the boy was one of ten families that clung to life within the valley, at the spot where the fremont river and the sulphur creek met. his family grew apples and pears and citrus fruits in rows of trees that stretched for miles. they used the sole schoolhouse for prayer and also social gatherings on the weekends. his granddaddy was one of many who first carried the good word of joseph smith into the utah dessert, and around them lay a vast expanse of canyons, ridges and buttes. on free days after morning prayer, he hiked through the gorges and climbed the cliffs and watch the sun fully rise over the sandstone domes which in the golden hour were the color of peaches and cream.

there he would sketch the cliffsides and the bushes that grew on them, blooming and blossoming every spring, fading away beneath the snow during the winters. the charcoal he stole from the schoolhouse, bit by bit so that no one would notice, and for paper he would use the old broadsides delivered monthly to the ancient sycamore trees that marked the far outpost of their isolated community. as long as he showed up for service and supper, and as long as he was there every morning in the orchards, no one paid him much mind.

the boy came to the cliffs and drew morning after morning until the boy became a man and the sketches accumulated like debris beneath his bed. the man married and had children. and they, too, worked the orchards and attended service in the schoolhouse and prayed over their beds at night. morning after morning, the man came to the cliffs and sketched what he saw, waiting for them to change, to be somehow new, to reveal something he hadn't seen before.

but the man's life was short, and he died at the age of forty-two. the cause, in the great scheme of things, does not matter, and a lifetime's worth of sketches was burned, the ashes scattered across the gravesite and the grave in time was lost. in time the cliffs would shift, new trees would grow tall, the sandstone would melt away. but that meant nothing to the man, buried beneath the valley.