“Prairie” by Brian Evenson offers a chronotope of wandering in which genres jarringly intermingle. The short story draws from the western, post-apocalyptic fiction, and romance, and offers a space both rife with meaning and incomprehensible. This article aims at analyzing how the text explores a desert in the etymological sense, a space deserted, abandoned by God but also a space devoid of “sertum,” that is to say devoid of any link, untied, in which genres interlace and unravel to produce a horrific language, the meaning of which we intuit rather than fully grasp.