Frances pulled up to the steaming patch of road tar and eased the white City truck to a stop. From the driver seat she looked at the site and rubbed at her sore knees. She rolled a delicate cone of a cigarette without looking, and despite the rough tobacco it tapered perfectly from tip to tip without pucker or bulge.

Normally she’d be done work by now and already up home, but today she’d signed up for four hours overtime, same as she had yesterday and would tomorrow, too. With the winters coming harder and earlier, the extra hours were a Godsend. Bad winters hadn’t been a worry when the good firewood was still coming down from Canada. It wasn’t at all that Frances was against the new Americans First initiative—they didn’t make ‘em more patriotic than her, she always said—but she couldn’t help sighing to think of that hard oak and ash and cherry from before.

When the wood stopped, the Tribal Council had natural gas lines put in, but with the pipeline protests, the gas dried up, too, and so everyone on the res had to switch to propane. They were getting by for now on those portable tanks meant for grilling. On her own she could stretch a tank a good two days or more, but then her sisters and their little kids moved in. These days they were going through better than a tank a day, because even a single degree below 70 and everyone in the house would be sobbing and wailing.

What they needed was a big propane tank. These were expensive up front but were eligible for subsidized refills. The thing was that each time Frances was about to buy one, something else came up. Last month it was getting the girls’ school lunch accounts squared up, and then just two days ago her uncle had come knocking and asked if she couldn’t help him out with his truck one last time. After that he’d be on his feet again, and then once he finished his safe driving course he’d be able to help the rest of them instead of the other way around.

Frances opened the door and slowly swung her big boots away from the truck. For a long moment she hung them heavy in the air and then dropped down onto the hard road. Around her the pitch black tar from the last crew steamed, reaching up under her yellow hard hat and sticking to her thick black hair so that when she got in the shower that night, the tiny bathroom would fill up with the smell of roadwork.

From the truck Frances grabbed a stack of road cones and dropped them down one by one. Her heavy boots were polished from cold and sweat, and she used them to tap the cones neatly into place one after the other. Drop, tap. Drop, tap. Once the cones were down, Frances reached into the truck for a handful of marker poles. She didn’t count or even look at the poles but grabbed just the right number, and despite her youth her hand was weathered hard like the boots.

She walked a path around the hot tar and dropped the poles into each of the cones. When the poles hit the ground, they bounced many times before falling still. Around the circle Frances walked, and around the poles bounced, running before and behind her with a sound like hard rain in huge places. 

In a couple weeks Frances would hit her one-year mark with the City. She’d be off probation, which meant a raise from $11 an hour to $16.50, and though she’d triple-checked with HR, she wouldn’t really believe it until she picked her check up. She’d have to see, but with a raise like that, she should able to take Sundays off, so long as she kept up with the overtime Monday through Saturday.

Next Frances grabbed a roll of caution tape and described a third circle around the site. As she walked she wrapped the tape around the poles, and despite the boots and aching knees her steps were quiet and light. She tied the tape off and lit the cigarette in her mouth.

Besides finally being able to afford the permanent propane tank, she wouldn’t have to smoke the cheap tobacco anymore after her raise, the stuff that comes in those huge plastic bags, dried out before you even open it. Not that she minded. She’d smoked it for years. And she would still buy from Four Corners off of Leavenworth and 24th because they knew her there. But now she could afford the good dark tobacco that came in metal tins shipped over from Holland or somewhere.

Once more around the site she walked and this time just looked and smoked. After a while she crouched and with her fingers twisted the ember off her cigarette. The ember sank slowly through space and crashed into the earth like an old star too tired to stay up. On the steaming road it glowed a brighter orange while around it fluttered some last tobacco and Frances stood and crushed it all under a boot.

She stretched her arms into the sky and then flicked the butt into the truck bed with the rest. Then she got in the driver’s seat and rubbed her hands together and tried to blow warmth into them. She couldn’t remember an October as cold as this one. She thought about her little nieces, who this morning had waved goodbye to her from the couch where they were all shivering and blue-lipped despite the blanket they were piled under.

In the truck Frances cranked the heat higher and rubbed at the small of her back, which had started to ache last week. After the propane tank and good dark tobacco, and after she got uncle back on his feet, she’d start saving for a new pair of boots. It would take a couple months—the City required special boots that started at $250—but her old ones were so worn that each step was like an ancient rusty nail being driven slowly but surely home.

Like a winter river icing over, Frances could feel the pain creeping further by the minute, inching from the hard road through her old boots and up into her body. She gave less power to pain than anyone she knew, but pain is the taker and takes and takes and it took from her then as she sat in the truck. Though it was in her, solid and heavy as cement, she watched the pain as if a distant spectator and wondered what would happen if it kept coming.

She wouldn’t let it keep her from working, never that, but she did wonder. If the pain didn’t let up soon, if it filled her completely, would it get from her into other people? Or could it somehow reverse course, travelling back down from her, through the boots and road and into the earth itself? God. What then?

When the worst of the pain passed, she checked the schedule to make sure there was overtime next week. She knew there was, had checked an hour ago after the last job, but she checked again just to be safe. Then she put the truck in gear and drove.

As she pulled away, a gust of wind swept through and blew the remains of her tobacco into a circle at the very center of the site. The wind dug up a little girl’s pink hair ribbon from somewhere and pushed that into the circle. It dug up the tail of an old kite a young boy might make and pushed that in too. The wind shook old leaves from dead elms and they danced across the plane of Frances’ steady gaze and joined the rest in the circle. In tight loops the windblow wove, braiding leaves and steam and tar smell into long ropes that climbed into the sky.

There is a certain sound caution tape makes in the wind out here on the plains, tight and quiet like a whisper screamed, like ten thousand shuffling tired feet. Frances hummed along with the sound as she rubbed at a brand new pain in her neck and drove through dusk toward the next site.

– Tyler Ayres