Published in 2013 by This Land Press, edited by Jeff Martin, and lauded by The Paris Review as “the literary equivalent of a high-wire act,” Imaginary Oklahoma is a collection of flash fiction stories about Oklahoma by writers who may or may not have ever been here. In 46 stories to commemorate the 46th state, some of today's most important writers, each paired with an artist, provide their take on "the Oklahoma of the imagination."
We're proud to bring some of these stories to The Pickup—some with This Land Press’ accompanying podcast episodes—to help you dream your own Oklahoma dreams.
They move with inhuman speed, the commuters, and it took me some time to get used to this. I myself am not a fast man.
“That’s because you’re eighty-three,” my brother-in-law Joachim says on the phone. I’ve yet to explain to his satisfaction why I sold my farm and moved to the city. His sister, my wife, has been dead for two years.
“Eighty-two,” I say. He knows how old I am. We’ve known one another since we were both seventeen. “And I don’t think I was ever fast.”
I lived all my life on a farm and by the time I was old enough to have a farm of my own, small-scale farming had become mostly a matter of watching. You watch the robots move over the fields. You tinker with their settings sometimes but they’re well-made, they adjust themselves mostly, they don’t need you for much. You play your violin in the field just to keep yourself occupied. In the distance the airships rise with the speed of fireflies, but they’re faster up close: now when I play my violin at the airship terminal they ascend so quickly that it’s as if they’re falling upward, gravity reversed.
I play Beethoven and watch the commuters, blank-faced between their earbuds, rushing to their gates. They glance at me sometimes, toss coins in my violin case. I thank them, try to make eye contact. I watch their ships carry them up into the early morning, to jobs in Los Angeles, Boston, New York. I think of their souls moving fast through the morning sky.