THEY WERE THE YEARS OF FAT WATER — MYNA CHANG
/the lush years of golden wheat fields and daybreak rain showers. Years with no wildfires, when no one’s well ran dry, when runoff graced the riverbeds and playa frogsong lulled your kids into the bright Milky Way night.
They were the years you thought maybe you could buy a new truck, one with air conditioning and electric windows, well, maybe a used truck, but still, newer than the rust bucket your grandpa left you.
They were the years you told your kids they could go to college, maybe downstate, one of the big schools with a football team you could cheer on Saturdays, and you told them they could study whatever they wanted, something with a future, business, maybe, or maybe they could go to that vo-tech school in the city, auto body work always pays good, doesn’t it?
They were the years you thought you might be able to retire, put your feet up, maybe you could die at home in your bed, just like in a storybook, the years you dared to think you might not die in the seat of a tractor like your dad.
They were the years of promises impossible to keep, the years you forgot about drought, even though you drove every day past the drifted blow-dirt that used to be Grandpa Ralph’s homestead, the years you focused your gaze on a dawn-pink sky that stretched horizon to horizon with nothing but daydreamed plenty in the budding spring air.
They were the years of remembrance, those fat water years, the years of maybe, because when the water was good, it was good.
Myna Chang grew up in the Oklahoma panhandle, surrounded by vivid reminders of the ecological disaster known as the Dust Bowl. These remembrances inform much of her writing. Her work has been selected for Flash Fiction America (Norton), Best Small Fictions, Fractured Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, and The Citron Review, among others. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Award in Flash Fiction. Read more at MynaChang.com or @MynaChang.
