Nothing, Arizona
Nothing lies in the middle of nowhere,
on Highway 93, 23 miles from Wikieup,
the rattlesnake capital of America.
It started as a joke in 1977.
Richard “Buddy” Kenworthy,
a man who embraced oblivion,
made Nothing his home for 28 years,
until one day he fled
in the middle of the night:
desperate, searching for anything,
but he didn’t know what.
Nothing still exists today,
though barely--a restroom
inside a crumbling gas station,
and four motorist call boxes.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
Another man tried to make
something out of Nothing,
selling pizzas to curious motorists
who wanted to know what
Nothing looked like,
but no one really cared,
and the pizza grew stale.
The town rolled over a few times,
then expired like a dog,
in the middle of a deserted street.
Nothing is nothing again,
and it couldn’t be happier.
A Stranger’s Bones
Under the overpass, a Ziploc bag
beckoned from cracked earth:
discarded receptacle, dusty
and still in the stagnant air.
When I pushed it with my shoe,
powder oozed from the top:
the zipped barrier had come loose.
Grainy, light gray substance,
ground into fine powder. At first,
I thought cocaine, then bulk flour,
but a woman’s name and date
had been scrawled into the plastic
with a black Magic Marker.
Someone had thrown cremated remains
from the overpass and driven away,
free from the burden of death.
Thirteen years passed until
they saw fit to discard the package.
Now it lay in purgatorial mud,
twitching and oozing dust.
I picked up the bag, poured
its contents into the San Pedro River,
watched cremains drift away
in the murky, sluggish current.
I’ve scattered the remnants
of my brothers, my sister, my mother,
my first and second husbands,
but I’ve never released a stranger’s ashes.
I held in my cupped hands a substance
that was once a person’s body:
a woman who ate, slept, made love,
perhaps gave birth to a child
who later threw her ashes from a car,
right before Mother’s Day.
What impulse prompted such an act?
I’ll never know: still, I am glad
I set the bones free, to drift downstream
in search of a better incarnation.
Leah Mueller's work is published in Rattle, Best Small Fictions, Certain Age, Writers Resist, The Shallot, NonBinary Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, New Flash Fiction Review, Does It Have Pockets, Outlook Springs, Your Impossible Voice, etc. She has received several nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her fourteenth book, "A Pretty Good Disaster" was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2025. Check out more of her work at substack.com/@leahsnapdragon.
