Jasika Nicole

Real in a way that nothing has since.

I trailed off and waved my hand to indicate a series of events that upended everything I had understood about the world.

Extraordinary things are only supposed to happen to a person once in their life, if that.

I had no interest in being struck by lightning twice.

The woman nodded.

Good, she said.

This would be a lot more difficult if you had.

It was bad enough involving you, but we felt we had no choice.

Who is we, exactly?

I said, not expecting a straight answer.

And she didn't even attempt a crooked one, so... Is this about Thistle?

Are they back?

I asked.

I'd come all this way.

Might as well get the worst of it over.

Clear, delineated lines between arid desert and irrigated farmland.

Brown to green.

Sharp divisions, like the squares of a Rothko.

The writer William T. Vollman, he called the landscape of the American desert a Rothkoscape.

Here is what the landscape has looked like for a thousand years, and then here it is with the water we have taken from somewhere far away and carried to this land.