Magenta Monster

The man stood and watch the night bleak branches cradle the moon and thought on his predicament, he was here in a street of harsh tarmac and the fields there lay beyound reach. Behind a barbed wire fence. The haze of mist could not cut the remembering from his mind’s eye though it softened the outline of the ruin. His home once but never to be a home again and the icy mud within would lay unchurned by cows with warm steam clouds of pungent breath.

They had taken it away from him in the aftermath of financial apocolypse, they had taken the only place he had ever lived, the only job he knew how to do, and they had ripped the land apart. Built on her grave and his heart had shattered.

They had built and fenced and hemmed in his fields, road kill on the roads rotting in swarms of flies in the summer. Delicate deer became killiers on the highways as their elegance abounded and spilt onto the new roads. His life had dripped away in a slurry of concrete.

He hunched his shoulders showing his age, he had been 21 when the crisis had hit and the government showed they cared not for agriculture, but loved the land owner who would develope and scar and maim the green hills. Farmers do not sell unless they have too, what business plan could that ever be made into?

He stood and looked at the bleakness like some dickensian scene, brimming with potential murder and sickness of the soul. He took some wire cutters out of his pocket, his fingers ached with their cold weight, stepping forward to the accompaniment of cracking ice he took a breath and faced the ghosts, embrassing the past. Seeing before him a vista of white hot memories, brimming to over flow his senses, images and rememberings of the boy-man he had been. Memories of Trish and her plans before the influenzer, before the kisses and passioned bliss and them crying over spilt milk. She had not out seen the farm nor the hurtful gossip of older tongues that denied them the little help that could have saved the situation.

His hands shook with the remnants of the effort to snip the wire, the cold made the cuts on his hand hurt but not bleed. Broken glass crunched now as well as the ice, somewhere in a security office a little light blinked on but no one noticed it.

Jason had come home, he stepped through the half collapsed doorway, nothing remained of the floral curtains but the smell was still there over the frozen earth and the stench ozone from the motorway. He creaked his way to the kitchen, tears etching out grief tracks that were already worn into his tired face. He sat upon a barrel that should not have been there. Spectors filled him up, teasing with love and warmth through a chilly vale, he lasped into half dreams shutting out the cold.

The bleeping light would not bring anyone, not for hours and the air hurt the lungs with it’s moist coldness that clasped all in an iron grip of winter. Yes he would sit here now, a man of 79 and die with his farm. He should never have left.

The mist condensed freezing around him, swirlling into shapes that weren’t there, a bundle of kittens and a sack of potatoes, he hummed an old tune that was true and never had been real for him – Misery Farm, it reverbed to nothing and finally he slept away the pain.

Posted: Thursday, February 7th, 2013 @ 4:12 pm
Categories: Uncategorized.
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