Flagstaff Revisited

One morning, Flagstaff arose and found that the prospector-mayor had proclaimed their town to be sovereign. And so began the first regnal year of the Prospector King. The heraldry of the Kingdom of Flagstaff was predictably recursive.

The Thief, dejected by her commercial failings, offered the heart of the mountain to the new king and retreated into a solitary, sad, and private life. His reign was cruel, and his domination destroyed the human spirit.

—

We couldn’t be ourselves anymore. Every day we were confined to imagining that we had become something else. We wondered what it was like back in New York, with everyone mourning us. And we realized then how easy it would be. In a way, we were dead already.

The children, in their glacial slumber, meditated upon their lives and upon the things they had seen. They won a secret wisdom beneath the ice, and though their bodies shriveled, their souls expanded. The children became priests of the sacred geometries, as they came careening towards the fundamental. 

—

The Thief, without her heart, could now be found in a ski lodge halfway up the mountain, drinking away her sorrows. She was, in an abstract way, attempting to bring back the dead.

The prospector proclaimed one morning that he would summit Mt. Flagstaff and plant the symbol of his kingdom and run it up the flagstaff. I convinced him to take the heart along, that the mountain might favor his journey were he to take a part of it with him.

The husband’s only solace was skiing. Even in summer, he could only be distracted from the death of his son when he could glide and skate across the surface of the mountain, when he could be carried by gravity from one point to another. She went with him one day, to see if she could glide somewhere new as well. They moved without friction across the vast expanse of snowy slope.

—

I was nearing the end of the lovers’ note. There seemed to be a section torn off at the bottom.

There was no explaining the gun or the road. We came across both as a kind of inevitability, as a thing that could have been predicted. We wandered there in a kind of stupor, stepping in as the minivan passed us. We were the happiest we had been since we heard our former lover’s wail. We only wished we could have predicted the children.

At the behest of the pistol’s crack, the snow rolled from the mountaintop in glorious, billowing sheets. Even as it thundered and raced across the hillsides and it seemed that gravity had exhausted its supply, still more came, as though it were the magnificent product of an eruption, or an expectoration somewhere deep within. Something inside the mountain was cleared. Suddenly, it seemed, the snow had become a shroud. The disaster was televised across the nation and all the mourners stared in shock that such a thing could happen. Not one of them found themselves able to spare tears, though. Beneath all of that snow lay people, individuals numbering in the thousands who noticed far too late that a great wall of snow was upon them. Nearly all of Flagstaff was buried that day. The Prospector King, who stood his ground and shouted at the avalanche that he had earned the heart, that it wasn’t the mountain’s to take back. He lost the mountain’s heart down a crevasse. He had tried to instill a semblance of order to avalanche sheets of snow, but gravity proved too strong. They were the silent, the people under the snow. They were the restful.

After a few minutes of panic and then ultimate calm, they found that they could breathe beneath the snow, and that they could walk unhindered by the weight set upon them. They could not see, but they found a new instinct inside themselves, which led them toward one another. The Thief found a boy she had never seen before and she led him by the hand to the only people beneath the snow who still seemed lost. The mother and father found their son restored, untouched by the murderous train. They had created a silent community beneath the snow and dreaded the day it would melt.

—

That spring, two ghouls were seen, walking in children’s clothes southwest from Durango along the desert highways to Flagstaff. They were the children, emerged from the glacier, ready to bring to Flagstaff their ancient wisdom. They brought comfort to whoever bore witness. They arrived in Flagstaff and pronounced to an empty field of snow that eventually, the buried would be made to emerge and face the sky again, as the wintry chill of that collapsed winter season gave way to thawing spring, but that the sun above could still be found and the ground below could still be felt. They asked that everyone send a silent prayer into the Earth for the conjoined corpse which was still laid on the freeway, decomposing.

On the day the snow melted, and the buried people of Flagstaff returned to their former lives, I found a torn scrap of paper sticking up from the snow and blowing in the wind. 

Perhaps we too would have been healed by the avalanche we caused, but we refused to feel grief. Though our destruction brought it about, we sing our poets’ praises for the healing of a broken part of the world.

I saw the children myself and, upon looking into the sunken eyesockets which once peered upon the world in wonder, I understood that I was no longer needed there. I ceded Flagstaff and its gravity to the children, and went in search of something I had lost long ago. 

Ian Connolly is is a theater and creative writing major graduating in the class of 2024. He loves books, films, theater, and anything that tells a good story. Ian currently works as an intern at a book to film consultancy. He is from Calabasas, CA.