American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,11

schedule for himself, and if he’s gauged the current date correctly he is well short of his appointed time. He should still be slumbering here, hidden from the raw, new world in the many rocky folds of the canyon. It is very curious.

Something must have awoken him, he decides. This is concerning, for few are the things that can awake Mr. First. So, in a series of slow, complicated movements, he unfurls himself and begins to examine his surroundings: he tastes the air, the moisture, the sandy canyon floor, and many other things besides.

It is this ability for perception (along with his seniority) that differentiates Mr. First from his many siblings. For example, while his family is unique in a variety of ways, only he is able to perceive the shape and shift of time itself: he can glimpse ahead and make out the rough, tumbling shape of things to come, like looking down into the sea and discerning a swell of silver and identifying it as a school of fish—and, if he concentrates very, very hard, he might even be able to make out the form of things that could have happened (or even should have happened) but did not.

Now, trembling and quaking in the cool morning air, Mr. First realizes this is what awoke him: the shape of the future has just violently shifted. A multitude of possibilities were eliminated, and everything has just been forced onto a single track. He exercises his talent for perception, and peers ahead at the blurry shape of future events, and sees…

He stops almost immediately. If Mr. First had eyes to widen, they would be quite wide right now.

He thinks about what he has just seen, and two thoughts enter his mind:

One is that someone has been murdered. This is unprecedented, and rightly so: such a thing should be impossible here. Yet merely by glancing at the next few hours, he can see it is true.

The second is far more confusing, far more ominous, and totally perplexing to Mr. First. Yet he knows what he saw, and though it was as vague and shadowed as all glimpses of things yet to come, it is clear as day to him:

She is coming.

Mr. First hunches down in his canyon, withdrawing utterly until there is nothing to distract him. He begins thinking, very hard and very fast, which is difficult for him, for his thoughts usually proceed with the pace and implacability of tectonic shifts.

Things are changing. They are changing here, in a place that should not ever, ever change. Even he, eldest of his siblings (give or take), could never have anticipated this.

Should I tell them? he asks himself. He extends his attention to the tiny town threaded through the valley before the mesa. They are all still asleep, for the most part.

No, he decides: they will know soon enough, and besides, it would make no difference.

But his own preparations will have to change, he knows. They’ll have to be sped up, for one. That is all he can do. And soon he will have visitors, and he will have to get ready for them.

He sighs a little. He was quite enjoying it here. They all were. But such things happen, he supposes.

CHAPTER FOUR

Anyone who wants to rhapsodize about the beauty of nature should drive from Texas to New Mexico, Mona thinks. There is about a hundred-mile stretch of nothing, genuinely nothing, no crops or buildings of any kind, though of course it’s hard for her to tell how big it is because it all looks the same. It is just flat, gray, sunbaked scrub, flatter than any land Mona’s seen before. She’s pretty sure that if she were to pull over and stand on the hood of her car she’d be able to see for miles in every direction. There are barbed-wire fences everywhere, but Mona can’t figure out for the life of her what they’re fencing out.

I-40 just keeps going. It has almost no intersections, and it passes through no towns. This is an empty country, untamed simply because there is nothing here to tame.

Except, Mona learns, the wind. It is when she first enters the hills that she sees the wind turbines, and she’s so surprised she nearly drives the Charger off the road. They are so unexpected, these shining white machines standing on the ragged mountaintops. She knew they had built wind farms out here, but she hasn’t returned to West Texas in over fifteen years, so she has never