2018-19 Fiction Winner

Cantilevers's winner for fiction was Jordan Brooks, who wrote a short story, below, called Rust.

---- RUST ----

By the time we got there our red truck was bleached rust. Sand caked the tire grooves, and the damned heat saturated every space – our mouths, our lungs, our heads.

We rattled to a stop, the truck wheezing as it settled. For a moment, we sat there in the hot silence.

When we finally moved, the rays of sun were sharpening needles of light behind the mountains.

The barn was dustier than I remembered, and the roof sagged in on one side. Resilient weeds struggled through earth as the desert crept in.

Together, we pulled the tarp off the old thing: there it sat, tires half buried, just as it was all those years ago.

Hours passed. My brother spoke barely eight words in that time, too absorbed in working with his grime-coated hands. By the time we coaxed a sputter out of the engine, cool air licked across our skin. We stepped back to admire our work. The tractor was running. All the way out here in the grassless desert, a tractor – Papa never did have the sense to tow it back into town.

We backed that old rust bucket out the barn doors, readying for the long haul back to town. In the dusk light, words began to come more easily as we hitched it up to the back of the truck. Later, in the cab, we spoke of how the distant city lights resembled the stars we used to lie back in the sand and stare at.

Papa had never been much of a philosophical man, preferring to stick to machine parts and good old-fashioned elbow grease, but he’d come a bit more alive out in the desert night. Sometimes he’d make up a story about the constellations we could never find. No two stories of his were ever the same.

We lapsed into silence, shared a glance. It was just the two of us in Papa’s old, red truck. For the first time in a while, we smiled together.