The first thing I noticed was the color.karaBlue.
There was blue where the blue never belonged.
I had crossed the ridge on my old Ford with the windows lowered and the heat of late summer spilling through the cabin like the breath of an oven. The way back was not really a reel ra, just two hard tire tracks running between the grass up to the waist, the sweet young trees, and a line of pines that my grandfather had planted before my father was old enough to hold an axe. I had walked that path a thousand times in my life. I could have done it blindfolded, although my abu elo m e would have slapped the back of the head to say it. Every routine had a memory. Every curve had a reason. The land opened at the top of the ridge in the same way that I had always done, rolling or towards my southern pasture, submerging towards the spring, rising again towards the old stacked stone fence that marked the boundary between the land of Mercer and the property south of it.
Only now, in the midst of that grass, sunlight slipped out of the water.
For a few seconds, my mind refused to understand what my eyes were seeing. I stopped the truck with a trunk still floating on the brakes and looked through the dusty windshield. It looked like a mirage at first, one of those heat tricks that Alabama can play on a man in August when the air is thick and the horizon shines. But the mirages have not cut the banks. Mirages do not have raw red clay stacked on mounds. The mirages have no traces of excavators carved deep enough to contain yesterday’s rain.
I killed the engine and heard it quietly.
