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Prologue

 

7th August 1937

North Dakota was dead.  A small town in the American dustbowl mourned her loss.  South Dakota was cast adrift, standing by the grave of her twin.  Beside her remaining brothers and sisters she was like a marionette whose strings, all but one, had snapped.  Head, shoulders, arms hung heavily as her mind floated aimless and remote through the clumps of people gathered in the churchyard.  South could not picture North mangled and crushed in the ground, so instead she closed her eyes and imagined drifting in between her sibling states, up past her mother, the ordinarily named Annie Connell, over the preacher’s head, over them all, up into the endless blue.  Alone and unanchored.
From there she could see the top of her sister Texas’ wide black hat, with a veil she had carefully stitched on the night before.  The dusty blond head of her oldest brother, Washington, was completely still as he stood beside their mother.  He was taller than her.  Taller than their daddy, too.  South Dakota opened her eyes to see her father, Frank, as he came rushing from the train station, only slowing to a walk when he realised everyone was watching him.  He took his place at the other side of Annie.  South saw her only other brother, Montana, risk a small smile at his father.  No one else remarked on Frank’s late arrival except the baby, Minnesota, who twisted in her sister Maine’s arms and began to wail for her daddy.  South looked at her family without raising her head, then turned just enough to see the train station roof in the distance, distorted by shimmers of heat.  The smell of disturbed dry earth filled each breath, and she thought about going somewhere cold.  She would look at Mama’s maps when they got home.