Ecotone’s tagline is “reimagining place,” and we love work that brings us to a specific location, real or imagined. In this new department, Save Your Place, we’ll highlight our favorite descriptions of place from work we’ve published at Ecotone and Lookout.
This place is from Chaz Reetz-Laiolo’s story, “Animals” from Ecotone 15.
“Morning. Already ninety-six degrees. The far and staggered blue mountains wavered in the distance. The palm fronds had yellowed, even browned at the tips. The shadow of one of the Air Force jets tumbled crazed across the land and was gone. And none of them seemed to notice, save for Peter. The rest of them with flies walking delicately on their body hair. It was a sort of drunkenness they were into. They wondered aloud if the concrete between the roof tiles had always looked so cruddy. If the black cross on the tower was Episcopalian or Dominican. When was the last time that the bell tolled. It would have surprised them that there was anything beyond the crooked driveway that looked now like a river in drought.”