Who Wants to be Nobody

Page 8

the road, nearly touching each other. Six thirty was a quiet time of the day. Except for few farmers in pick-up trucks, it seemed as though she and her mother were the only ones in the town-a tiny, farming town, hardly a fly speck in the middle of vast potato and wheat fields. When she finally opened her eyes, she looked up through the sprawling trees to a dark, granite sky. A swollen, somber cloud blanketed the trees, promising rain. During the summer, the main topic of conversation among the farmers at the Co op was whether or not there would be enough rain to keep the wheat growing on the dry farms. But Kim never liked the clouds because they gave her a heavy, depressed feeling. Through tear filled eyes she glanced nostalgically at sights, ordinarily uninteresting to her, which now ripped at her heart strings. The barn-like high school gym on the highway with its rickety basketball floor where she had first learned to do a jump shot; the Community Church, whose recreation hall doubled as Mr. Flugman's School of ballet where she danced each afternoon, and the farm, which she could spot miles off by the power line. Even though her mother sold the farm five years ago when they moved into town, that was still her real home. The Passeys, who had owned the farm just next to it, had bought their thousand acre farm after her father died, and Kim kept hoping they would default on the monthly payments so the land would once again belong to her mother.