She looked across the field of lights. It should have been a neighborhood by now.

“Guys look,” Jake pointed to the east as the sky lit up like dawn. A molten saffron dart shot up into the night.

A FIELD OF LIGHTS BY JOSHUA DULL 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 35

Sarah Mansfield drove into the heart of what was supposed to be a subdivision called Gatsby Villages. Lanterns lined the asphalt, casting sequential pools of white light along the black roads, curving through expansive fields of grass. When she was younger she remembered riding by this place on her way to Path of Light Lutheran Church with her parents and feeling sad because backhoes and bulldozers had ravaged the forest of pines that once stood in its place. Sarah drove to the west end of the street, turned left and parked. She opened the trunk and pulled out a garden spade and the first of ten violet chrysanthemums. Sarah walked each of the ten plants into the middle of the field, between the street and a tan wall about 200 yards away, arranging them in a circle. She looked across the expanse, streetlamps glow…