Fantasy puts me in a dark mood. Rabbit holes and wardrobes, obscured bloodlines and secret parentages, otherworldly visitors, ethereal lovers, swords from stones, wands from shops, powers and prophecies that, once discovered, offer a way out – there’s a subtle tragedy in escapism. When we indulge characters who, according to chance or destiny, are lifted out of mundane lives, we must simultaneously acknowledge the untold billions who never will be.

Ebenezer Gale had died with 1200 acres. His was the biggest farm in the territory at the time, but with eleven children, the original homestead had been divided and subdivided over the generations. The Ogburns farmed a 60-acre plot, sorghum and millet, on the southern fringe of what had, since Ebenezer’s day, been incorporated into Muckum County. Joe Ogburn and his wife Bertie (Ebenezer’s granddaughter) had one son, James, who at sixteen had tawny blonde hair and broad shoulders from the long summers threshing alongside his father. The girls who gathered on the porch of Grissom’s Seed & Mercantile had that summer started to pick on James, who they called Jamie-O, for not coming to any of the dances hosted by the Ladies’ Temperance Auxiliary. They prodded him, suggesting that he only had eyes for his Gale cousin, a girl from three farms over who liked small dogs and blue gingham dresses. But they were disappointed when he didn’t rise to their teasing.

James hoped to leave Kansas one day. He was haunted by dreams of eastern cities, where women with golden hair danced in silver shoes. On the road leading east from the Ogburn farm was a tannery and a rail crossing. The yellow phosphate salts that the tanners used spilled across the road where truck drivers, careless or drunk, had hit the rails at speed. The county had installed a green electric crossing signal on the tracks, and as the light lengthened in the evening, James would stand in the farm yard and look eastward. He would hold his eyes open until the wind whipping across the darkening fields caused them to water. Through the tears, he believed he could see a golden road stretching out before him and at its end, a hazy green light, the glow from an emerald city. On this particular evening, the wind out of the east was full of grit and malice and Jamie-O was forced to shut his eyes against it. When he opened them again, the sky had gone green, not the emerald green of the crossing light but a septic, angry shade. Jamie thought he could hear his father shouting but the roar of the wind drowned out all other sound. Jamie watched the black funnel descend from the sky and turned to run towards the house where his father was gesturing wildly from the doorway. The boy never saw the fence post that took his head clean off his shoulders.