If Monet Had Painted the Western United States - Nikoletta Gjoni
We pull into a gas station—the first one we’ve seen in over an hour—and step out to stretch our legs. The sun has beamed down all afternoon, sitting on the horizon like low hanging fruit ready to crack open and spill its shimmer over the Plains. It has made everything around us look like a hazy mirage, until suddenly, darkness begins to creep up from the fold between earth and sky.
The day’s warmth begins to lift like a veil and the evening chill settles in its place. I roll my sleeves down as a shiver climbs up my spine and overtakes me like a damp blanket planted on my shoulders. We are nearing the end of August but out here in the endless, cavernous space of South Dakota, the wide, flat land creates easy passageway for breezes to gain speed into low grade winds. We stand around staring in awe, feeling the need to whisper and not disrupt the intricate hush surrounding us. We admire how the sky has taken on an ombre coloring—mauve and Pacific Ocean blue at the horizon, and a velvety black above our heads, pinpricks of stars peering down through the darkness like seeds scattered across the sky.
I’m used to obstructed views in Maryland. Forest lined hills and highways that curve sideways, going uphill and downhill like the flow of cooling lava—slow, steady, and gray. I’m used to driving towards my house and seeing the glow of lights from the next town over far off into the distance. Sugarloaf Mountain’s rounded bump rises from the earth like a pimple even when miles away. But South Dakota doesn’t care to remind us of where the next town over is, or that civilization is just around the next turn. There are no turns. There is no civilization. Like being on a ship and seeing only ocean and sky, the Great Plains yawn out on all four sides, mustard yellow and mossy, the grass simply existing endlessly. I think of how insignificant we are in this wide world, how we are just insects crawling through, inconsequential to the landscape that has seen it all and will continue to see more long after we’re gone.
The next day we see the earth change out of its clothes into something a little more vibrant and show-stopping. We drive through the Badlands in silent astonishment and notice the rock mirrors the same colors as the evening sky we had just witnessed. Gentle waves of soft pastel pinks and purples stretch across as if a kid with a crayon had wandered their way through the park. Uneven lines mark every rugged surface in near perfect alternating pattern.
We stop on the side of the road and get out into the desert heat, squinting into our phone cameras as we take selfies with pink and beige pointed peaks jutting above our heads. Discovering there are no fences or restrictions, my brother and dad run off the road towards the mounds, their laughs echoing off the rock surfaces and flitting between the blades of grass like a residual haunting.
I resort to sitting in the dry brush only to discover that it is less mossy and more hay-like. The tall grasses scratch against my bare legs and make my whole body itch. Insects whir and sing in rhythm, overriding my silence and I feel my body slowly expand from within, my fingertips swollen and buzzing as if separate from me. I sit still and feel sweat trickle slowly down my thighs, my brow. I imagine bits of my DNA melting into the dry soil, coiling itself to the pink mountains. I find joy in imagining myself being absorbed by the earth while I’m still alive to recognize that that’s what’s happening.
I inhale deeply before asking my mom for another picture, before I can be overrun by the wilderness of a place that is half-desert, half-field. I yell across the way at her to grab her phone, my voice echoing before dissipating. I’ve never felt smaller, I think, and wonder if the need to feel lost is a modern-day desire born out of over-stimulation, of over-consumption of both mind and spirit. This feeling of being tiny—of being no more or less special than everything surrounding me gives me a sense of peace. The unfamiliarity of the land and all of what it offers and deprives us settles on my tongue like sand grains.
In the picture, I’m a black and cream dot against a world of gray, yellow, and shades of pink. I look at it now and remember the taste of Little House on the Prairie stories; of salt licked off my lips and the rivaling sweetness of melted chocolate disintegrating in the heat of a car whose windows we refuse to roll up. I remember each of our heads hanging out, tongues lolling to taste arid air as if memories could be ingested. Like a ghost surveying the land, I can see the car meandering down empty, winding roads as the kaleidoscopic scenery eases past us, the world dissolving into a blur of watercolors like wet paintbrushes dropped into a cup of clean water.
Originally published by Rhythm & Bones, 2019
Nikoletta Gjoni is a writer living outside of Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in the 2023 Rising Stars London Independent Story Prize anthology and has been previously nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She was a 2024 scholarship recipient for the Salty Quill Women's Writing Retreat where she worked towards completing her first novel. View Gjoni's publications at www.ngjoni.com or follow her on Twitter @NikiGjoni
