Martin Spangler’s property was surrounded by hundreds of acres of sagebrush-covered hills. He knew the devil was out there, in the caves and on the hilltops, just watching him. It was no secret that spirits haunted this land. He had seen the unexplainable in the sky and on the land more than once. It was part of living out here. It was just something else to get used to, along with loneliness and a need for self-reliance.

Martin used to have horses, a burro, and two wolflike mutts, but they knew what was happening and had since run away. The dogs he pushed away, because they were very loyal creatures. The horses ran and he did not have the strength to give chase. Instead, he sat down in a lawn chair in front of his trailer and thought about what to do.

He decided he would dig.

In the early evening, when the sun was barreling toward its finish and the heat was loosening, he found his shovel in the makeshift shed, and looked out around the property. Five acres had seemed like a lot once, but it really wasn’t. Not that anyone had tucked in near his sagebrush-and-sand-covered property out in the desert. No one else had come out this far to settle a patch in order to fall off the face of the earth, just him.

He didn’t want to be too near the house, because he didn’t want the cesspool he had built underneath to taint his final resting place. He found a faraway spot by the rocks he had put down to prevent his land from washing away during mid-spring rainstorms. The rocks would be his barricade from washing down the road, or floating up. He would have to tell someone to make sure to weigh the spot down with some good, thick quartz rock, and maybe mark it with a nice piece of jasper. He began to dig. He knew digging a grave would be a multi-day affair and so he took his time. He was not at all operating at his best anyway.

Yesterday he was involved in the business of the world, but soon he would not be. It was okay as far as Martin was concerned. He had been waiting for the end and was not at all afraid. His cells would leave his body with his spirit and all that energy would be dispersed into the sky and the clouds. His mother was up there and his father, too. His sweet daughter was another mass of energy that hovered above his trailer day in and day out. He could feel her there, waiting for him so he could tease her mercilessly once again.

Dig and dig he did.

When he was finished, dusk had just settled into that soft blue light that he liked so much. He watched the vibrant pinks and purples fill the sky and the stubborn light refuse to leave the horizon, spreading out in a line. Sometimes, Martin said, he felt like he was a tumbleweed stopped against a fence at the end of the earth. He saw tumbleweeds plow through his land from time to time with bits and scraps from people’s lives—clothes and junk, mostly. But it still made him wonder how people and things traveled over the land, unbridled, stopped only by force or fence.

When he was finished digging his own grave a few days later, Martin called his friends. He still had a few, and he asked them to stop by for a party if they felt like it. They came to pay their respects. They did not try to convince him to go to doctors or the hospital or anything like that. They knew he wanted to die under the stars and he did just that.

He had asked someone to stop by in a couple of days, just to check on him, and when his friend came upon the trailer, he saw that Martin was dead but his dogs were back, watching over the body so no animals would get to him. They were loyal, after all.