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    Dashboard Jesus
    Dashboard Jesus
    Dashboard Jesus
    Ebook73 pages1 hour

    Dashboard Jesus

    By Sharon Iggulden

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Abel has returned to central Kansas to bury his father and sell the farm. Walking through the neglected fields he finds a veritable archaeological dig of discarded machinery. In the midst of all the mechanical carnage he finds his first car, rusting and shimmering in the unforgiving climate, calling him with a siren song. As he sits gingerly in the front seat again, he is invaded by the piercing static of a thousand remembered moments, riding the air currents with the incessant droning hum of insects that never seem to die. Still perched proudly on the dashboard is the Jesus statue his
    mother once gave him as protection against a misspent youth.

    As he rounds the barn he finds his old high school sweetheart, Ellie, waiting in the afternoon sun.. He had abandoned her, alone and pregnant, after graduation, fleeing a life steeped in religious fanaticism, poverty and small town gossip, almost more afraid of
    spending eternity in central Kansas than he was of fatherhood.

    Now living in Montana, Abel tries to lure Ellie back to him.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSharon Iggulden
    Release dateOct 12, 2011
    ISBN9781465828613
    Dashboard Jesus
    Author

    Sharon Iggulden

    Sharon has written several novella/short stories including: Dashboard Jesus, The French Tour Guide, Run Hard, Tick-Tock, Time Changes Everything, Symmetry and A Lucky Day. Sharon has also written several novels including the Christian Scott-Sarah Hunter series: Wire Mother, A Better Tragedy and The Lyrics Will Make You Cry, as well as the stand alone novel A Pale Horse. Sharon lives in Elma, New York and may be reached at sharoniggulden@yahoo.com

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      Book preview

      Dashboard Jesus - Sharon Iggulden

      DASHBOARD JESUS

      By

      Sharon Iggulden

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2011 by Sharon Iggulden

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Cover image: Mikhail Siskoff

      Cover Design: Rita Toews

      It’s important not to get caught in the crosswinds.

      Easy advice out here in the land of a thousand breezes.

      The heartland.

      Where the wind never stops until right before the tornado hits.

      Easy advice.

      Not so easy to heed.

      Sometimes, at night, even now…especially now…regardless of where he was in the world, he could feel himself rise and fall with the swaying summer grain. Feel it move with him as he walked, hip deep sometimes, in its almost sensual rhythms. He hadn’t been out in the fields since he left. Maybe he was half afraid its siren song would lure him back.

      Back to this beautiful nothingness. Odd, how the beauty of a country side can’t stop the terror that lives there.

      It’s heartbreaking really.

      Evil should live only on ugly land.

      So it can be recognized for what it is.

      Home.

      It was not a gentle place.

      For as long as he could remember, it was a place he desired, wanted, needed to leave. It represented a stark living death of numbing daily sameness…and terror. He remembered the panic that would grow inside of him, like cold hard fingers kneading his intestines, when he thought he would have to spend the rest of his life here.

      He would not live his father’s life.

      He couldn’t.

      Yet.

      Still.

      It felt comforting to be walking the old land again. He stood very, very still and closed his eyes, feeling the wind on his face, the secrets of life all wrapped up in its unbreakable code. He inhaled deeply and could almost smell the rain and mist rising off the land just before dawn, carrying with it the odors of old manure and hay, stale sweat and fear.

      In the fall, the air would smell like burnt sugar and candied apples as leaves and fruit left to rot on the trees and ground would mingle with late mowing and hay bales. The humidity would be gone and a cool bite in the air would be a reminder of harsher things to come.

      Abel never enjoyed being buffeted by the elements. This was tornado alley a pristine sky could turn into clouds on a death march within seconds. Able had experienced enough near misses to know what could happen to all the blissful solitude.

      He wiped his face on his shirt sleeve as mid-western summer blast furnace heat mingled with unseen particles stung his perspiration covered neck. The heat was breathtaking, all encompassing, like treading in a solid. He could feel its suffocating tentacles ooze into his marrow with the stealth of an unseen virus. He heard the swishing of the grain and wondered how many times he had sought the solitude of this desolate field.

      The absolute solitude necessary to erase the despair of the alternating silences and howls of two people who had lost each other long before he ever appeared beside them.

      A change-of-life baby.

      That’s what he was.

      The ultimate surprise for two lonely desperate people who walked past each other to love only him, but there was too much uncompromising isolation in lives lived with too much hostility.

      Too much of a hard, unbending father who thought the grain was a direct, personal gift from his God, who was an equally hard and unbending deity. A father who tried too hard to create a son out of his own reflection.

      Too much of a weary, sad, heartbroken, mother who had no one and nothing else, and clung to him for salvation. A half mad mother who lectured him about the danger in the world. The uncontrolled danger and heartbreak.

      In the end.

      He broke both of their hearts.

      Sometimes he wondered if he had left anything good behind.

      Or maybe everything.

      He looked around slowly, hearing their voices in the wind. He never questioned that they loved him. He only questioned their sanity. He needed to go. He couldn’t be here any longer without all the guilt and regret reforming, the unnamed guilt that follows us when we don’t deliver a vague something that seems to have been required. It breaks the surface, when we least expect it, like a swimmer who has been under too long.

      Remembering is not a spectator sport.

      He turned to leave when he saw the undulating grass lean and swirl in an unfamiliar pattern. A few steps closer and he saw it all.

      It could have been an archeological dig, a machinery graveyard, like the crumbles of a dying empire, or the remnants of Ozymandias. Every car or piece of equipment they had ever owned was there, rusting in the unforgiving sun and desolate winter, oozing their essence into the ground, like diluted blood. It was creepy, actually. Like unburied bodies.

      Why hadn’t they just thrown it all away?

      Or was his father so steeped in religious fanaticism that he thought it would all resurrect in some glorious miracle?

      That’s when he saw it.

      There it was.

      Shimmering in the sun.

      Waves radiating from the roof like heat off the tarmac.

      He couldn’t

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