Page 6 of Rough Hands on the Prairie
November 27th… 1853.
My breath catches.
No.
No way.
I must be reading it wrong.
I flip to other pages—same handwriting. Same dates. All of them decades before the turn of thelastcentury.
I run a trembling finger over the page, half expecting it to flicker and vanish like some hallucination. But it doesn’t.
It’s real.
The ink.
The book.
The date.
Whatever delusion I’ve been clinging to—whatever hope that I just wandered into a LARP camp or some immersive experience—that illusion shatters.
I’m not in 2025 anymore.
I don’t know how I got here.
And I sure as hell don’t know how to get back.
My palms are sweating. My heartbeat won’t slow. I carefully replace the book on the bed and try to breathe through the lightning flash outside.
Think, June.
You’ve survived worse. Mom dying. Leaving everything. Living in a van alone. You built a life from nothing. This is just a new kind of nothing. A scary, batshit time-travel kind of nothing.
You’ll figure it out.
Maybe I’ll even write about it—if I ever get back.
A knock hits the door.
“I’m coming!” I call, voice a little too high. I smooth the skirt and paste on a calm I definitely don’t feel.
Fake it, babe.
He’s standing by the fire, ladling something steaming into two wooden bowls.
He holds one out.
“What’s that?”
“Stew. You looked like you could use something warm.”
I hesitate, but take it. I have to act like I belong here. He sets his bowl down at a small table and sits in a creaky wooden chair.
It smells… good.
Better than it looks.
