There is no sign welcoming you to Annesville. Blink and you miss it. The town begs you to forget it before you arrive.

Other tiny towns scattered across the Midwest comfort travelers with vestiges of a livelier past, like hollowed-out car factories, grain silos rusted from disuse, tracts of houses foreclosed upon during the recession. Annesville offers no such fragments of nostalgia. There are no restaurants, no parks, no schools, no doctors. Instead, there are three liquor stores lined up along the main road like unfelled dominoes, undistinguishable from one another but for the sun-faded signs in their windows, along with an abandoned gas station, a barber shop, and a mechanic’s garage. The post office closed unceremoniously when I was fourteen. An errand as simple as a gallon of milk requires a fifteen-mile drive north to the Long Grass reservation, just over the South Dakota border, or south to the town of Tyre. On every side, Annesville is flanked by endless beige prairie. We are in the Nebraska sandhills. No crops can grow here. God himself has salted this earth.

Five unpaved side streets branch from the main road like tributaries from their mother river. In a town of ninety-some people, there are no city services to plow the snow or collect the leaves or clean up the odd gutty mess of roadkill, which is often left to suppurate in the sun for weeks before someone is finally repulsed enough by the stench to scrape the decaying creature from the dirt. The lots are large, no fences between neighbors, the excess spaces filled with trucks, trailers, RVs, and even a handful of tiny fishing boats for catching walleye down at the Twin Lakes. Houses range from rundown to dilapidated. Rusted swing sets and knee-high grass decorate the front yards, along with a few signs urging voters to reelect the local congresswoman. Everyone has an American flag. Most people have a Gadsden flag.

In Annesville, no one moves away. People die and pass along their house to children who will also die there, a cycle spanning generations. My family is no different. We are the fourth generation of Byrds to live in the saltbox house on Cedar Street—or I suppose I should say they are the fourth generation of Byrds to live there. It hasn’t been my home in thirteen years.