Judd glanced up from the ground he was plowing and saw movement on the river. He let go of the horse’s traces and trudged down to the riverbank.
He glared as an empty rowboat glided smoothly down the middle of the river. For a moment, he thought about letting it go on by, but he grudgingly doffed his boots and swam out to catch the boat and guide it onto dry land.
Posted in fiction
Tagged abandonment, embarrassment, farm, fiction, ingratitude, mail order bride, marriage, rowboat
“The city’s swimming pools were full again today as we wind up our record-breaking third week of 100-plus-degree days,” the TV weatherman said over images of children splashing around. “My, doesn’t that look nice and cool! They’ll likely be there again tomorrow and the next day as there’s no relief in sight.”
Craig looked up from his tablet and scowled. He picked up the remote and muted the volume. It was bad enough to suffer the heat without listening to some idiot prattle on about it. Almost unheard over the window air conditioner, his children splashed happily in the horse tank he had filled for them to swim in. The nearest town with a swimming pool was ten miles away, and the water was too heavily chlorinated for Kathy to tolerate.
Jane glanced briefly at the now-quiet TV and her husband. She kept working to get the family’s dinner ready. The water for the spaghetti was about to boil. “It’s really too hot for this,” she said to herself. “Can’t live on sandwiches all summer.”
Posted in fiction
Tagged climate change, energy, farm, fiction, fluorescent, grid, heat, incandescent, LED, light bulb, rural, swimming, tractor
Roy saw the new Chaffinch’s Almanacs sitting near the cash register. He paid for the odds and ends he was getting at the hardware store and plucked two of the free almanacs from the displays.
Chaffinch’s was the only almanac sexist enough to publish his and hers editions, in blue and pink covers. The women’s edition contained all sorts of stuff about that time of the month and children and homemaking that the men in Chaffinch’s target audience were certain they didn’t need to know.
Roy picked up a pink almanac for Enid so that if she saw him with his blue-covered almanac she couldn’t complain about his not getting her an almanac. Married life was full of little preemptory strikes like that, he mused.
The oblong little spacecraft overtook the truck on the road and landed gently in front of it, scarcely disturbing the gravel. The driver of the truck, a Blazer from the previous decade, slowed and stopped and stared.
A hatch opened on the side of the spaceship and an extraterrestrial, all four-foot-five of him, stepped down to the ground, his iridescent green scales shining in the afternoon sun. He approached the truck’s driver, a stocky man wearing a brand-new seed cap.
“Good soil to you,” the alien said. He held a small, round device from which the English words flowed; nothing about his mouth seemed capable of producing those sounds.
Seth led the horse into the barn and let it drink from the trough before pitching some hay under its nose. He gave it a quick rubdown, more a lick and a promise than proper care of a tired animal, but the human was also a tired animal. Plowing twenty acres of someone else’s hard land twelve miles distant in heat and humidity he had never even had nightmares about – but would from now on – was more than a middle-aged man could stand for too long. Seth had stood it for longer than that because it had to be done.
He walked toward his house. He didn’t smell supper being made, but it was too hot to eat, anyway, and he was too tired to care; he just wanted to lie down. But he forgot his exhaustion as soon as he walked through the back door into the kitchen. He stood perfectly still for a moment and took in the situation.
Lewis had worked out a simple plan: Load the old propane tank on the ton truck. Back over the gas pump by the old barn. The truck’s hot tailpipe and some fortunate sparks ignite both the gasoline storage tank and the fume-filled propane tank. Half the farm goes up in a massive explosion.
It should be a quick death, he figured, and best of all it would look like an accident; the insurance company would pay off.
Lorna would be at work at the diner, and Sarah would be in school. They wouldn’t get hurt, and they wouldn’t be around to see it happen. He’d sent them both off that morning with smiles and hugs and kisses, so there would be no reason to suspect he’d taken his own life. And they’d have a last happy memory of him.
Mandy stood by her mother at the kitchen sink. Her mother was clucking almost as much as one of the nearly ninety hens on the farm.
“Here’s another freckled egg,” Muriel said. “Put it in with the others for your Aunt Anna.”
Mandy took the egg from her mother and dried it. Before placing it in the little basket meant for her aunt, she held and pondered it, looking at the dark red spots that mottled the light brown shell.
“Why do you give the freckled eggs to Aunt Anna and Uncle Eddy?”
Mandy noted her mother’s tiny pause; it happened more and more when Uncle Eddy’s name was mentioned. “Because your aunt grew up on this farm with your daddy and knows there ain’t nothing wrong with a freckled egg. City-bred people will think it’s bad and won’t buy it.”
The kitchen door banged shut as Mandy’s father came in. “That’s right,” Billy told his daughter. “Same reason we can’t sell you,” he said.
Seven-year-old Macey Yager tiptoed through the darkened house before dawn’s first light. She painstakingly unlocked and opened the kitchen door – the one farthest from her parents’ bedroom – and ever so carefully closed it again. She walked quickly and silently down the path away from the house and barnyard and toward the road.
Once there, she ran. She took nothing with her but her memories and her hope.
*
At the beginning of the summer, Macey’s dad, Ken, came home one day with an energetic bundle of fur, a one-year-old Australian shepherd.
“He looks like a panda,” Macey said, and Panda became the dog’s name. Ken built a doghouse and put it under a tree near the house and Macey and Panda played every day from sunup to sundown.
She gave Panda his breakfast and supper every day and sat with him while he ate. She threw a ball for him to fetch. She used him as a pillow and looked at the clouds and talked to him about everything.
*
Everything was fine until school started, she thought, walking around a road-kill possum.
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Copyright © 2008-2011 Bryon Cannon.
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