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no longer track. I glanced at my watch. I wasn’t sure if it was showing the correct time. My cell phone had been in my pocket, but I had it shut off. When I turned it on, it still displayed four out of five bars of power. As a phone it was useless. I could access the games, but the main screen readout haunted me with a “no service” message. The clock wouldn’t change off of the blinking, “four forty-two.”
    The one thing it did have was a memory card full of pictures I’d taken with the phone’s camera. I spent some time looking at the pictures. I lost it, and sobbed uncontrollably when I came across the picture of my granddaughter, Megan, in her Halloween costume.
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    RemembeR me
    I shut the phone off—a notion inside my brain stabbed at me. I might need it someday and I better conserve the battery life. It just might prove to be important. All night long the theories of my plight had channeled their way into and out of my mind. “I’m not in Kansas anymore.” It was the humorous cliché I’d spent a lifetime using. Only now it wasn’t so funny.
    Before I’d finally dozed, cold and contemptuous, I was swearing out loud at God. I chastised him for putting me in this place and taking away everything I loved. Then I turned around and asked for his forgiveness and for his salvation.
    I rubbed the back of my neck as I walked around the interior of the farm house in the morning light. The room I slept in once had flowered wallpaper, pink tinted. Most of the wallpaper was now long gone. There were only remnants remaining here and there, some hanging in deathly strips. The walls were streaked with old glue and age. Beer cans were scattered around the room. In one corner of the room, many had been neatly stacked. From the pungent smell of them they probably hadn’t been there long. I decided that last night would be my one and only night staying in this farm house. I explored the rest of the downstairs rooms. It gave me something to do as I tried to make sense of my predicament. The writer in me wanted to speculate about the people who had once
    lived here. What had their story been? Part of this tale I already knew. Marge Duitsman had lived in the house, up to the day she died in nineteen seventy-four. Her husband had preceded her in death twelve years earlier. They farmed the hundred and sixty acres the house overlooked until the day Herb died. They never had any children, and all of Herb’s family preceded him in death. Marge had a younger sister, and the farm eventually went to her. She lived in Georgia and rented the ground out until she passed away in nineteen ninety-two. Marge’s granddaughter, Nancy, was the current owner of the farm ground, S 29 S
    Brian L. MacLearn
    and she continued to rent it out. Nancy was also the one the Ervins convinced to sell them the twenty acres that Amy and I would then later buy from them with the new house.
    During the time between Marge’s death and the Ervin’s
    purchase, others had shown interest in buying the place. They could never seem to reach a deal. Some people wanted to turn the homestead into productive farm land; but Marge’s sister wanted it kept as acreage—for some reason. Time did the rest until the Ervins pictured a place in the country, and had the money to spend to make their vision come true.
    I tried to get a writer’s sense of Marge as I walked into the kitchen. It would be even better if I could see the upstairs, but I wasn’t going to try the steps. From what I could see, in my mind’s eye, Marge must have been a simple person. The living room had been some previous shade of green. Now it had faded into a streaky, yellowish tint. The kitchen walls were four-shades of dirty white. Some areas were marked with graffiti and several places had holes punched into the wall. Linoleum covered the floor. It had a geometric pattern of squares and circles, and had probably once been white, but was now a muddy brown. Only two of the cupboards had