I imagine it much to be like a country field that could be found in Alabama. Or maybe, Nebraska, that flat open space. Farm yards, Earth and rows of plowed soil running parallel in one direction for miles, ready for crop, ready for planting, hungry for birth, life. The Farmer’s home, dependent on the reaping of the crop.
All but one farmer and his kindred family have abandoned this particular parcel of lucid land caught momentarily wasted in lingering time. This farmer, big and tall, laughing in a golden clown type suit, ribbons and bows, mad fire flowing hair grinning glaring with pink stained teeth, isn’t quite like any other farmer. His belly bounces big and round, jolly on the pleasures his crop and cooking may bring.
High wind howls through the fields searching to tears anything apart that endures its downward current. It whistles through the six-foot tractor tire left to rust in the mud, half buried and forgotten. The once green John Deere gas powered machinery, left behind by the ancient race, the single breed, the forgotten people. It has not moved for over a thousand years. Its components, unable to biodegrade and disintegrate. All across the remaining Americas, Chevy’s, Fords, and all makes and models of cars have been disregarded, left behind, useless once fuel supplies ran dry.
Flowing dark purple clouds swirl above. They churn like the frozen liquid center of a child’s marble might, if it weren’t forever caught in a spherical glass prison. Rain begins to beat down. Farmers like rain. It is supposed to return nutrients and minerals back into their soil, feed their crops. But this field is different.
The blundering ape of a farmer stands beneath the tarring heavens cussing at the lack of God above or the Devils all around, either one, the same, for the rain destroys his precious fields, depleting it of its valuable mineral content, washing it away, seeping deep into the Earth and away in the rivers. He screams, waiting with clenched fists beating against his leather chest like a Silver Back.
When the storm has ended, the ghosts might return.
Giant raindrops explode upon the Farmer’s large oval skull. The patterns gently caress his thought patterns, easing them slightly, rescinding some anger, temporarily. Water runs down his massive bald head dripping from his nose and wetting his thick upper lip. He closes his protruding lower jaw of jagged unmaintained teeth. He spits on the soil cursing the world in a series of grunts.
A dead crow, black and wounded, lays lifeless at the Farmer’s bare toed and hairy feet. He picks up the rotting corpse and sinks his teeth into the chest cavity. Tiny ribs splinter and break like snapping twigs. He chews, feather, bone and flesh. Maggots spill out from the dark bloodless hole in the bird. They wiggle over his fingers, fall to the earth and bury themselves in the rich dark soil, hiding from the farmer, and feeding off his land as well.
He takes a few more bites of the crow like eating an apple then tosses its rotting corpse aside amongst the others. The storm will be over soon, so he thinks. This pleases him and his monkey sized brain. He will let his children out soon.