Send the Sun

Short Fiction

Here’s my submission for this week’s Stories from the Jukebox prompt from MJ Polk: Send the Sun by Nikki Lane.

Title: Send the Sun (by Steve McKennon)

As she slid open the back door, the sound of her dogs growling and barking excitedly at the edge of the tree line amplified threefold. Nikki picked up her rifle and clutched the front of her robe as she stepped out onto her back porch. They had built the house here for the view, and the back door opened onto a marvelous display of the morning light shining across acres upon acres of Caddo County. The land wasn’t overly fertile and every cattle farm built on top of the area’s red clay had to be two to three times the size of farms in other parts of Oklahoma, which made it a great place for coyotes. They hid in the tall grass and wooded areas around the expansive fields, and right now one of them was trying to lure her dogs out into the trees where they could be ambushed and torn apart.

Calling out for the riled-up dogs to come back toward the house, Nikki fired the gun in the air three times and scanned the tree line to see if she could catch a glimpse of the troublesome coyote. Well, of course not, there was a reason that as long as she could remember those things could be heard across the fields at night, calling out to one another in their yipping high-pitched howls. They were pretty hard to pin down.

Once she was reasonably sure all her dogs would still be breathing after breakfast, she fired one more shot into the air for good measure then stepped back into the house and headed over to the stove to fry up some turnips and eggs. It was her husband Stoney’s favorite, and she made it in tribute to his return in a few days. Like most cattle farms in the area, the margins made it pretty hard to fully make a living from that alone without some supplemental source of income. So, like many people in Caddo County, Stoney (whose given name was Jackson) worked two weeks on and two weeks off in Alaska on an oil field. It was currently the time of year there where it was dark like 18 hours per day, and she raised her hand and pretended to blow Stoney some sunshine to warm him as he worked. When she ate the breakfast, she closed her eyes and willed that he be able to taste the food through her tongue somehow.

After cleaning her plate in the sink Nikki walked over to the window near the front door, which was positioned to see some pretty great sunsets at the end of the day. Despite his attempts to seem like a hard and practical country boy, Stoney had worried about every detail of the house so that they could fully utilize each angle and romantic view. This sunset view was now slightly polluted with the sight of slowly spinning windmills from one side of the horizon to the other, each with a blinking red light that at night made them look like columns of an angry-eyed otherworldly army marching unstoppably forward. From what everyone she knew understood these windmills generated more green energy offsets than actual electricity for the grid, but everyone lucky enough to get one could earn up to $20,000 a year just for letting it sit on their land. That would be a nice boost.

As she looked out the window, Nikki saw a truck coming up the dirt road in front of the house that was going along too slow to kick up a cloud of red dust behind it. She held her breath to see if it would keep going and tried to recognize whose it might be. While many of the men in Caddo County made good by working in the oil fields, many others didn’t bother. Some times of the month when a lot of the men were gone supplementing their income, it seemed like the welcome sign into town should have a neon attachment that flashed “WELFARE.” Those kinds of people could be jealous and sometimes it was just a few steps from jealous to vindictive.

Nikki retrieved her rifle and went back to the window near the front door, fingering the trigger as she watched the truck moving slowly toward the driveway. It passed just as slowly by and continued down the road, not kicking up any dirt as it went. She exhaled deeply, not realizing until then she had been holding her breath.

Turning slowly toward the north, she raised her hand again and pretended to blow Stoney some more sunshine.

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In response to Stories from the Jukebox weekly prompt #25 (“Send the Sun” by Nikki Lane):

Send The Sun