The First Quarry

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The night after Christmas and all through the house, it was colder than fuck.

The home was new, brand-new, with the various smells of paint, plastic and disinfectant you might expect. Even the carpet I was sitting on, next to a window onto the quiet street, had a chemical odor. No Christmas decorations lingered here, because the split-level four-bedroom affair was as empty as the boxes littering curbsides across America.

And this was America, all right-Iowa City, Iowa, the heartland, the street out front not really a street at all, but a former county road recently renamed Country Vista, which was ironic because the builders who’d invaded this stretch of farmland-bordered real estate had nothing so much in mind as blotting out a country vista.

Two houses sat on corners on either side of a brand-new lane that made a T with Country Vista, and I sat in one of those houses, the beige split-level on the left as you faced the renamed county road. This new lane had no name yet, just as its dozen split-levels (so far) had no inhabitants; the waiting dwellings squatted on sloping future lawns-snow-pocked dirt right now-with room for an entire development to develop beyond.

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