All the Names They Used for God

by Anjali Sachdeva

Great masses of blue-black cloud gather above the prairie, and lightning cracks sideways at the horizon while the wind sets her hair whipping about her face. Times like these the world feels more alive than any other, like she is only a mosquito resting on the hide of some great beast.

In the constant darkness, the passage of time becomes impossible to calculate.

After a while, she begins to crouch by the icy rivers and swipe at the white fish, flipping them from the water to the cave floor, where they thrash until they die and she can rinse them clean and eat them.

Tell me something, she says to the cave, and the cave breathes back at her, its million water droplets echoing against its stony heart.

She hauls the gun back up from the floor into the crook of her arm and lets the black exhaustion that has been tugging at her pull her under.

Van Jorgen could not have been more surprised had a squirrel or a house cat stood up and told him that it planned to seek a post at the bank.