Only now, in the middle of that pasture, the sunlight flashed off water.
For a few seconds, my mind refused to understand what my eyes were seeing. I stopped the truck with one boot still hovering over the brake and stared through the dusty windshield. It looked like a mirage at first, one of those heat tricks Alabama can play on a man in August when the air is thick and the horizon shimmers. But mirages don’t have cut banks. Mirages don’t have raw red clay piled in mounds. Mirages don’t have excavator tracks carved deep enough to hold yesterday’s rain.
I killed the engine and listened to it tick itself quiet.
