Jaq leans up against the “Ride a Jackalope to Trinidad”
billboard and soaks in the warm sun. Wind whistles under the frame, but this is mostly
a sheltered spot. She slides into the grass and dozes.
When she rouses, no telling how long she has slept. She
looks across the scrubby junipers toward Raton Pass. This is the Santa Fe
Trail, and before that it was a game trail, although history books will credit
only human species, and then only Europeans.
What rough country. Old volcano cones dot across the horizon
like chess pieces on a disorganized checkerboard. Other ridges flow
rhythmically into tilted edges of mountains. A few stone wall ruins remain,
perhaps Pueblo, and the arch of an abandoned Spanish church. Farther upstream,
a Raven circles.
In the valley she notices movement, then sees smooth leaps
of two antelopes, their ebony-black pronghorns well defined against pale grass.
Good to know the ‘lopes still own part of the homeland.
Back by the highway, a white cross rises above an informal
shrine of tinsel roses. Here someone died in a car accident, a reminder of time
passing, as much as the extinct volcanoes. A fading photograph of a young man’s
face, framed in white wood, stares West into eternity.
Jaq looks behind her at the garish billboard poster. “We
Never Sleep!” says a grinning cartoon wolf. “Stay the Night.” The Jackalope next
to the Wolf wears a saddle, and it walks down the highway, one foot raised.
Jaq looks back at the subdued greens of the winter
foothills. The raven tilts and starts a new spiral against clouds. In a blink,
it all could return to primal void. Or not.
Jaq smells the piny mountain scent one last time. She
stands up against the saddled Jackalope image, and it is exactly her size. She
stretches to fit the silhouette. She raises her foot to mirror the poster and
tweaks her left ear to fit. It is when she matches the two-dimensional
Jackalope’s grin that she suddenly loses consciousness.
© 2014 Denise Low. First published in Yellow Medicine Review. All rights reserved. Contact kansaspoetry
[at] gmail for permissions and queries.
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