I-70 West — By Eryn Sunnolia

artwork by Ziyi Huang

We weren’t supposed to really like Kansas. It was too much like the small town we grew up in, where we drank in dark fields and dreamed about skyscrapers and yellow taxicabs. We were just passing through in our mud-specked car packed with puffy rolls of sleeping bags, on our way to the mountains, to the blue, ice-thick waterfalls, to the newly legalized recreational marijuana. During golden hour, hundreds of white windmills turned against a sky bluer than the Atlantic. We passed the occasional house. A farm. A car, maybe two. The pale grass around us stretched flat and wide and endless. Later, the sunset lit an orange blaze that surrounded us. We drove into it, chased it west across the state. It felt like it lasted for hours. As it got country dark, middle-of-nowhere dark, we stopped the car and got out, sat on the hood with knees hugged to our chests, like when we were little, and watched the glowy embers. We tried to get a photo of us with the sky, but all you can see are our flash-bright faces against a smudge of orange, the endless dark. Nothing happened there, probably, but this, like everywhere else. 

Eryn Sunnolia (she/they) is a queer writer living in Philadelphia. Their writing has appeared in Electric Literature, HuffPost, Well+Good, Vast Chasm Magazine, TINGE, and others. Her flash essay "Substitute" was recently nominated for Best American Essays 2025. She is currently a first-year student in the creative nonfiction MFA program at Rutgers-Camden. You can find them at erynsunnolia.com.