Jeannette Winderhoek imagines herself on the plains of Kansas, a fallow, whistling desert of burnt corn stalks, the line of the horizon melted by mirage, broken by lines of telephone poles, the posts of grain silos, distant churches. Oil derricks rear back and bow, siphoning off the rocks’ blood. The sky above an unblinking eye. Then, one by one, the signs of human intervention disappear; the power lines, the skeletal irrigation equipment, the houses huddled at the intersections of pebbly roads, the roads themselves; as though the camera keeps stopping and starting and things are taken away during its blindness. Soon it is just Jeannette, the wind, and the sky, and she feels herself slipping, understands why people might go to church more out here; it’s so easy to be a victim of God’s wrath. Were His gigantic hand to descend from the firmament to pluck you from the planet, there would be no buildings, no valleys, no trees to impede its approach, no mark on the ground to signal your disappearance. Just a spiral upward into the atmosphere as the hand passes, pulling up dust into a wispy finger of soil, a tornado in reverse, until the wind carries it off.
—from Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America
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