The Well Behaved Dingo

My mom’s property is a weird place for me. It’s wrapped up in long resentments of the worst kind of work, work you’re forced into with no reproach, of laying barbwire fence, bucking hay bales until my throat nearly closed up from my allergies, of fights at family gatherings and the last saddest days with my old blind dog Connor. It’s a deep well for me out here.

Sarah on the other hand has had to tolerate very little of that, thankfully, and so today she’s riding Peanut horse around the ring, having target practice with the BB rifle I bought her for her birthday. I managed to take down a buffalo this afternoon! And really it’s a beautiful place, my step dad Randy is being, well, pleasant, a not too easy maneuver for him.

They keep asking how long we will be staying. If we knew we’d say, but as it is there’s an overflow of what was that I can’t leave behind me and there’s a feeling that something ugly is just waiting out of sight. We’ll see.

Until the ugliness arrives I’ll be biding my time hunting buffalo.