weathering, or: little house on the prairie fan fiction

It was nice to log into Blogspot for the first time in ages and read my happy AWP post from March, just to remember that I haven't consistently been a human dumpster fire for the past one to five years. I am inconsistently a dumpster fire. My current problem is unemployment. I was fortunate to be steadily employed for twenty years(!), weathering the great recession of 2008 and the pandemic. But budget cuts came to 826LA, and my job didn't survive them. I am good at diligently applying for jobs, but so far I haven't actually landed one, and I am bad at dealing with uncertainty. 

All of which is to say I have not used this time to make my house fabulous or have a creative renaissance. But I did write one short story, which is basically Little House on the Prairie fan fiction. I'm posting it here because I don't think there's a huge literary market for Little House fan fiction. 

In one of the books, Little Town on the Prairie, Laura teaches at a tiny country school and stays with a member of the school board and his wife during the week. One night she wakes up and hears the wife threatening her husband with a knife. She is so over frozen prairie life, and so desperate to go home. Naturally I had to write a story from the POV of someone feeling a bit trapped and crazy. 

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Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

Weathering

Mrs. Brewster is no longer fooled by a blue sky in the middle of a Dakota winter. On clear days, the snow doesn’t cross out everything a person might see or touch. Claim shanties, barns, new small trees, horses, prairie, a body approaching the cabin. The wind doesn’t scream over everything a person might hear. Her son crying, Mr. Brewster’s logical tenor about how the land will be theirs if they can just weather this. A person screaming. On clear days, Mrs. Brewster can sometimes see the moon, a discarded white marble. 

But the temperature is farther below zero than any thermometer can measure. These are the days men venture out, and horses fall in snow-covered sloughs, and she tells Johnny he mustn’t be fooled into playing outside.

The Ingalls girl has eyes like one of those blue-sky days. She is the same age as Mrs. Brewster’s youngest sister, who will not receive either of the letters she wrote until spring. The first letter spoke of our own little piece of America, as if she were writing an advertisement to sell herself on something she’d already bought. The ink on the second letter is uncertain, jittery from a pen held by frozen fingers. 

The Ingalls girl is quiet and well mannered, but something about her seems ready to burst with chatter. She appears to be waiting for an indulgent smile from Mrs. Brewster, but none is forthcoming.

Every weekday, the Ingalls girl buttons up her shoes and coat and winds her muffler around her resolute face and heads to the schoolhouse, where Mr. Brewster has built a fire for the students. The girl has a Ma and a Pa at home, and some sisters, and a beau who announces his arrival with sleigh bells each Friday evening. The girl’s Ma knit that muffler with warm hands, and it is as if the girl is held by those hands everywhere she goes. 

Scott Ymker on Unsplash

Johnny Brewster’s nose is always running. He’s had three fevers this winter, and by the second, Mrs. Brewster wondered: If he died, would Mr. Brewster relent and take them all home? By the third, Mrs. Brewster knew he would not.

On the night that Mrs. Brewster brings the kitchen knife to the part of the claim shanty they call bedroom, she knows that the Ingalls girl hears her. All this endless land around them, and only a sheet hung on a wire between them, approximating a world that has forgotten them. Home. Room. What fanciful ideas.

This is the knife that carved their Christmas goose, shot from the sky as it tried to fly south. This is the knife that she used to cut the calf free, when it got tangled in morning glory vines. Spring and fall are foreign lands now, as far away as the town where her sister lives. She wants to believe the knife contains a kind of magic. It can sever, set free. 

She holds it above her head with both hands. The marble moon watches through the window, giving her just enough light to see Mr. Brewster’s shiny cheeks above the quilts. He works all day in the tiny half-town, thinks he deserves supper and rest when he gets home.

“You’re not happy here. You can’t be,” she whispers.

Mr. Brewster stirs. A hand pops above the covers like a gopher from its hole. The hand waves in her direction, shooing her away. She is a fly to him. If she had hoped that she could make him see, the hand corrects her. 

“Take me home.” She isn’t whispering now. Her voice is cold as the clear sky.

In a fit of movement and recognition, Mr. Brewster is awake, and understands, and doesn’t.

“Woman, what are you doing? Are you mad?”

Of course she is mad. She has been for some time now.

“If you don’t go of your own free will, you’ll go by force,” she says. 

He barks out a laugh. “Are you going to hold that knife to my throat all the way to Wisconsin?”

“If I have to.”

“There’s nothing there for us. You going to buy back the old farm? With what money?”

“We can live with my family. They’ll make room.”

“Oh, they’d love that. Their daughter’s no-good husband, coming home with his tail between his legs. Put the knife down and go to sleep, woman.”

A woman is a fly. Flies freeze and die in the winter.

She hadn’t felt quite like herself when she picked up the knife, and the force that guides her to lower it is equally strange. A thing outside herself. She hears muffled crying and doesn’t know if it’s the Ingalls girl or Johnny or herself. 

Brianna Marble on Unsplash

The Indians have lived on this land for longer than any of the white men who rushed the claim office last spring and plowed the sod last summer. How can people who don’t even know how to grow wheat survive these winters? Mr. Brewster said a group of Indians built a bark house near the lake, and pulled fish through holes in the ice. Mrs. Brewster has two thoughts at once. Have they cursed us for taking their land? and Would they take me in if I went to them? But then she would still be here, more or less, and that is the problem.

She puts the knife back on the high table where she prepares meals, too high for Johnny to reach, although he is taller every day. She wraps it in a checked dish towel. 

Johnny is asleep on his cot by the stove. The red embers tell her there are still many hours until morning. They cast a glow on the half of his face visible above the blankets. He has long dark lashes and pale skin that turns rosy when he’s cold or feverish or excited. Lately he has seemed like one long whine, like the wind itself, and she has snapped at him and spanked him harder than she should, and then scolded herself for her temper. 

If not for Johnny, she might walk out into the snow. She’s heard that people feel warm right before they freeze to death. Maybe that’s what it feels like to be welcomed by angels. But Johnny is a kind of insurance policy for Mr. Brewster, isn’t he? He would be shocked to hear her frame it so coldly, accuse her of being unmotherly. It’s true, though. Johnny keeps her tethered to life like a horse on a picket line. 

She puts her hand to the window. During the summer, they didn’t even have glass. Then Mr. Brewster arrived with two sheets of it for their two windows, and they celebrated this bit of civilization. Her hand melts the condensation, as if she is a living thing, full of heat and life.