No one within hearing badmouthed the new town’s two ceramic frogs perched columnar on oxidized blue lily pads outside City Hall like they never did on Crenshaw Pond.
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Sheriff Osprey couldn’t find or explain the missing pair of rattlesnake skin cowboy boots enshrined in glass once worn by Riddly Tucson, founder and first mayor of Burlington West.
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The story told more often in schools, saloons, and after-church lawn gatherings had to be Roy Calhoun’s losing his battle with the bottle blamed for heaving him and his horse into Red Pine Canyon, Chester saved when hung up forty feet above the canyon floor by its titular tree, his rider not so lucky, pitched headfirst on a boulder the size of Paul Bunyan’s bowling ball.
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The last to leave the deserted town, Pastor Wiggins, preached a sermon to a congregation of ants, mice, rats, and bats, advising them to learn the lesson God gave Job, to pay obeisance to the Lord no matter how stark their futures, without hope or food.
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The developer stressed the new primitive, box over box, the way of the future born from the county’s Indigenous past for maximum efficiency, aesthetic nuance, and ambient preservation like no other in-town rural casual formal feel.
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“Pond? What pond?” Mrs. Killibrew threw at the half-blind, nearly-deaf Claude Wiggins, her frosted flute meant for more than grocery store Chablis half empty, then lifted from her hand-me-down Brown Jordan chaise to emphasize her gift for leaving idiots to stir themselves thick.
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When the residents of Cactus Butte Luxury Homes opened their manilla envelopes on Thursday, May 14, 2042, they might have felt a similar sinking feeling as Roy Calhoun when first pitched off the trail, Chester dropping beneath him as if he’d taken up flying, long-needled pine boughs slapping his face bringing him to an unwanted and unplanned consciousness until, upended, landing as he knew he must, the split second crack hatching a split-second memory of the Cowtown Rattlesnake Round Toe boots, squirming out of a coil as he liked to think of them, under three loosened floorboards in Pastor Wiggins’s horse barn over which Sheriff Osprey every day clomped like a man with little or no horse sense before everything went dark.
Richard Holinger’s work has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Hobart, Iowa Review, Chautauqua, and has garnered four Pushcart Prize nominations. Books include North of Crivitz (poetry) and Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (essays). He holds a doctorate in Creative Writing from UIC, has taught English and creative writing on several levels, and lives northwest of Chicago overlooking Lake Campton.
Richard Holinger
