At first the people in the small town let the tumbleweeds be. Not my problem, not my property, the bar is open, wanna get a drink? But the tumbleweeds only multiplied, coasting down the narrow concrete avenues, the wind whistling through their bony tendrils in an ominous song. They came to a stop in the schoolyard: the children were scared. The church basement: the minister was scandalized. The backdoor of the strip club: everyone was furious. And the tumbleweeds didn’t just glow—they spoke, or sang, or screamed, so eventually the volunteer fire department set up a new volunteer group: people to get rid of the tumbleweed souls that grew in the field.

Nathan volunteered at the Soul Field on weekends, because he didn’t have time during the week. Well, maybe he did, Nathan hedged; but he never wanted to go to the Field after work, so he didn’t. He was once a morose college student, but had come back when his mother fell ill, and now he again stayed in the small town. He worked at the bank doing meaningless tasks from nine to five, and when he was done he didn’t fancy plucking the souls of people who probably had much better lives than him.

But having that thought made him feel guilty, and cruel, so he went to the Soul Field on the weekends, because those souls needed some place to go.

The volunteer team was barely official. Someone was usually “in charge” and sat in a tall chair like the ones meant for lifeguards, overlooking the Field, but whoever that was didn’t know any more than the volunteers beneath—except maybe the newbies. No one in the small town had figured out why, or where, or what, or anything else informative about the soul tumbleweeds, and Nathan, like the rest of the volunteers, didn’t really care. Small towns fend for themselves, as the mayor always reminded them. It was: clear out the Soul Field; or listen to the screams and sobs of the dead, the blue glow of the afterlife interrupting your beauty sleep or your lap dance—so to the Soul Field they went.

Nathan was taught early not to pull a tumbleweed that wasn’t done growing, and after watching Joey do so once by accident, he made extra sure not to do it himself. Pulling a grown soul felt like the satisfying snap of ripping a full dandelion out of the grass, white and puffy and promising a single wish. But, according to Joey, pulling an early soul was like ripping the skin from your cuticles too close to the nerves, but along your whole hands instead of one finger, as the tumbleweed wailed and tried to remain in the ground. Worse, once the pull started, you couldn’t stop, and the unfinished teal roots would leak red into the soil at the loss of the weed, and though the In Charge volunteer had already tested the red liquid and determined it was not blood, just sap, that didn’t make you feel any better about it. Joey tried to look tough and strong despite the snot dripping down his face and the empty look in his eyes.

“I feel like a murderer,” Joey told Nathan that night, over drinks at the bar.

“You’re not,” he reassured. Privately, Nathan thought, Maybe you are.

The hardest part of the job was disposing of the soul at the end. He says “the end” because it was after the end of a long walk to where the tumbleweeds were deposited, a dumpster specifically chosen for the purpose (it had been cleaned. Somewhat.). Nathan didn’t know where the tumbleweed souls went at the end of each day. “Away,” the In Charge volunteer had said when he asked. Nathan supposed it was just as well that he didn’t know: he wasn’t God, or a priest, or a politician. He didn’t decide what happened to the dead.

What was hard about The End was that, during the walk, the tumbleweed’s brambles would snake onto your skin, like a curious worm exploring a new garden. It didn’t hurt, or burn, or sting, or tickle, and it wasn’t even that hard to untangle yourself after: and that was because trapping you was not what the brambles were for. They were storytellers, whispering to you the achievements and regrets and hopes and failures of the soul you carried, and at the end of the long walk, when you went to throw the soul away, it felt like saying goodbye to a friend. When Nathan tossed a tumbleweed into the dumpster, a single tear would slide down his cheek, and then the feelings of mourning would fade. Some shed two tears, some three; some people sneezed, or laughed. Nathan had learned at college that grief was different for everyone, and he supposed that would apply to the grief of throwing away a tumbleweed soul, too.

It sounds like a terrible job, surely something only the very virtuous and devout would volunteer for—but that was before Penelope had found her sister in the Soul Field. “It’s her!” she’d apparently shouted, crying and jumping with a medium-sized tumbleweed in her arms. Everyone knew the story of Penelope’s little sister, the one who died at 18—too young—in the natural disaster that tends to hit small towns the hardest. The gossip spread as fast as the doubt: how could Penelope’s sister’s soul show up now? She’d died many years back, surely the souls in the Soul Field were new? Has Penelope been hitting the bottle again? How could the tumbleweed tell her who it was, or who it used to be?

But nothing stirred up a small town like the idea of a miracle, and after that the Soul Field was overrun with volunteers. The flood dialed back after a while, but still: there was never a want for workers anymore. Never mind that it hadn’t happened again, at least not that Nathan knew. Everyone was willing to roll the dice: even if it meant grieving for twenty strangers every day that you threw in a dumpster at The End to go God knows where.

And Nathan was no different. He had lied, a little, before: it wasn’t just his guilt or his civic duty that brought him to the Soul Field on weekends. He wanted to find someone, too. To hold them in his arms, to feel their soul whisper into his veins, wrap around his fingers. To send them to a place that he hoped and prayed was better than this small town neither of them had ever really liked.

Nathan won’t say who it was. None of the volunteers admitted who they were looking for. Sometimes you could hear a pronoun, or a pet name, curious and pleading from the volunteer’s lips: but it wasn’t anyone’s business. A small town needs to fend for itself. You plucked and you listened and you cried, then you threw the soul away, started over, and that was all.

The only thing that makes Nathan so different in this story, he supposed, is that he’s telling all of this to you. You’re not from the small town, and just happened to catch Nathan on his rare trip into the city. You’re sitting next to him, waiting for a train, and asked about the blue dust coating the bottom of his jeans. He looks defensive as he finishes the tale (even though you never explicitly asked for it), looking at you with small, lonely, bitter eyes.

“Well, what would you do?” he asks. “Think you’re better than me? Think you’d figure it out?”

There is a pause as you try to think of an answer.

“Volunteer work is always admirable,” you decide on saying. “It’s good of you to do it.”

Nathan’s face spasms, expression falling into something pained and grateful all at once. “Thanks, I guess.”

He leaves on a train that arrives before yours, no doubt going back to his small town. You try to catch the name of the train, the number of stops, the travel time: but Nathan has turned silent, and there’s always something in the way of your line of sight when you examine the train itself. Maybe the Soul Field doesn’t want me, you think.

You are getting on your train, sighing, when you catch a swirl of shining blue on the edge of the track. You turn to look, but nothing’s there.