoulders suggested the pleasure of high speeds on dirt roads. I asked her the farthest she’d ever been from Montana. She said Calgary. I told her I once drove through the night to Utah after seeing one of their rock arches on the news.

Later I found out she was lying. She’d been to the ocean. It made me wonder who was really feeling sorry for whom. For our wedding, I gave her a blind kitten. We’d watch him chase mosquitoes through the house, leaping from the couch onto the table without ever crashing into anything. But all of that is in the past. Sarah was taken in a starship last year, and I haven’t had a moment’s peace. Suspicions ride me at Basin’s general store, and at the pumps. It’s as if I threw her in the old reservoir or — more likely, since my neighbors look down on me — that she climbed into the back of the first truck that stopped.

I’ll ask you the same question I ask myself: Why did they choose Sarah? Why did they come to my dry hundred and take, of all the people on this planet, my strange, bony wife, who walked with her chin out like a hound and made little whistling sounds when she slept?

What use is there for such a woman in the vast cosmos of space? Does someone need to be told for the thousandth time to knock the mud from their boots? Are there chickens to feed? Is it cold and lonely during those interstellar nights? It roils my thoughts like the running of a thousand horses. The wind rattles the shutters, and dust balls follow me from room to room in the empty house. I stare at the rocking chair by the woodstove where she used to knit, her neon balls of yarn. I remember the way she sighed as she plunged the needle through, making beer koozies and placemats, things we never used. Love is so