Wayward tales and dusty sails line the shipyards far away, off somewhere, on the edges of the country. Here, there is no water, only that which is filtered and re filtered and hosed through the ground underneath our shoes. There’s well water, too. The bugs like that, and so do the aliens, I think. The aliens are everywhere, and they lay traps for us that we can’t see. In the old wooden house, on the old dirt street where the scent of burning wheat fields is always aglow, there’s a ghost that sits in a rocking chair, on the second floor. He laughs a lot, and when he laughs he sounds like a crow. A hacking crow, a rabid bird, a two-headed alien. Who knows. There’s an old lady on the first floor, she said that she asks the ghost for rent every month but he always says no. He stinks up the toilet, he overflows the bath, he laughs and creaks his rocking chair around, so that it echos a horrible sound, and the lady on the first floor never knows where he is, he just goes and goes.
Out there by the ocean there must be a change. A hark, or a bellow, a small one even, like the crunching sound apples make while horses chomp, chomp, chomp. There must be another way to live than this, a way that involves shiny People talking on the street, in a shop, on a boat. People yelling, and laughing, with live vocal chords and shadows.
Remember what the pastor said. It was just their time. You carry on the farm by yourself. You’re a man now you can do it. And I just looked at him and saw my parents lying on a tree, pushed over a carriage whose horse had all but left the scene entirely. Their heads looked purple, swollen, hollow, their eyes both open, still looking.
The farm is mine and so, I will never see the shadows on boardwalks and that is what it is. It is just the old man in the rocking chair who refuses to pay rent. The aliens watching me, the wheat-smoke burning perpetually, staining my bed sheets with the secure feeling of time passing, and grains growing, and people-less miles, for miles and miles, until you can’t see the spec that was a stop sign, about an hour ago. The rock that was a landmark, before you knew the road.
fictionconsolidated 