Part I

Dale Henderson was fixing a carburetor that had been broken since the Clinton administration.

The carburetor belonged to a 1987 Ford F-150 that had belonged to a man named Earl Pemberton, who had belonged to a man named Earl Pemberton's father, and who probably belonged to the land before anybody owned it at all. The truck sat in Dale's garage—a corrugated metal building with a leaky roof and a concrete floor cracked in patterns that looked like river deltas if you squinted.

Dale had been working on the carburetor for four days. He had the right tools. He had the right parts from the hardware store in Goodland. What he did not have was patience for rust that had been forming since before he was born.

He drank a beer. The beer was warm. He kept working.

The television in the corner of the garage was on. Some channel was showing the news. A woman in a suit was talking about the sun. Dale did not look at the screen. He knew what she was saying. Everyone knew what she was saying.

The sun was expanding. Scientists were monitoring it. Nobody knew why. Nobody knew what to do. The sky had been red for three weeks.

Dale turned a bolt. It stripped. He put the wrench down. He drank another beer.

His phone rang. It was Marlene from the convenience store.

"Dale. Your dad's oxygen tank is empty."

"I know."

"Did you not buy the refill?"

"I will tomorrow."

"Dale."

"I know, Marlene. I know."

He hung up. He looked at the stripped bolt. He picked up a bolt extractor. It was the wrong size. It was always the wrong size.

Part II

The next day Dale did not go to the hardware store.

He slept until noon. The light coming through the garage window was the color of a bruise—purple and yellow and that persistent red that had become normal and then become annoying and then become something you just noticed when somebody else mentioned it.

He made coffee. He drank it standing at the sink. The coffee was weak because the beans were old and the water was hard and Oakhaven was the kind of town where everything was slightly wrong and everybody had learned to live with it.

His truck was a 1992 Chevrolet Silverado that started sometimes. Today it did not start. He turned the key. The engine made a sound like a dying animal. He turned it again. Nothing.

He drove to Marlene's house on foot. It was two miles. The road was US-83, which ran north through the middle of Kansas like a straight line drawn by somebody who did not understand curves. The wind was blowing. It always blew in Kansas. Today it blew harder than usual, carrying dust that made the air taste like old pennies.

Marlene's daughter had died the day before. Lung cancer. Thirty-two years old. A daughter named Claire who taught second grade and loved crossword puzzles and who had been sick for eight months and who had died in a hospital in Wichita while Marlene held her hand and talked about the weather because that is what you do when you do not know what to say.

Marlene answered the door. She looked the same as she always looked—fifty-two, tired, wearing a floral dress and an expression that had stopped being surprised by death a long time ago.

"He's on the porch," she said.

Dale found Old Tom sitting in his usual chair, the one with the cushion worn through to the wire springs. His oxygen mask was off. His chest rose and fell in slow shallow rhythms. The oxygen machine sat beside him, empty, its blue light dark.

"Dad."

Tom opened his eyes. They were cloudy but clear in a way that had nothing to do with vision. "Dale. Look at the sky."

Dale looked. The sky was red. Not sunset red. Not storm red. A flat even red that covered the whole hemisphere like a ceiling.

"It's red," Dale said.

"It's always red now."

"Yeah."

"Your mother used to say the sky was blue. I told her she was dreaming. She said I was the one dreaming." Tom smiled. It was a small tired smile. "Maybe we were both dreaming. Maybe the sky was always red and we just couldn't see it."

Dale sat down on the porch step. He took out a beer from the cooler beside him. He opened it. He drank it. It was warm.

Part III

Dale decided to drive to Wichita.

Not to a funeral. He wasn't sure there was going to be a funeral. Marlene had said something about "keeping it simple" and Dale understood that to mean there would be no ceremony, just a body lowered into ground that had already given up on growing things.

He decided to drive because driving was something you did when you did not know what else to do. The Silverado started on the third try. He backed out of the garage, hit a rock with the undercarriage, and kept going.

US-83 north. The Kansas plains stretched out on either side—flat brown and green, dotted with abandoned farmhouses whose roofs had collapsed and whose windows were black eyes looking at nothing. The wind hit the broken passenger window like a physical force, filling the cab with dust and the smell of dry grass and distant rain that was not coming.

He passed Hays at four in the afternoon. The town was mostly empty. A few cars in the parking lot of a bar called the Blue Moose. A sign that read: WELCOME TO HAYS—POPULATION 20,000 (approximately). Approximately was the key word in Kansas. Approximately population. Approximately harvest. Approximately rain.

He kept driving. Colby. Goodland. Every town the same. Empty main streets. Closed stores. Houses with grass that had gone brown and then yellow and then the color of ash.

At a gas station outside Goodland, he met a young Mexican man pumping diesel into a pickup truck. He couldn't have been more than twenty-five. He had a scar on his left cheek and eyes that had crossed an ocean and learned to look at the ground.

"How far you going?" the kid asked.

"As far as the gas takes me."

The kid laughed. It was a short humorless laugh. "Me too, man. I'm driving to Los Angeles. Left San Diego two weeks ago. My cousin says the sky is red there too."

"Is it?"

"Redder. Orange, maybe. Like the sun is trying to come through the paint."

Dale paid for the gas. He put forty dollars in the tank. The tank was already half full. He kept driving.

Part IV

He ran out of gas near a town called Hoxie that had a population of three hundred and a single stoplight that had not worked since the Reagan administration.

The Silverado coasted to a stop on the shoulder of US-83. Dale sat in the driver's seat and listened to the wind. It was the only sound for a hundred miles. No birds. No insects. Just wind moving across flat land that had been flat before anybody was born and would be flat after everybody was gone.

He got out. He walked to the edge of the road and looked west. The sky was red all the way to the horizon, which was so flat and distant that it looked like a line drawn with a ruler.

He walked back to the truck. He got in. He drove the last two miles on fumes, the engine sputtering and coughing, and pulled into the garage just as the light went out completely.

He sat in the dark for a while. Then he got out and went to his father's house. Tom was asleep in his chair, the oxygen machine silent. Dale covered him with a blanket and went to the kitchen and opened a beer.

He sat on the porch and drank it. The sky was darker now, the red deepening to something that was almost black at the edges. He could not see any stars. He could not see any clouds. Just red.

He remembered being seven years old, sitting on this same porch with his father, looking at a sky full of stars. There had been so many he could not count them. His father had pointed out Orion and said: "See that one? That's a sun. Over there—another sun. And over there—another. Every one of them could be a sun like ours. Or they could all be suns like ours. Or none of them could be. Nobody knows."

Dale looked at the red sky and tried to find one star. He could not.

He finished the beer. He set the bottle on the porch step. He listened to the wind. He listened to his father breathing in the house behind him. He listened to the silence of a town that had been silent for longer than he had been alive.

Tomorrow he would buy an oxygen tank. Maybe.

The sky burned. The wind blew. In a garage in Oakhaven, Kansas, a man sat on a porch and did nothing, which was what you did when there was nothing to do.

OTMES_v2 Codes: TI: 58.0 | T3_Martyrdom M: [M1:5.0, M2:1.0, M3:3.0, M4:7.0, M5:0.5, M6:1.5, M7:2.0, M8:3.0, M9:1.0, M10:2.0] N: [N1:0.55, N2:0.45] K: [K1:0.70, K2:0.30] theta: 270.0 | Existentialist V:0.40 I:0.80 C:0.95 S:0.15 R:0.20 Style: Dirty_Realism Theme: Existential_Nihilism / Absurd_Daily_Life