"The Blowout" by Sean Theodore Stewart
She stretched herself on her beach towel amid the other sunbathers. She watched a burying beetle skitter over the hot sand, leaving a trail of small patter marks. The beachgoers crowded the blowout on this last hot day. Martin lay beside her and spoke about Bingham’s shuttered pool hall. She did not hear Martin today, either. The burying beetle darted around wiggling toes. It hunted for the carcass of a vole or a horned lark to bury for its larvae. The blowout stood three miles outside Bingham. It was a smooth bowl pocketed into the side of one of the grassy hills like a golf course sand trap. She craned her neck to see over a leg blocking her view of the burying beetle. It circled a family and made straight for her. Martin blamed the railroad for the loss of the pool hall. Every time they shifted stops or signal stations the towns along the tracks suffocated. The prairie did not suggest water anywhere near this makeshift beach. Still, the people of Bingham put on their bathing suits and flocked to the wind-blown crater each summer. Bright umbrellas shaded the older sunbathers where they reclined. A shrieking child ran by and kicked sand onto her towel and almost stepped on the burying beetle. The burying beetle paused as if stunned. A teenaged couple approached, absorbed with one another. The burying beetle stood right in their path. Martin did not know Bingham would cease to exist. The last businesses would go. She pushed herself to her knees and stretched forward. She cupped her palms into the sand and lifted the burying beetle. It tickled her hairs as it scuttled over her skin and remembered what it was looking for. She thought, hadn’t I heard Martin, once?
Sean Theodore Stewart holds an MFA from the University of Idaho, where he served as the fiction editor of Fugue and was named the 2020-2021 Hemingway Fellow. The Arkansas International selected his piece as a finalist for the 2019 Emerging Writer's Prize and his stories have appeared in Salt Hill, The New Territory, and Guesthouse. He is originally from the Sandhills of Nebraska and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Samantha, and their pups, Ramona and Molly.
