Welcome to Deadwood

   I pressed my cheek up against the car window, staring up at the grey sky, tracing over the shapes formed by aeroplanes soaring through the stratosphere. Frost was starting to form across the window pane and I pressed my fingertips against it, as if I could feel the cold through the glass. Bob Dylan was playing on the car stereo, I remember this distinctly. 

   We were surrounded by lush vegetation, dewy from the rainstorm that had blown in from the East that same morning. It caused this glimmering effect, when the sun managed to break it’s way through the clouds, the light refracting off the waxy leaves and water droplets, making everything shimmer. This was what I had been brought up on, the pine forests and sycamore trees, watching birds in the spring from my bedroom window. 

   “Hey, May,” my dad reached his arm around the driver’s seat and tapped my leg, “look right over here,” he pointed over the steering wheel and I lent forward in my seat, resting my chin against the tough upholstery and following the line of my father’s finger. “Can you see it? Right over there, in the trees?” 

   “No, I don’t see anything,” I replied, continuing to stare into the forest, searching for something. 

   “The stag!” He cried out, “Christ, you barely ever see those so close to the roads.” 

   “I see it now,” I grinned as my eyes focussed on the large deer hidden in the undergrowth, it’s magnificent bone antlers curling outwards like some period headpiece. “It’s beautiful,” I sighed, following it as the road curved and the car turned away. 

   “I didn’t see it,” my mom complained, turning back in her seat and trying to get another look. 

   “You surely missed something, darling,” dad exhaled deeply, winking at me in the rearview mirror. “Mother nature in all it’s God given glory,” this made me laugh and my mum huffed in aggravation. 

   “Just because you two are too ignorant to believe in such a thing as our great creator, doesn’t mean you won’t pray to Him like everyone else does at the end,” she scolded and my father took his hands off the wheel for a moment, holding his palms outward. 

   “Hey, I’m not denying that for a moment,” he agreed, “but you have your faith and I have mine. I’m sorry I was joking, darling, you’ve known me long enough to realize it’s nothing but jokes.” He reached out and squeezed her leg affectionately and although she tried her best to stay annoyed, I saw her smiling in the reflection of the windscreen. 

   “At least I don’t believe in a ‘great eagle’ in the sky,” my mother said cynically, feeling the gold cross she always wore between her fingers. 

   “All I’m saying is there are some Native American tribes that have a thing or two to say about this world and it's creation,” he argued. 

   “Eagles don’t even have hands, how is one meant to have sculpted every living creature on this earth?” She challenged and I just sat back in my seat, watching them, as they always were, arguing over things they could never possibly prove right or wrong. 

   “Maybe there was no sculpting involved,” my father pointed out. “Hey, May, tell your mother about that boy in your class who can make things out of plasticine with his toes.” 

   “There ain’t such a thing,” she pouted. 

   “There is, Mama,” I chimed in. “His name’s Roy and he’s my fourth favourite person after Marie and Jessica and Caleb. One day, for show and tell, he took a block of purple plasticine from his bag and took off his shoes and the teacher didn’t know what the heavens he was doing but he did it and he gave it to me. It was a dinosaur, don’t you remember?”