in parentheses

Lance Ümmenhofer (he/him) is a bipolar Southern author from Nashville, TN, USA. He is Editor-in-Chief of April Gloaming Publishing and the literary and arts journal, Waxing & Waning, and is the author of And the Soft Wind Blows. You can find previous work from him in Wild Roof Journal, Prometheus Dreaming, and Belmont.

Author’s Note: Enclosed are 3 flash fiction pieces (all under 400 words) from my WIP titled Off the Road, which chronicles a road trip I took from Nashville, TN out west to Utah in the winter of 2020/21. These pieces are each based off of a single landscape picture and represent the movement of a single moment, by way of landscape painting in words, aimed at capturing the end of the tumultuous year 2020 and the hope (& despair) that the calendar turning to 2021 brought.

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Animas River 1.2.21

The pebbles and their everfalling ‘side your everflowing foam. Light, airy, in the middle of a dream. The pebbles, golden, ceasing the growth of the golden brush in the golden hour. A gentle repose, the flit of a fish in finite space. Your water has been draining for hours, days, no longer the gold-flecked years of abundance. Trees transcendent and nude. The clouds sing sonorous and flick across the skyline, scatter.

The wind has been here. It takes shape and takes hold in the space between the trees you harbinger. You harbinger. Of the violent hour when this old world takes your shape and folds in on itself in a dignified dying. Though someday you will reanimate, spring to life again, burst forth and enrapture this land once again. Once my descendants no longer hold your throat. Once a new fish takes its new breath. Once the human race descends into its proud pit. Once the footing is loosed and fallen. Once the air breathes light again.

Concan, TX 12.29.20

A maelstrom of wind shoots through the blades of dying brush, their skin flecking off in a minutiae of debris flurrying through the air and setting down across the way. Trails of small game, jackrabbits, coyotes, foxes, stay hidden with their eyes shooting toward a stray sound in a distant corner of the field. Noses perking toward the sound they sense a presence, be it a meal or a murderer, a cool frenzy of hope and anguish causing stock-still the heart. In the center of the field a big bush waits to host another wandering life, to come in from the sun’s fire and wind’s whip and take refuge in its dense shade.

The field’s surrounding is made of trees, strong and valiant, holding in place tendrils of broken branches that had not survived yesterday’s storm. Now they rest for the warblers and goldfinch to hop across to their nests and feed their young. An ever-present wind touches the earth and straw and brush and cradles its long paws to shape the crests of hills and send sparks of life, or dead or dying, over the hills and beyond to the next valley or great expanse of earth or––maybe they settle not far from where they took off, and either way, the valley still thirsts for more rain and the next coming of sun.

At the very edges of the valley a large hill stretches upward and shifts the clouds. An impediment, a protector, a royal overseer of the distant below. It firmly solidifies a place for an ending, or the start of a faraway story––the ripples of plot holding near no sway here. The sounds and vibrations, an obscure beat of the heart of a lover or pack member never to be known. The skin of its dying brush never reaching this esoteric land nor this sequestered world. Here, lives lonely and full.

Concan, TX 12.29.20 (Midday)

Do they know the line of wooden electric poles that extends through the hills forms a game trail? Exposed and free of brush and sage and rock, the wild lives in droves. A line that curves slightly in the distant descending gray and white of the cloud line, setting off across the valley and falling behind the hills that lay unwavering on the horizon. A sentimental cause and effect of humans and land, pumping light and heat for miles away that reaches out its hand to ward off the coming maelstrom of nature taking hold. A violent retch that echoes loud and unnerving at night. And now, midday, the sun’s reach speckled amid the valley in wisps of light that brighten the dry brush, weed, and fallen foliage.

Every thing aloud and awake. These wisps of light breathe a brief blessing for the coming storm is of haste. Why don’t we sit and breathe too? Call ourselves violent brothers standing staunch and stolid against the southern wind?

In gentle crosses each pole is equidistant and the wires held strong. A hawk watches us, for it knows its prey is drawn to this manmade line. In the corner of its diamond yellow eye we are sized and left to live, but somewhere a wild violence perks its ears and follows the trail.

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