STILL HERE

By Iris Moulton


Photography: Matt Morgan, VisitUtah.com

A year of grief and anxiety. When it ended, we drove. Holding hands until the freeway. Snacks passed to the kids until they slept. Until we reached the place where an erosion-resistant layer mushroomed up, thousands of shadows hovering over the sand which succumbed millennia ago and became sand. Hoodoos hunch and lean together like a family battered to being. We want to show the kids how the sky slits through a canyon but we make it only a few feet before it’s time to watch stink bugs and let sand run through our fingers. A rock to climb. A snake. A few strangers. At night, stars battered into stars millennia ago stare back at us, all of us granules, all of us still here.


Iris Moulton lives in Salt Lake City with her family. Her work can be found in Gigantic, Conjunctions, American Short Fiction and Western Humanities Review, among others. She won the creative nonfiction book category of the 2020 Utah Original Writing Competition.