Emily Uecker
Prairie Fire
Second Runner-up for 2026 American Literary Review Award in Essays, Judged by Ira Sukrungruang
On a tallgrass prairie, the majority of the biomass lies below the surface. A fibrous tangle of roots sucking up moisture and nutrients, binding the soil, holding the pattern for regrowth. To the prairie, a fire is only a haircut.
I have a guy for you, your friend says by way of hello. You tell her you aren’t sure how someone would fit in your life, and mean it. You bought your first house, filled it with things you love, and are, to the best of your knowledge, happy. The guy is smart, a professor, with good conversation. No harm in meeting up; he’s in town until the end of summer.
His first name and Midwestern college are enough to find him online in under a minute—black hair to the shaggy side of kempt, horn-rimmed glasses, hint of smile. For a week he’s a number on your phone sending bodiless texts that are funny and self-deprecating. You agree to pick him up for a walk in a neighborhood park, the option of drinks if it goes well. He describes the corner where he’ll wait for you. You tell him what kind of car to look for. Promise I’m not treating you like an Uber, he texts. Leave the money on the dash, you reply.
He is shorter than you pictured, a few years older than his photo, brown lips crinkled from the decade he was a smoker. His voice is honey over gravel with a hint of aw-shucks. You walk and talk for hours. Take him to a Portland food cart. Recommend a beer he likes. Close the place down. Neither of you want to move to a noisy bar or club. I have a spare room. Which is true and is what you mean, no more or less. Except that you must and he understands.
This is how you always date, a sideways crash, in the middle before you’re conscious of beginning. The men are circumspect, leaving nothing behind when the wind changes. No dry brush to set a match to.
March sun chases the last chill of winter and black squirrels chatter across the unfenced lawns of his neighborhood. Stoic houses listen as you debate the difference between bison and buffalo; which one’s habitat and breeding herds your people destroyed. When he leaves for a faculty meeting, you admire aging Victorians and picture how it could work—snowy Midwest Christmases and rain-soaked drives up the Pacific Coast, a small hand in yours.
Among his town’s claims to fame are a Lincoln-Douglas debate, a stop on the Underground Railroad, and Carl Sandburg’s birthplace. “The fog comes on little cat feet,” you quote. “I don’t know that one,” he laughs. “Never been to the museum.” A three-room cabin—main room, bedroom, kitchen—smaller than the train cars Sandburg’s hobos rode on the Pioneer Limited, the Empire Builder. The guide’s voice ricochets like a radio turned up too loud for the tiny space. Disordered words bounce back and forth through the years of Sandburg’s life, a script cut up line by line and reassembled at random. He emphasizes the heft of Sandburg’s cultural impact, his celebrity. “We may not pay him much attention today, but in his time he was real…well, President Johnson gave his eulogy.”
That night, thinking of the guide’s chaotic tour through Sandburg’s life, you look up traumatic brain injury. An injury to the brain caused by an external force. Is it a kind of traumatic brain injury, you wonder, to hope one of your sideways crashes turns into love? The rapid acceleration, the abrupt deceleration. “I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes,” Sandburg wrote in Cornhuskers.
He takes you to campus—the standard shady green quads and red brick buildings, antique lampposts hold purple banners emblazoned with their mascot: Prairie Fire. “Is it normal wildfire?” you ask. The name implies a mythos like swamp gas or St. Elmo’s fire. “I think so,” he replies. “The biology department does a burn every year on their field station.” For millennia, the internet says, Indigenous peoples set cultural burns, a practice informed by ancestral knowledge deeper than decades of modern research. Fire to guide bison herds, to drive grasshoppers to harvest, to protect camps, to improve grazing land. Fire to turn nutrients tied up in dead plant matter into ash in seconds, a form of fertilizer grasses can absorb as they quickly regrow. Fire to clear trees that overshadow and kill grasses. Fire to bring on a bonanza of blooms for pollinators and seed production. Fire for survival, for procreation. Without fire, no growth.
Prairie, you learn, is a French word for meadow, from the Latin pratum for meadow, crops, or fields, in turn from the Proto-Indo-European preh “to bend”, and thus, bent with fruit. It is interesting, though perhaps only to you, that pratum is a transposition away from partum.
The Professor visits Portland in December and you hike Eagle Creek to the falls. In the first hour your rain jacket is soaked through with snowmelt and all your edges are cold. When you come to the falls, confusion over poor trail signage has you hiking on to a further, upper falls that does not exist. For over an hour you continue through snow-covered woods, convinced any moment the thicket of trees will open to a vista that makes the cold wet worth it. Not unlike making love, he is quiet and inexpressive. You can never tell when he’s arrived. If you should allow your enjoyment to continue or conclude.
“You’re so quiet,” you invite. “Yeah,” is the best of his replies.
The next summer you return to the hike alone. Without the blanket of snow, it’s easier to see the bristle of dead trunks rising from the understory, vestiges of the 2017 wildfire that was so intense ash fell on Portland forty miles away. It’s clear where you went wrong last time, the sign for the lower falls faces away, towards those hiking out, and not towards you, hiking in.
On a late August morning, before the long drive back to the Midwest, the Professor stops at your door. You said your goodbyes on your last date, but here he is with your coffee order and pastry in hand, saying he can’t stay, that he wanted to see you before leaving.
When r u free? he texts a few days later, and you come home from the bar, declining another round of shuffleboard, to have your first video chat. The room around him reduced to the pinhole view of his laptop camera: wood-paneled walls and a tentacled lamp. Seated in an upright chair at the table where, you’ll learn later, he works and eats his solitary meals, opposite the couch where he watches Iowa sports and pro golf.
“Did you see the story that ants outweigh all the mammals and birds on Earth?” he asks.
You did. Scientists estimated the world’s population of ants to be about twenty quadrillion, a number so large the zeroes don’t fit in headlines. A number that needs to be contextualized for human brains to compute—2.5 million ants for every person on Earth. Quadrillions of ants aerating the soil, distributing seeds, decomposing organic material, eating other pests, making the landscape. “I have a kind of sad fact about ants,” you add.
“Tell me.”
“Scientists wanted to know how ants follow such precise paths. They assumed it was pheromones, but a study discovered that ants can communicate the exact number of steps and turns to each other with their antennae. You know how they figured it out?” He didn’t. Researchers cut a millimeter from some ants’ legs while a control group laid a path to a food source. The altered ants followed the same path as the control group, proportionally shortened for their undercut legs.
You set your traps halfway between the crack in your living room windowsill and your cat’s food dish in the dining room. It feels like a failure, ants in your new home, stealing food from your sole dependent. “That’s no big deal,” he says, a more seasoned homeowner.
He carries you to the kitchen for another beer. There is, somewhere, a bedroom where he sleeps without you, a formal living room that has no furniture, a disused front door and sun room. Did the ants feel it when the researchers cut their legs? The best the internet can say is ‘plausibly.’ Ants may plausibly be capable of nociception. (You have to look up nociception—the perception or sensation of pain). What is it like, you wonder, when the trail your friend said would lead to food ends in sugary death?
The air is comfortable when he’s around. He cleans his dishes, wipes his feet. Slouching over his coffee, his body language meets you as an intellectual equal despite the prestige of his title. He asks questions. Each time you think it might be about what’s happening between you. Instead it is always about why things are or how they work.
Over oatmeal he shows you a paper that queries whether babies in utero prefer sweet foods. In ultrasound images of fetuses whose mothers ate carrots, the smushed orange faces seem to smile, whereas fetuses of mothers who ate kale showed no such enjoyment.
The two states he’s lived in, Illinois and Iowa, have the least uncultivated land remaining of all fifty states. He wants to get married, have a family. You send him a piece you wrote, full of your yearning for the same. You’re so good, is all he writes back. When you write this story, you tell it to yourself in the second person. “You” feels more accurate than “we.”
You are of Western, Pacific Coast people, you have never blown snow or detasseled corn or been to Menard’s. Your fields are strawberries or artichokes or brussels. Your childhood is a freeway, hillsides of orange poppies, the smell of sex wax and wetsuit neoprene on foggy mornings and salt-crusted seaweed drying in the sun. Your Amtrak is Cascades, Coast Starlight, rolling through abandoned mining settlements and old-growth forests, past flatbeds stacked with redwoods and osprey aeries high in Douglas firs. Your wide open is the sea, restless as a prairie. A prairie that cannot burn.
Heavy rains fell the night before the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate, the wind so cold the stage was relocated to the leeward side of Old Main. The Professor brings you to the room where Lincoln waited to meet the crowd—ten to twenty thousand strong, depending on your source. “With ruddy and wind-bitten faces they were of the earth,” Sandburg wrote, “they could stand the raw winds when there was something worth hearing and remembering.”
You wonder how old Lincoln was when he sat in the room (forty-nine), whether his hands shook, whether he had the fluttery stomach and rising heartbeat of adrenaline beginning to flow as he waited to fold the spidery length of himself through the window and onto the stage. “At least now I’ve gone through college,” he reportedly joked.
Did you know, before you looked, that in 1858 Lincoln’s moral opposition to slavery ended at the Mason-Dixon line? He advocated leaving slave states alone, believing slavery would die out on its own some long years hence.
Did you know, before you looked, that Lincoln lost the election? A loss that assured him the greater victory to come.
On the college website, history begins with the arrival of abolitionist Presbyterians as if generations of Dakota, Kickapoo, Meskwaki, Miami, Peoria, Potawatomi, and Sauk were not here first. Here before a treachery of treaties seized the land, making way for the pioneers so lionized by Sandburg to plant wheat and lay railroads, build streets and schools and cities. Before there was a college with shady quads, this land had a name. It was loved and nourished, tended with fire and gratitude. The people were here. The People, Yes.
You spend a perfect long weekend in Chicago, white January sky and cold wind blowing off Lake Michigan, red noses in front of Cloud Gate. At a taco bar you look around and think these are all people who chose Chicago. Who chose the middle, the second. For whom face-freezing winters are worth it for summers on the lakefront, for music festivals and everything New York has—grungy public transport and grand civic plazas, skyscrapers, people, restaurants—on a lower gear.
“Chicago” comes from words in the Algonquin language family meaning “skunk” or “place of wild onion” for the strong scent of wild alliums that grew alongside its waterways. The same waterways Tribes valued made it attractive to settlers; homes and forts were built, destroyed, rebuilt. Chicago did not take things slow. The great fire of 1871 left one third of its residents homeless, destroyed more than three square miles and seventeen thousand buildings. Twenty-two years later the city was hosting a world’s fair.
Over dinner in The Loop he talks about leaving his first college teaching job to make it in music, about auditioning for rock stars, trying hallucinogens with a major show’s touring band. When being a professor felt like the better gig, his college was the best offer, the closest to Chicago and a woman he is no longer with. You walk by the converted garage that was his grad school home, past live music bars overflowing with sidewalk smokers, and you wonder if he feels the ghost of himself exhaling into the frigid air. You imagine where you’d take him to visit your past selves.
To Oxford’s worn stone buildings where you were happy waiting for your partner to make you a wife. To the Manhattan office where you completed every outlandish task your boss dreamed up, to the New England college where you learned to stop saying “I just—”, to Colorado skies that smothered you with their endlessness, to the Pacific coastal air that is home on your skin.
“You’ve built yourself a nice life here,” he says to you on an Oregon beach.
“A few times,” you could have replied.
In the basement of the Art Institute you visit the Thorne Miniature Rooms. There are Georgian drawing rooms, early American kitchens, salons from the Louis XII-XVI. In the Queen Anne library, light spills through deep-set windows onto sage walls, a Turkish rug, and inset shelves of minuscule leather-bound books. When the Great Depression left skilled architects, interior designers, and artisans unemployed, Narcissa Niblack Thorne directed the creation of these one-twelfth scale masterpieces. While her creatives replicated upper-class interiors, the Dust Bowl ravaged the prairies, farming and drought left topsoil unmoored from the tangle of native roots, and soil particles collected into great clouds that swarmed into the sky, blew into every crack and crevice. There are no dust-encrusted farmstead kitchens in the Thorne collection.
There are no people either, only the suggestion of them—tables set for tea, children’s toys, sheet music at the pianoforte. You think of Sandburg’s birthplace, the table in the cramped kitchen set as if the children are on their way home from school, father from the rail yard, mother stepped out to gather more wood for the fire.
In a dim bar above Millennium Park you ask to talk. There have been months of video chats, longing texts, flights to visit each other. You want to know how he feels about you, not your mind or your conversation; where he thinks you are in the process of belonging to each other.
“I like to date one person at a time,” you say. He’s made it clear there is no one to date in his small town, two hours from here on Amtrak’s Sandburg line. You know he isn’t seeing anyone else.
“We can do that,” he replies.
It is what you wanted, yet it is somehow disappointing. The morning after your first date, he swiped your arm with his hat, unable to look at you when he said, “We should do this again.”
Narcissa married her childhood sweetheart, James Ward Thorne, heir to the Montgomery Ward fortune that would fund her art. (“They named their sons ‘Ward’ and ‘Niblack,” you tell the Professor. “One of them got the very short end of that stick,” he laughs.) There’s nothing in her rooms that looks like a home you would live in, a home with kid art on the walls, Legos and cat hair in the carpet, sloppy piles of student essays, New Yorkers, and paperbacks waiting to be read.
He leaves early on your last day, eager to get back to campus for a visiting lecture. You sleep late in the hotel room before taking the El back to O’Hare. City streets flick by like rows of corn.
Researchers release studies on the toxicity of wildfire smoke—increased risk of dementia, low birth weight and stillbirth, increased preterm birth. For anyone with cardiovascular disease, a 70% increased risk of cardiac arrest on high smoke days. Young children, whose lungs are still developing, are especially susceptible. Their small bodies will breathe in more toxic air pound-for-pound than an adult.
Seasonal mega fires, you learn, burn hotter, destroying the denser fuel of old growth forests—tree trunks and canopy—that release larger amounts of harmful emissions. Prescribed burns can can be engineered to burn at lower intensity and consume fuel that is less dense—grasses and brush. A small burn to keep away a crippling one. You wonder why it should be controversial, this kind of taking care. Why we think caring means never hurting.
You’ve been in love once, him twice. He tells his stories, how they met, the years they spent together. How it faded and they did not get married. He was not loved the way he deserved to be loved. You wonder how that lack made him feel. He does not say.
When you fell in love—easily, overnight—you were too young to appreciate how rare it would become later, after you married and divorced—no one’s fault, it happens. Except it doesn’t; you belonged to each other. You thought all the years of choices—leaving homes and jobs to stay together—meant that you always would. Ten years became ashes, an empty land to regenerate. You went to therapy thinking you needed to heal from the relationship—plant some seeds and be on your merry way—and instead found a root system of trauma so tangled and dense you’re still digging up the strands.
How are you? your texts ask. He responds with what he’s doing.
You’ve been talking through his career anxiety since you met, an unsettled ambition that wishes he’d reached a pinnacle just a little bit higher. He buys new shirts and ties for interviews, sends photos of his reflection in his bathroom mirror. An approximation of a fashion show. The second one you say, liking the way the blue contrasts with his olive skin. When you ask about his day he frets about his students. The best among them will struggle to get into the grad schools they have chosen and he doesn’t know how to mitigate this disappointment. The worst take up all his time as they wonder why their complete lack of effort has not earned them a passing grade.
Prairies were formed by receding glaciers scraping the land smooth, by the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountain uplift. Without enough water to support trees, grasses covered the Great Plains, sending their interweaving roots deep into the soil. An ecosystem perfect for pollinators, grassland nesting birds, bison, ferrets, and pronghorns.
“It’s so hard,” your therapist says with real empathy. Childhood abandonment taught your nervous system to see every rejection as a threat to survival, and thus, every connection as vital as a limb. She reminds you to keep working on your self-love, your boundaries, to stop abandoning yourself to the ephemeral validation of a man.
“You want a person who can see you, who will grow with you and alongside you. You believe that person is out there, right?”
You want to believe. You want someone to let you love them. Instead you get better at letting dead things burn.
When you begin, how do you choose what to share with each other? Do you know who you are underneath—in the roots of yourself where you store your truths?
Of the 142 million acres of native prairie that existed in the United States, less than five percent remains today. Sandburg’s pioneers arrived and plowed half the grassland for corn, wheat, and soybeans without understanding the vital role prairies play in sequestering carbon, or how their dense root networks enrich soil, maintain water quality, and prevent erosion. Prairie soil was perfect for agriculture and pioneers needed to be fed. Almost two hundred years after Europeans arrived, grasslands continue to be lost to row-crop agriculture, development, and invasive species. Without burns on the prairies that remain, trees can take root and smother grasslands with their leafy, sun-stealing branches.
Oregon Tribes used cultural burns to clear underbrush, kill poison oak, and help wildflowers proliferate. Once burned, tarweed seeds could be eaten or ground into flour. Without excess fuel, accidental blazes didn’t run wild. “It’s why you’re put on this earth—to take care of the landscapes that take care of you,” says Merv George Jr. of the US Forest Service, the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, and the Hoopa Valley Tribe.
To know the land you must live on it, observe its seasons, movements, relationships. You must know it before you can care for it. You wonder how to do the same for a person; learn the rhythms that rise from their roots. If only you could learn each other well enough. If it weren’t such a radical thing, to care. To burn each other just enough to get to the place that hurts. The place that nourishes.
You sip fancy cocktails by a roasting fire in a hotel bar.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen my parents be loving to each other,” the Professor admits. “I mean, they care for each other, but…”
“After fifty years, maybe love looks like familiarity,” you suggest.
“I don’t know.” His eyes have the kind of faraway look you know too well.
“What would being loving in a relationship look like to you?”
He ducks the question with the deftness of Roadrunner spotting Wile E. Coyote’s trap, leaving you to smash into the archway of open road you painted for him seconds before. You knew it was only ever a rock wall, yet you asked anyway. (Wasn’t it Coyote who stole fire for humans? To the Karuk, the Shoshone, the Miwok.)
After the college tour, the Sandburg birthplace, walks through the neighborhood, “It was positive,” is all he’ll say about your visit. It sounds like a step down from enjoyable.
The connection recedes gradually enough there’s no acute moment for your nervous system to panic. “I expected to fall in love,” he insists on the last call. He has cut his hair and looks the youngest and most attractive of all the time you’ve known him. “It just didn’t happen.” The truth you hold is an open flame, ready to catch on the right bit of grass. He is still green. You think of Sandburg—I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes—and reply with a shade of truth like the shadows of clouds passing over fields.
Roots of prairie grasses can reach fifteen feet deep. Threading down to the groundwater, a repository for regrowth. A network so dense the topsoil needed John Deere’s steel before it relinquished the fertility that built a Midwest Empire. This is where his foundation lies, on the tilled-up soil of a land that is no longer allowed to burn. The house he built of himself is solid, he knows who he is. You grow from roots that have made peace with the burn, and a house does not grow back after a fire.
Emily Uecker is a writer of the Pacific Northwest. Her work appears in Hunger Mountain, McSweeney’s, and Witness where she won the 2026 Literary Award in Nonfiction. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Chulitna Artists Residency, and Hedgebrook. Originally from Northern California, she lives and teaches in Portland, Oregon.