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So suppose the sky that
day looked like America, with
piled-high clouds wind-mown into furrows of cotton and cropdusting
and projected against a luminous, gaping bluescreen firmament,
the sparse greens and browns of trees and houses cutting paper-thin
relief into the bowed expanse, all of it seeming to scream out
the tragic possibilities of wide open spaces even as the sky
tucked and buckled down to the land supporting it; and suppose
that in the middle of all that America, the one on the ground
and not the one above it, there was a mammoth, red, rust-mottled
and beveled-edged Ford F-250 going sixty, sixty-five, seventy
on a ribbon of blue-black asphalt hugging flush against the low,
imperceptible Midwestern lists and sways, and that inside the
pick-up there were one father, one mother, and one daughter,
each one pale-skinned and sun-freckled under a dull, brown head
of hair. So say there were three.
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