Another one-word, open-ended prompt. I just like prompts if you couldn't tell lol.Do what you like; enjoy!

The bell over the diner door wouldn't stop ringing. It had that metallic jangle that could slice a person's skull in two, and all week the wind had been ringing, rattling the glass, shoving the door open on nothing but dust. Ellen wiped the counter for the third time and watched the grit come up in the rag like she'd scrubbed a grave. Every morning she swept it out of the booths, and every afternoon it was back, fine as flour, in the sugar and the salt and the creases of her knuckles. Mr. Harlan had hung wet sheets across the windows. They dried stiff and brown by noon.

"Order up," she called, though her voice barely carried. The ceiling fans had stopped months ago, when the power company started rationing, and the room hummed with flies and low talk.

The regulars were in their places. Mrs. Carter was counting out coins for a coffee she'd split with her husband. The trucker with the sunburned neck wasn't there anymore. His rig had been idle since the roads clogged.

"Refill, sweetheart?" a man in a denim jacket asked, holding up a cup.

Sweetheart. Sugar. Doll. She poured. She'd learned to let the names slide off her like water off a tin roof, back when there was water. The bell rang again. She didn't look up, and then she heard the cough, wet and rattling and too familiar. Her heart stopped. A man stood hunched in the doorway with a handkerchief over his mouth, dust streaming off his shoulders. It wasn't her father. Her father would be home on the couch with a damp cloth over his face and the windows chinked with rags. The doctor in Guymon had a name for what was in his lungs, and the name was dust pneumonia, and everybody in the county was learning to say it the way they'd once said fever. He didn't come to town anymore. He didn't have the breath.

Ellen pushed the thought away. Thinking about home at work never helped. It made her hands shake, and shaky hands dropped plates, and dropped plates came out of her pay.

"Ellen!" Mr. Harlan barked through the kitchen window. "Back door. Somebody's asking for you."

Jocelyn stood on the step with a flour sack over her braids and her eyes red-rimmed from the wind. She held a jar wrapped in a dish towel.

"Ma sent lemonade," she said.

"Jocelyn, you shouldn't be out in this."

"Neither should you." Jocelyn looked past her at the kitchen, then lowered her voice. "Radio says it's gonna be bad today."

Ellen took the jar. "Mama's not good," she said instead. "She's four months along now. She's been sick every morning, and he hasn't noticed. He just coughs and shouts for her. And she goes." The jar was cool, impossibly cool, and for a second she wanted to press it to her face and cry. "I've got a plan," Ellen said. "There's a bus out of Guymon on Wednesday. My mama's sister is in Colorado. I've saved eleven dollars from tips. It isn't enough."

"It's enough for one" Joceyln said.

"I'm not leaving her."

"I didn't say you would." Jocelyn reached into her pocket and pressed something into Ellen's palm. "Ma's been taking in washing for the Whitlows' neighbours," she said as Ellen's fist closed around a small wad of bills. "Don't look at me like that. It's not charity."

Ellen's eyes stung. "Does your mama know what it's for?"

"My mama knows more than she lets on." Jocelyn tucked a braid back under the sack. "And somebody ought to get that baby out of this county before it's born into it."

Ellen closed her fist around the money. "If he finds out..."

"Ellen!" Mr Harlan's voice echoed from the kitchen, and Jocelyn waved her away and concealed herself slightly between the alley and the back wall of the diner, shaking dust from her hair.

Ellen was refilling the sugar when the light in the windows changed, from brown to a bruised, violent purple. The talk in the diner stopped. Mr. Carter went to the door and opened it, and the horizon was a wall, a mile-high rolling black cliff of earth with the birds fleeing ahead of it like thrown seed. It was a dark so total that Ellen held her hand an inch from her face and saw nothing. The wind howled in the wires. Dust came through the walls themselves, through the keyhole and the nail-holes and the seams of the wet sheets, sifting down like black snow. Someone lit a candle, and the flame shrank to a pinprick, a sick orange coin in the murk.

She counted heads in the dark, twenty-two of them, including Jocelyn, who had concealed herself in the dark and sheltered beneath a table. She left before anyone saw her again.

The town had been scoured to bone. Ellen walked home along the fence line with a wet apron tied over her face, past a jackrabbit dead in the road, its fur gone gray, past drifts piled to the sills of houses like dunes in some foreign desert. The door stood open. Inside, her mother, Ruth, sat at the kitchen table with the lamp lit and her hands folded, very calm, a quilt around her shoulders. The room was filmed in dust, every dish, every chair, every picture frame.

"Mama?"

Ruth looked up. Her lip was split, but old, already healing. She smiled like she'd just remembered something sweet.

"He's gone, Ellen-Rose," she said. "Passed about an hour ago. I held the cloth to his face right to the end." She turned her wedding ring slowly on her finger. "I don't know what that makes me. I didn't do anything but sit."

The couch was empty. Someone, her mother, had drawn the good sheet over the shape on it. The room smelled of dust and rain that hadn't come yet.

Ellen crossed the floor and knelt, and laid her head against her mother's belly, where the small, stubborn life was still turning over.

"We don't get to be saints," Ellen whispered.

"No, baby," Ruth said, stroking her hair. "But we get to be alive."

Outside, the wind finally dropped. Somewhere far off, a screen door banged, and a dog began to bark, and the whole ruined country held its breath and waited for a rain that might never come. In her fist, Ellen still held Jocelyn's eleven dollars. She would not need them for the bus now. She would need them for the burying, and for the flour, and for the long road after.

"Mama," she said, "when the roads clear, I want to go to Colorado. All three of us."

Ruth smiled, and for the first time in a long time, it reached her eyes.

"Pack proper," she said. "And let's go longer this time."