Transience and Permanence

I watch as he inspects the daily delivery of baked goods from down the street, much as I’ll watch as he tosses whatever remains at the end of the night. His hands move through the loaves and rolls and pies and cakes with a seasoned ease. He tosses some back into a large gray bin, wiping his hands on his khaki pants. His breath hangs in the cool morning air as he thanks the man with a polite smile and handshake; the same polite smile and handshake he has given for years.

I snuff out my cigarette under the black, non-slip sole of my shoe. I watch as the main lights of the dining room hesitate before turning all the way on. Music kicks on, but not the top 40s hits that would play during operating hours. The passionate voices of Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole sound as though they’re singing underwater. The sounds of brass and bass eek through the cracks in doors and windows of the old building. I hear the neon hum it’s own tune as the various liquor and beer signs are powered on, and the big hanging sign that reads “The Market” shudders, unlit, in the autumn gusts.

An old white station wagon pulls up to the back of the building and I watch as a bent old man opens the rusted driver’s side door and hobbles towards the back entrance to the building. He shuffles past the stacked milk crates and coffee can ashtrays that serve as the employees’ break area. He strains to open the big red door. The big red door separates the restaurant from the rest of the world. For a second that big steel door hangs open and the soothing jazz fills the morning with sorrow-filled thoughts of times passed. It closes, and the world is gray and lifeless once again.

I figure it’s about time for me to head in. The door closes behind me, pushing the smell of stale cigarettes, booze and trash inside in one last futile wave. Onions and garlic raise their heads to turn back the alley smells and are given their due respect before they once again fade into the background. I pass by the kitchy decorations that most bars seem to have these days: various old signs for old alcohols, old sports memorabilia, an old deer mount that has been defiled with sunglasses and other human accessories. I remember him telling me stories of times when the deer’s antlers were covered by nothing but a thin layer of dust. Most of the things that litter the walls are older than the establishment, but attempt to lend their credibility to the business.

I throw my backpack in my locker in the basement. My sweatshirt stitched with my college’s name -- the one that everyone has -- goes on top of it. No one else was here because it didn’t make any sense to pay workers that have no work to do. We have to have at least one cook there for the breakfast shift, and usually that cook is stuck doing prep for the real meals to come.

I move back to the kitchen and take up my familiar spot at the flat-top grill. There are no tickets on the line, so I have time to prep things for the day ahead of me. I cut tomatoes and bell peppers. The swinging kitchen door hits the pink tiled wall behind it with a hollow crash. I hear his voice, and for the first time notice that the radio has been switched. Some pop music scratches its hot pink nails over the blackboard that displays our daily specials.

“Where the fuck is Brian? That bisque has to be prepped five hours before service. I swear to God if we have to change our feature again tonight I’m going to shove his hand in the fryer,”

“Brian quit last week,”

“Then what the fuck are you doing cutting tomatoes. Prep that bisque.”

I had never made a soup in my life. The old cook is bent over a pot working with carrots and a knife that flashes so fast it looks like he’s cutting with the side of his pointer. The recipe card is covered in parts and pieces of seafood bisques long past. I can make out some words and some numbers, but the whole is lost to me. I pick up a bin filled with an opaque liquid. Someone had hastily scrawled “c-food stock” on a piece of tape and stuck it to the lid, probably Brian, he was never the brightest. The old cook takes it from my hands before I had the chance to do wrong. I turn around to gauge my boss’s reaction, but he had left already.

I hear the dish machine kick on. The stereo in the dishroom is switched on and hums in anticipation. The dishwasher finally connects his music to the system. It’s too loud. I know that the boss will not appreciate it. The dishwasher -- Tod or Rod or something -- has nothing to do, so he’ll be told to turn down his music and to go scrub down the walk-in meat cooler. It is exactly as bad as it sounds. He won’t last another month here. I still move to the loud room and give him the nod that shows that I’m here as well. He nods his head and his neon purple hair dangles over his eyes. He brushes it back with a non-soiled wrist and turns back around to the rack of dishes made dirty by the morning’s prep. If he’s not up for conversation neither am I.

I turn and leave the dishroom. I don’t hear my boss’s voice, but I hear the music get turned down and the swinging metal door to the dining room bang against the tiled wall. I hear the bucket with the bleach water and paint scraper get taken from the closet. I hear the moans and groans of the purple-haired dishwasher rise and then fall as he descends to the walk ins. The old man is done the bisque. His work for the day is done, he’ll most likely stop by some of the other restaurants in town before he heads home.

I make a few omelets with egg whites and organic spinach, roast a few tomatoes and peppers, and bake a few dozen trays of bacon. I take a smoke break. I tried to stop smoking at work, but it doesn’t work like that. The big red door closes and the world is quiet again. Servers with their uniforms half assembled; maroon shirts untucked and unbuttoned, jeans, hats and undone hair. I’m proud that I’m wearing an unwashed shirt from high school and a pair of jeans that are so dirty they probably don’t need me to stand up straight. Working in the back has its advantages.

“Hey bud, how was the morning shift?” asks Ben the server.

“Shitty, don’t hard sell the bisque,” I reply.

“Ha, wasn’t planning on it,”

My boss pushes open the door, and the employees that had began to gather to socialize before the busy lunch shift scattered into the building. Ben gives me an overacted shrug and a salute and follows. Boss man is staring me down, and I turn to leave, but he stops me.

“Don’t you have a class?”

“Yeah, but I was gonna work the triple today,”

“No you’re not, come back for dinner,”

He unconsciously rubbed his vacant left ring finger. I had heard all the rumors about his marriage. He had beat his wife; he had been caught with a server at the restaurant; he blew his wife’s savings on coke and booze. I knew how rumors worked in this place, and I had been at far too many “After-Market” parties to know how many of them were ridiculous for the sake of curing boredom at work. I don’t care about how he got to this point, but at this point he’s a jackass.

Class is class, and I fight the strongest urges to fall asleep. My eyes and attention are paid to the tiny screen of my phone, and I can’t seem to pull myself away from it. Time feels as though it is moving through a tub of butter. I catch bits and pieces about fluid dynamics and then zone back out. Time is moving through a super viscous silicone solution. Soon enough the sound of zippers and the scrape of desk chairs on linoleum floors signals the end of class. It’s time to go back to work.

The dinner shift starts much differently then the lunch and breakfast before it. The faces of the workers I had seen as I left looked strained and exasperated. They had seen too many trays falls and orders botched. They had lost too many tips and endured too much of our boss’s berating. I see Ben, he’s dropping off an appetizer of spinach dip -- one 6 ounce serving in a white ramekin served with baked pita chips and garnished with some grated Parmesan cheese and a blow torch for color. The man Ben is serving is eating a Texan Burger -- one 8 ounce patty cooked to the customer’s preference topped with fried onion straws, thick-cut bacon, house barbecue sauce, and a set up (a tomato and lettuce) served with potato chips or up-charged to fries. I can’t see what the woman is eating, but I bet it’s a salad; they always get salads.

I’ve missed out on so much. I feel cheap for coming in after what looked to be a hellish lunch shift. My fellow workers ask me where I was for lunch. I’ve returned too late to help, and they were short-staffed. “We got killed,” they say, and I notice that there’s a maroon shirt in the dishroom. Missing is the purple-haired Rod Tod dish washer.

“Fired,” my boss says behind me.

“Too bad,”

“He was shit,”        

People move in and out, the deep maroon of the staff’s uniform weaving in and out of the mobs of patrons with trays overloaded with food perched high on their exhausted shoulders, rolls tumble and fall from their plates. Drinks flow and laughter cascades from the happy mouths of satisfied customers. The voice of our boss can be heard over all the colliding conversations, commanding his fleet of high school and college students. Names are forgotten in the fray, and are replaced by points and hair-color nicknames.

A plate falls with an incredible with a resounding crack and the sound of the plate’s body being scattered all over the floor. The sound only momentarily stuns the dining room into silence., I see a whoosh of khaki past me, and my name cracks the silence left in the wake. With no dish washer here I was the low man on the totem pole, or the only one that he remembered the name of. I grab a broom and a butler, and stumble through the crowd. I still stop and say excuse me. He dashes off a quick thank you before he departs to the alley behind our building. His hand reaches for the the handle of the big, red, steel door, the gateway. I follow him as I empty the butler into the appropriate bin, the big steel door closes behind me, and silence clears the air. He inhales his Marlboro Red to the filter in three long drags. He turns from the door and flicks the cigarette into a coffee can. He flashes the same quick smile he shown the baker and hefted the big door open.

I go back into the kitchen and there are orders all the way down the line. I grab the one closest to me and start preparing it. Calamari app -- pre-portioned serving, bread, fry, serve with a dipping sauce and garnished with green onion; done. Steak with fried potatoes -- steak goes on, potatoes are wedged already, they’re the flat top with salt and pepper; done. I complete several other orders, and notice our salad cook is struggling to keep up. I help her as my last order finishes.

The door slams against the wall again, but I don’t look up.

“Put down that fucking lettuce,”

I know he’s talking to me.

“Put it down and take this.”

He hands me a potato wedge.

“Is that cooked?”

“I don’t know,”

“Take a bite,”

It tastes okay, but as my teeth get deeper I hit the apple-like texture of an undercooked potato.

“No, it’s not,”

“Get the fuck out,”

“What?”

“Get the fuck out of my restaurant.”

I don’t know what to say. Everyone else is in stunned silence. Servers open the door and see the oddest scene; a quiet kitchen. They immediately turn back and leave before the door even has a chance to swing shut again. I take off my apron and walk out the kitchen door. I hear some apologies from my co-workers, and spot my former boss out of the corner of my eye at one of the corner tables. I keep my head down and push down the angry red ball that is welling in my gut. I walk through the swinging doors out onto the dining room floor without destination or cause. I’m free in some ways, but entirely lost in others.

“Is this how you want customers to feel?”
“No sir, I’m sorry,” my boss replies.
“You have an easy fucking job, you know that? Your job is to bring me food; the food that I ordered, and make sure that it’s not complete dog shit. That’s your job, and that’s what you failed to do,”
“I’m sorry sir, your meal will be on the house,”
“You’re goddamn right it will be. Can’t even cook fucking potatoes,”
Everyone at the table knows that this guy is way out of line, but no one is saying a word. He must be their boss, and they know that standing up for some manager of some restaurant isn’t worth losing their jobs. They all shift and squirm in their chairs trying to avoid the critical looks of the rest of the patrons. My former boss unconsciously fiddles with his ring finger again. The servers do their best to keep the customer’s attention on the food in front of them, or on the menu, or on anything that isn’t the scene.

“Would you like to see our wine menu?” they ask.

“Can I interest you guys in some dessert?” they ask.

“How is everything tonight?” they ask.

Someone has wrote my name in big letters with the number 86 in dark red ink on the kitchen whiteboard. We are out of the salmon, lamb chop, stuffed peppers, artichoke hearts, and me. My former boss catches me lingering at the board and asks me to come to his office.

His office is in the basement next to the employee lockers. It’s not a place that anyone spends much time, including the cleaning staff. Old promotional ads for drinks and specialty alcohols are propped up against his beige hospital office walls. They loom over his desk like an ever-present panel of judges. His desk is covered in sticky notes and official-looking documents. I see the paperwork for Rod Tod on his desk, and the appropriate filings for termination next to it.

He itches his ring finger and sits down to do something he’s done hundreds of times. He asks me to take a seat, I oblige. I think about the dish washer boy that had sat here less than six hours ago. I bet he was furious. I bet he swore and cursed and said things that he’d later tell his friends about. They’ll be in awe of how brave and courageous he was to stick it to an asshole boss. He did something that they had always wanted to do. I couldn’t be mad at him.

There was only one time that I didn’t see him in the morning going through the bakery’s delivery. The delivery man just dropped off the big gray bins and left; we probably got some dented loaves and some burnt pies. I asked the old cook that morning where the boss was, and he said “with his kids,”

I imagined him sitting awkwardly on the corner waiting for his ex-wife to drop them off. I could see him fidgeting because he hadn’t smoked that day, because he didn’t want to smell like cigarettes around them. I can imagine them holding tight to their mother’s pant leg not wanting to get into this stranger’s car. He stays silent; his heart breaking with every plea to just go home. Their mother reasons that they’ll go out for ice cream later.

“You guys like ice cream? I like ice cream too,”

They bury their faces deeper into their mother’s leg. He looks at her, his eyes search for something that says that this is okay, that this is normal.

He showed up to the lunch shift and fired three people that day. I heard him swearing at his desk when I was in the locker room. Everyone avoided him that day; people made jokes that his dealer cut him off, or that the prostitutes were all tired of getting paid in The Market free appetizer coupons. I laughed. I knew what it was about, yet I still laughed.

So I’m in this chair. This chair that I was hired in. My jeans are stiff and aren’t supposed to bend. I stare at my hands and realize the scars I’ve accumulated here. Knives, jammed disposals, hot flat tops, hot dishes, sharp corners. They’re all there. I see his hands as he gestures at me, and he sports the same scars. His forearms are crisscrossed with thin white lines and oblong burns that weren’t cared for enough to heal properly.

I don’t know what he’s saying. I’m not there right now. This is the same thing with my class this afternoon. I know that I should be listening to him. I know that my tangent thoughts can wait until I’m off into the cold night. He stands up and offers to shake my hand. I look at it, the cuts and scrapes and burns, and I reach out my own hand with its cuts and scrapes and burns.

I clean out my locker and say my last good byes to everyone. My name on the 86 board was already erased and replaced by “seafood bisque”. Ben stops me and says that I can still come to the After-Market party tonight, but I decline. He promises that we’ll keep in touch even though I won’t see him everyday. I know we won’t. We’ll run into each other on campus and exchange polite courtesies the first time; then it will be a hello and a how are you doing; then a nod; then pretending that we don’t see each other.

I leave the restaurant with the last of the customers. They giggle and laugh; their breath hangs in the air for a second before being lost in the cold. I watch the employees leave and some of them had started drinking behind the bar already. They move in a mass of maroon like a school of fish. They all were ready to leave that building. The poor server that was stuck in the dishroom is the last employee to leave. He’s angry that he drew the short end of the stick and hurries to catch up to the mob.

I crush my cigarette under the black non-slip sole of my shoe, and turn to leave. I hear the big red door open again and my former boss come out with bags of trash from the night. His nice khaki pants are stained with grease and streaks of steak tips and marinara sauce. I swear I can smell the congealed ranch from here. He had loosened his tie and unbuttoned the first few buttons of his dress shirt. The first dumpster behind the building is full, and so he has to walk to the corner to dump the trash in the neighboring establishment’s dumpster. He hoists it up and it teeters on the edge of the big brown container before it decides to fall on the sidewalk.

It splits open like an overripe melon and the man curses. People out for the night look at him with disgust as he attempts to guide the soupy mess of bisque, calamari, steak tips, burgers, bloody band aids and spoiled ranch dressing back into the black plastic sheet that was once a bag. He apologizes profusely to those that are forced to walk in the street to avoid the putrid excrement of The Market restaurant and bar.

I pick up the last bit of trash and hand it to him. We carry the last bags out in silence. He thanks me and turns around and opens the big red door and walks in. I hear the moody sounds of deep saxophones and the sad tones of an old piano. The door closes, and I hear the laughter of someone here for a weekend vacation.

The Value of Liberal Arts

The universe we currently live in is full of stuff. There are people that wish to define and explain this stuff, and these people are called scientists. Science's goal is to explain the unexplained, decrease the gray in between areas of human understanding. That sounds very lofty and pretentious, but it is ultimately true. But there is a literal universe of undefined and unexplained gray, and the scope of collective human focus cannot possibly dedicate its attention to anything more than an infinitesimally small fraction of that gray. So I am not here to insert any questions about the validity of their findings, but rather the motivation and choice of gray area to explore.

So what does this have to do with the liberal arts and their title-implied value? Great written, filmed, spoke, and otherwise broadcast to the general public works have played crucial roles in influencing what people know and what people want to know. This sounds very idealistic, and yes, I know that, but if you unwind the thread behind any business move within this capitalistic world you'll find consumers.  These consumers are not the experts on the field in which they are putting their hard-earned dollars towards, nor are they always the most thoughtful or conscious consumers. They buy what we sell -- we, as in the collective writers, advertisers and content-deliverers.

Pharmaceutics, computers, industrial tech, everything is reliant on advancements in science and engineering in order to progress. These are not cheap ventures, they require considerable amounts of capital in order to fund. Science may still be driven the that insatiable explorer's spirit on the lab-level, but when you increase the scale it is a business. The money still comes from big names like Monsanto, Exxon-Mobil, Pfizer, Intel, etc. The labs these scientists work in may still have these incredible minds working for them, but they are made to specialize and direct their brilliance in a direction of the money's choosing.

The Liberal Arts have that distinct ability to influence people. The books you read, the TV you watch, the newspaper you peruse, all have some impact on how you see the world. You might veer towards the organic section of a grocery store, because you heard that organic was better. You might purchase a new car that has less emissions, because you heard about emissions being linked to something called climate change. These things were made possible for you to purchase because of engineers and scientists, but you buy because you were informed or influenced. They produce because you buy, and thereby these engineers create.

Sustainability, green, organic, etc. are all buzzwords, and that's the way writers do their work. They focus on these buzzwords and then attempt to explain why they are important. The science is there, and those scientists will continue to do science, but interest and passion is incited not by their findings, but rather by the people that make it their goal to make you passionate. Science will progress where human-interest demands it to, and that will always, and inseparably be influenced by the media you consume -- the media that was produced by the Liberal Arts.

This was a nice rant, and I understand that my audience is insignificantly small, but if this made you think, or even see things in a slightly different shade of apathy, you see exactly what I'm talking about.

Being a Freelance Writer

I'm not that good at it. There are two things that freelancers need in order to survive in this new internet world: motivation and hubris. I have one of those two, and it ain't a business thing. I can talk about myself, and I can make myself sound like the perfect candidate for whatever writing project you might have in mind, but I get involved in one project and then devote myself completely to it. This is bad when you stare down a $40.00 payout after a weekend of work. Apparently the way to make money in this industry is to either split yourself between multiple projects, or to market yourself so well that clients are more than willing to throw 500 bucks at you for a single piece.

I can't do either of these things, at least not yet.

But there is a zany thing about this working from my own computer chair thing. I know, that in my heart-of-hearts, if I wanted to make some money today, I could. I could just log on to some freelance site and just market the living hello kitty out of myself and hopefully get some bites. Chances are, I'd find someone willing to pay me 5 cents a word for some article about "Health and Fitness in Your Basement!" or something equally mundane like eateries in the Midwest or something.

What I've found is that I cannot self-motivate worth a good golly darn. If I find something that I care about writing, or if I get that bug and I just want to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), then I can write, and the money is just a happy bonus that pays for my food and weekend habits. What I need is work ethic, and I have finally acknowledged this after every school teacher I have ever had has told me so. This is where I find myself, and how I am going to improve.

The biggest revelation I've had while freelance writing is that I can talk about utterly anything and sound remotely intelligent. I think a key point in writing for money in any field is that you give yourself this aloof sense of intellect, so that even if you have absolutely no clue exactly what you're talking about you can present it in a way that says "sure, it wasn't totally a bad idea to pay me to read stuff online and then write about it, nope, great idea,"

And I just nod and hope they don't see the sweat.

Out of the Darkness and into the Light

Out of the Darkness and into the Light

By Andy Hayes

The mirror in front of me shakes with my neighbor’s screams. For an instant my worn expression wobbles and vibrates, and I think that I look better out of complete focus. Someone must have fallen asleep when the Dread was so close to our parameter. My room is brightly lit. The high florescent lights shine straight down on me, and create a small pool of a shadow just under my feet. Even this little leak of darkness makes my hair stand on end like needles in a pincushion. I take my company-issued safety razor and run it over my stubbly scalp. It leaves clean lines of freshly shaven flesh in its wake. My hands move through the motions without thought, rehearsed and practiced. My bald head catches the rays of the ever present lights overhead. I put on my company-issued sunglasses to make the world a little more bearable, and step into my company-issued jumpsuit that lays crumpled before me. My uniform is still white, and all of its zippers are unjammed and pull the white fabric tight against my bare skin.

I look outside my 1x1 foot window to see the sun fight its way through the darkness, through the Dread. It used to be able to hold back the Dread, but these days it seems to find it impossible to do alone. I can see other rays of lights streaking out and fading into the darkness prematurely from other windows like mine. The other side of the workers’ barracks faces the yard, and whatever beams their little windows emit are lost in an ocean of light.

I check my appearance in my now very stable mirror. My jumpsuit is white and still very well-kept, and my sunglasses still have the heavy mirroring that usually fade within the first year of usage. I open the door and walk out into the well-lit hallway. Several other workers on this side of the barracks are in the hallway as well, and we exchange knowing nods. We walk together through the yard-facing side of the barracks listening for whimpers and moans from the rookies. We could at least get a sense of light and dark on our side, these poor guys are constantly in the light. We knock our callused knuckles against their doors; not to wake them, because they’re awake, but to get them to move from whatever corner of their room they’ve inevitably buried their face in. We wait and they eventually emerge.

Their uniforms are a brighter white than even mine, and their sunglasses still boast a standard issue sticker explaining the Standard Operation Procedures for usage of their 100% UV Protection, Mirrored, ShineBrite MirrorForce sunglasses. One reflexively probes the area next to his door for a light switch, and then remembering where he is, stops. We wait for the last rookie, probably the one screaming earlier, to come out. He doesn’t, we make him.

The mess hall is silent, the buzz of the lights and the sound of dulled forks scraping against metal bowls are the only sounds that fill the large cafeteria. Murmurs about the outside world are few and far between, and the poor soul we dragged out this morning is rocking in his seat talking to himself. His jumpsuit is still creased from the shipping box it came in, and his sunglasses are in its breast pocket. Those that are sitting next to him have already scavenged his morning food ration and continue to eat in silence. The bell rings, we all file out.

I’m handed ShineBrite Lightbringer #6642 and I grab an extra bulb and battery pack. The glorified flashlight is light in my hands, and I press the trigger to lock the bulb on, and again to shut it off. Everything shines, everything is in order. Everyone around me tries their torch in a similar fashion, and when satisfied move out of the armory.

The yard’s lights seem to be even brighter than the barrack’s, and we all raise our gloved hands to shield our sunglasses protected eyes. We make our way to the long walls that surround our little camp, and file into units. I’m in the patrol unit, and the rookies are on the wall. I steal an apple out of a rookie’s lunch ration and meet up with my patrol.

“We have signals from the beacons in the southwest and west proper, the Dread is inching closer when the bulbs flicker, and we can’t push it back. Shift 1 patrol is trying to find a more continuous circuit to run the lights on. They’re pulling a double, so be sure to fuck with them as little as possible,” my commander says.

His uniform is off-white, almost gray, and his sunglasses are worn to the point where I can’t see myself in them. His Lightbringer is decorated with markings and stickers that surround its issue number - #31. We jump into our ShineBrite Photon all-terrain vehicles and move out to the beacons in the southwest. I see a familiar face in Shift 1; we shared our flight into camp. He told a story of the stolen car that he’d accidentally driven into a off-duty cop picnic, and his brilliant attempt to pretend he was a male stripper acting as a criminal. He was a funny fellow, quick with wit and sharp with his tongue. He’s hauling a wire as thick as his torso, and his white jumpsuit is made nearly transparent with sweat. He falters and falls, stands again only to fall again.

My right hand grabs the back of his suit and my left grabs a loop on the wire. I sit him up and hand him the apple I stole from the rookie earlier. I urge him to take a bite, eating will keep him awake. He’s passing out sitting there, and I take his Lightbringer and pop out its stand to set it up right in front of him. The flashlight beams directly onto his face. It tries in vain to keep him awake, keep him in the light.

His head nods forward and he looks peaceful if only for a second. I almost envy him, the serenity in his face. His sunglasses droop on his gaunt face and his eyes are closed, the pupils rapidly moving beneath his eyelids. His body slumps under the weight of it all. I slap him, I hit the emergency taser built into the jumpsuit, he’s unresponsive. It’s coming.

His scream pierces the darkness, and I swear the echo can be heard on the distant hills. His eyes open wide and the Dread shoots through the light like a dagger in the hands of an assassin. It grabs his body by his chest before I can get a beam on it, and drags him deep into the abyssal shadows. Shouts and orders are barked around me while I bend over to pick up the fallen apple. Lightbringers spring to life, shooting thin beams into the looming darkness. He won’t be found, no one is ever found after they enter the Dread’s forest, and I just hope I won’t be moved to Shift 1.

The beacons in the southwest and west proper are repaired, their circuitry improved and bulbs increased in power. The dirt surrounding the beacons is brighter than ever; brighter than I care to see it. The beacons are circled by dead earth, too much light for plant growth. We head back to the mess hall. The food is surprisingly good here. I guess they want us to have something to look forward to so that we don’t all run into the Dread’s forest without looking back.

A large map flickers on the wall of the cafeteria. We see the two beacons we repaired shining brightly keeping the black at bay. A large rolling banner declaring “Today we saved over a million lives by keeping the Dread at bay! The war is being won by soldiers like you!”

I’m no soldier, I leave for my room. My mail slot opens and I hear my paystub being slid through it. I check the deposit, it reads Sam Marshall, a name that’s not my own, everything is right. I ball it up and toss it into my trashcan next to my desk. My eyes start to lose focus, I bang my shin against my desk leg and the shooting pain keeps me awake. Blood pools beneath my foot from a reopened wound. The red stands in stark contrast to the whiteness of my room. It’s like a pen that accidentally bursts in a white dress shirt. I soak all of the red up in a white towel and throw it in the bin with the paystub. I watch as the piece of paper soaks up my blood and creates a harrowing peak of red.

I reach into the bottle on my desk and pop a few of the innocent, company-issued, purple pills it contains. I unzip my jumpsuit and sit on the lone chair in my room in just my white underwear and my sunglasses. Colors swirl and converge, I smell the iron in the blood that is seeped into the towel, the light vibrates and flickers. I feel the tendrils of the narcotics easing themselves into the cracks of my brain. I look down at my hands and watch as they dip slowly in and out of the light. My hands are covered in blood, and at my feet is the body of a man. His ID reads Timothy Marshall, a name I was not assigned to know, and my body goes numb as I feel the red and blue lights scream towards me; reaching out to grab me and pull me into the light. He was no one, he was innocent.

A knock on my door snaps me alert, and I look at the timer on my wall. We don’t get clocks because of the association of time with sleep. The timer just ticks down the minutes until we get thrust out into the light. The timer reads 00:05:36, and I pull up my jumpsuit. No time to shave my head and no time for breakfast. My jumpsuit’s leg is soaked in blood, and I’ll undoubtedly get pulled aside by my commander. I get to the wall and meet up with my unit; my commander corners me and makes sure that I understand just how important keeping a neat uniform is in the war against the Dread. I’m just happy it wasn’t about being moved to Shift 1.

I nod, and then flick him the bird as he walks away. Today’s patrol is the usual. We attempt to push back the Dread with our Lightbringers in order to install a new beacon, one farther out. We succeed, and there are thoughts of getting an hour of sleep in before we awake in a horror. This is all so that those behind us can enjoy their little slice of whatever paradise they’ve constructed. The Dread gets us so they can sleep at night with the lights off.

The shift ends and I eat with my patrol. Some talk about the outside world filters in and out of consciousness. I just need to finally get some sleep. As Shift 2 returns to the barracks we find that we’ve been reissued our beds, and the light was made a fraction less intense. I collapse and find sleep like the embrace of a long gone lover. Screams are heard; created by phantom Dread. The light outside is too intense, our parameter too thick to penetrate, but the Dread within cripples. The yard-facing wall is a chorus of moans and screams of bodies who so want to find sanctuary in the unconscious, but are only greeted with terror and dread.  

I get up out of bed exactly thirty minutes before my shift starts. I eat breakfast. I go to the armory. I meet up at the wall. I’m assigned Shift 1.

Extra work, extra patrol time, all the extra got shuffled onto Shift 1. People crack under Shift 1 in a matter of days. If a beacon goes down they call in Shift 1 and watch as we try ineffectively to hold off the darkness with only our Lightbringers while one of us repairs the downed beacon. If a light burns out on the wall we must repair it before the darkness finds the hole; an impossible task. We must preserve the boundary between light and dark, equally impossible.

I hear uncharacteristic shouts and directions that break the incessant buzz of the lamps overhead. The guy that had been melting down for the past few days had finally hit critical mass. He’s also been assigned Shift 1 to replace a suicide. He’s waving his flashlight around like a club and screaming at people to just let him go back to prison. If he goes too nuts he could knock someone out or knock down a light. People are scared to approach him, scared to be forcefully pulled into unconsciousness so close to the Dread, but he must be stopped, contained. We can’t have everything we’ve worked for, all we’ve sacrificed, be brought down by some kid who can’t go a few days without sleep.

A deep, warm breath fills my lungs. Dust hangs and dances in long swirls, almost animate in the way it moves. It’s too small to make shadows, too small to make any difference. I wish I was dust. I drop my Lightbringer and roll up my sleeves to my graying uniform and begin to walk toward the wild eyed man. His sunglasses had fallen off of his skinny face in the turmoil revealing two bloodshot eyes. His pupils are pinpricks it seems his eyes were mostly bright blue iris adding to his horrifying visage. As I approach he brings his Lightbringer around to hold out in front of him attempting to keep some distance between the two of us. He waves it at me as I stand out of his reach.

“This isn’t standard operating procedure for your issued ShineBrite Lightbringer,” I tell him.  

He screams and lunges at me. I catch a lucky break as he slips on the barren dirt beneath his squeaky new boots. He comes crashing down and his improvised weapon skitters out of his reach. The flashlight hardly had time to roll to a stop before the rogue worker was grabbed by a dozen different hands. His hands are bound at his back, and a few of the guys press his jumpsuit’s emergency taser to fuck with him. The commander of Shift 1 yells at them, but makes no real effort to further punish them. After all this guy kept him from his duties as well.
His face is pressed up against the hard, cold metal of the newly installed beacon and he’s being told what is going to happen to him. His rations of purple pills would be halved and his stay on Shift 1 would remain unchanged. He turns to me and smile through bloodied teeth. The corners of his mouth reaching farther than they should, creasing his face into a wicked mask of perverse confidence. His sky blue eyes grow wide and he swings his head full force into the base of the beacon.
It comes. A tentacle of darkness swings from beyond the light’s reach and grabs the unconscious man by the leg. I reach for the flashlight loop on my suit to find that it’s still on the ground where I left it. The other Shift 1 guy that was holding the man swings his Lightbringer around fast; its beam carves fleeting paths into the void beyond the light. I see the bright light in my eyes and then stars, I see stars for the first time since I got out here.
I come to and open my eyes. Are my eyes open? I see nothing, darkness. It’s colder here, but not by much. My eyelids droop and close, so yeah, my eyes were definitely open. It smells like rain, like the mountain trails in places away from the wall and the Dread. I reach again for my absent Lightbringer, and shuffle around to gain my ups and downs. I hear panting, and breathing from my right? I think? I use my hands to probe the ground, cold dew forms around blades that are not of the safety or shaving type. I find something rough, something like...bark? I think it’s bark, from a tree? Trees cause shadows and shadows lead to Dread I think in my trained procedural mind.
The breathing stops, it’s funny that how the absence of a sound can alert you to the sound’s existence. No buzz of the lights, no hum of constant bulbs shining constant beams down on our constant lives. I go too far with my nose leading before my hands. I bang my head against the trunk of a tree and hear scurrying. My body is on alert, I have nothing to defend myself and no ability to judge what I have to defend myself from. My hands ball into pathetic little fists. I plan to punch the darkness into submission.
It’s gone. I relax and work to consciously unclench every muscle in my body. Probably just a squirrel. A squirrel, something I haven’t thought of in years. I push my face against the bark again, but this time in a much more gentle manner. I breath deep the wood, I breath deep the grass and the dew and the squirrels. Without the lights blinding all of my other senses I find that everything is deeper in sensation. I take off my company-issued boots and my company-issued jumpsuit and roll in the grass in nothing but my white underwear and sunglasses. The grass tickles my bare skin and I hear the rustling of fallen leafs beneath me. I drift to sleep again. I hear no screams in the darkness, and I dream of nothing but black.
Familiar beams shoot into my dark sanctuary and I wake up. There’s no timer to remind me when I have to run into the light again. I hear the unwelcome sounds of human voices probing through my serenity, prying their stupid white fingers into my inner peace. The darkness runs and hides from the destructive light, I’m blinded and frozen in my shock. An arm grabs me, enveloping my entire forearm in one massive hand. I’m blind again, but not by black now, but by white. My commander continues to drag me with his entirely normal looking hands. The buzz of the lights consumes me and I struggle to block them out. I smell nothing but dirt and human sweat.
I’m put in a room, not my room, a room that faces the yard. I’m not a rookie. I’m handed a new bright white uniform and a pair of ShineBrite MirrorForce sunglasses with the tags still on. The buzzing of the lights around me is rising to a roar. I run my hands over my scalp to comfort myself. The hair is course and thick. It itches like a thousand mites crawling over my skin trying to find a pore they can burrow in. The light is raining furiously blows down on me and I can’t lift my head up. I’m stuck staring at the ground, staring at nothing but my pathetic little puddle of a shadow. My shadow is my sanity and it’s far too small. I want to tuck myself into ball and fall into the hole that my shadow has created in the middle of my white room.
The lights from the yard seem to be even brighter than those in my room and seem to be shining directly on me no matter where I am in my room. The buzzing is louder and louder and I want it to stop. The smells of this human-created hell overwhelm me. Everything smells sanitized and white. The timer peers down on me, dictating what I do, controlling my life. The mirror in this room is on the opposite wall as the window. I look into it, all I see is the outline of my head surrounded by a bright white light. My fingers sink deep into my eye sockets. They give way with relative ease. Pain is nothing compared to the constant suffering I endure in the light. I’m holding two small gelatinous orbs in my hand, and they drop to the floor. They make a satisfying squishing sound as my bare feet grind them into the white floors. I can still feel the light, I can still feel the binds of this place, I still smell nothing but blank.

My pathetic balled fist strikes the mirror hard, and I feel as it shatters to the floor. I find a suitable piece, one that fits my hand. I run it over my scalp, trying to get rid of the horrible itching. Blood runs down my face chasing the trails of bloody tears. I can hear screams in a different room. Someone must have tried to sleep with the Dread so near. There’s a knock on my door.

Heritage and Harvestors

Heritage and Harvesters

by Andy Hayes

A car horn shouts its owner’s rude obscenities, and I know what it means even before the slick looking sports car’s owner flips me the bird. My old John Deere tractor is leading a long line of commuters into town like ducklings in tow. I wave people around when I can, but the outflow of traffic was nearly as busy as the pied piper lane I had created. I see the barn over the next hill and I was glad that I would be able to duck out of the way of the collective ire soon.

The barn was once painted a deep, traditional, red, but it has since chipped and faded into a less proud spotted pink. We had to move it closer to the house when we sold our first plot of land, and then had to move it again when we sold our second. The barn and the house could now be caught in the same sad photograph, and many have. Our house was once a majestic white, and had a long, well-kept wrap around porch and a swing seat that my mother once sung to us from. Now it was a shade of beige and the wrap around porch was a mismatching set of warped boards that made it treacherous to maneuver anywhere besides to the front door. The swing seat was taken down right after my mother’s death.

The tractor spits and complains as I pull the left hand turn into our barn’s open doors. I hopped out of the seat and disengaged the plowing equipment I had set on it. The worn runners of the big barn doors squealed as I slid them shut, and the lock barely fit over the rust build up. I wipe the day’s sweat off my brow. I take my muddy boots off and place them together next to my father’s kicked off pair. He’s in the kitchen looking over the map of our land with a pencil in one hand and a balled up hard candy wrapper in his other.

“Looks like we’re gonna have to sell off another plot,” he says.

“We haven’t planted yet. This harvest could be better,”

“Harvest will be the same as last year’s, and the year before that,”

“Corn will go up to account for the increasing biofuel craze,”

“If we don’t have to claim most of our crop,” he says.

The pencil is restless in his hands. He taps it in different sectors of the map. Two large plots are already covered in a big red X. The barn has been sketched in by the same red pen next to our house. The map is covered with coffee stains and cigarette ash. There hasn’t been a cigarette near this house in five years. I go to the fridge and grab the carton of orange juice and take a swing. I look over the map with my father and talk about which section of our land would be the least crippling to part with. On the map our land is bordered by green spaces and little illustrations of trees. Today our land is enveloped by housing developments named things like “The Greens” and “Oak Wood”.

I check the time, and swallow the last of my orange juice. The bus would be here in a couple of minutes. I rummage through bulk sized bags of hard candies until I find a jar of peanut butter. I grab a half of a loaf of bread from the refrigerator and put on my sneakers. I kick my father’s wandering left boot back onto the mat with its partner and head to the bus stop.

The bell rings for first period class and it’s like the ringing in of the first round of a boxing match. Other kids are drawing lewd things in the margins of their notes. I fill mine with more notes, notes about my notes, meta notes. Biology is done in a sprint, and with it goes Math and English. The bell rings again and it’s lunch time. I find my normal seat in the corner and pull out my loaf of bread and peanut butter.

I hear them making fun of me while scarfing down their pizza that they paid three dollars for. I hear the condescending tones in their voices. I see the way their eyes gleam and glisten because they weren’t up at 4 a.m. I eat in silence and wait for the bell to ring to get back into class. I move through the rest of the day without a thought about the farm, the fields, selling land, or my father.

I spend the bus ride back looking out across freshly plowed fields ready for planting. Markers of the fields intended seed strains mark the side of the road like political signs. Each field has a different combination of letters and numbers to mark just what kind of soy or feed corn they plan on growing. No seed company allows for the farmers to replant their seeds, so each season you pick a different strain or a different breed of plant so that you can’t ever reseed with whatever you grew last season.

The seed bill is on the kitchen counter, and it’s a staggering amount. A necessary expense of course, but money from now is not always money for later in this lifestyle.

“These biofuels are taking from both sides I think,” my father says walking into the kitchen.

“Yeah, but money now will be money later,” I reply.

“Not always,” he states.

We share a pot of spaghetti with red sauce for dinner. We use whats left of the loaf of bread that I brought to school to make toast. My father sprinkles some garlic salt on it and makes a joke about it being a true Italian dinner now. I laugh, and he laughs. We fill the empty house with our laughter.

“Got a letter from your brother up in the city,” he says.

I know that my brother would have much preferred an email, but he knows that my father would never get it.

“Yeah? I think we should go see him one of these days. I heard he just got a pool table,”

“Then we’d have to visit your sister too, and you know how that goes,”

    We finish dinner and do the dishes together. I place the hand-washed plates and cups back into the cupboard. The cupboards are filled with nice china and ornamental serving dishes, and they each boast their own coat of dust five years thick. We go upstairs and pull on our matching heavy sweatshirts and go back downstairs. I sit and tie my boots as my dad hitches the planting equipment to the tractors in his socks. The planting equipment is locked up next to the fertilizer spreading truck. They each look like horrible, malicious pieces of technology, more prone to dismember than to sustain. I throw him his boots as he climbs into the tractor I was driving this morning. I find the seat of the older one in the dark and settle in for a long night of planting.
    The sun’s probing rays find their way between my window’s shades too late. I swear at my alarm clock which is blinking 12:00 innocently back at me. By the time I get downstairs my father is already back inside, showered and bootless. He’s drinking coffee and looking at the map again. He slides me a mug of steaming coffee, and shrugs off any apology I could have given. He has the red pen in his hand, and is looking with great intent on one of the plots we have yet to plant. In front of him is a pile of hard candy wrappers glistening in the sun like a mound of precious gems.
    “Shoot Dad, you’re holding that pen awfully tight,”
    He ignores my quip and continues pouring over the map. His tongue swirls around a hard candy in his mouth. The clatter against his teeth makes me cringe. The bus would be here soon, so I grab a couple bagels from the pantry and head out. I look out the window of the bus at the rippled field of browns. There’s so much hope, so much potential.
    When I get home I notice that my father’s boots are not by the door. The kitchen is silent, and my Dad doesn’t answer when I call for him. I hear the sound of a phone that’s been off the hook for far too long. It cries out for someone to return it home. I place it back in its cradle, and see that it’s not the only thing that’s been disturbed. The living room is in shambles, fist sized holes dot the walls. The family portrait, the one with everyone in it, is broken on the floor. Mom’s old reading lamp is leaning, bent, against the wall like a man after a long night out.
    “They refuse to pay what they offered,” I hear from behind me.
    “Dad...it’s okay. We still have this harvest. This harvest will be a good one,”
    “We’d have to sell two plots to cover the loans we took out, and with two plots gone next year we’d have no hope of keeping those housing vultures away,”
    “We’ve got this, we’ve made it years past and we’ll make it now,”
    “We? We don’t have anything, you’re just going through the motions before you go to college. Just like your brother and just like your sister,”
    “This isn’t the time for this talk Dad. Calm down, take a walk,”
    He shoves by me and heads out the front door. The screen door waves back and forth; its hinges wailing with every movement. I dip my head and go to my room. My hands move through my homework while my mind is out in the fields. I check the status of my college applications; all pending review. I don’t hear my father get in before I fall asleep.
    My alarm sounds from my new alarm clock and I rise without hitting snooze. It’s still dark as I prepare a pot of coffee and I go to the shed to see that my father’s boots and one of the tractors were gone. I curse myself for making him work alone again, and I hurry to set out.
    Planting seed is just about as mindless as it seems. Tractor basically drives itself, and I just sit there listening to the large wheels churn out little seeds that we will water with our life. College would take me from this life, and it would take me from this horrible way of living. My brother is living as a consultant for some networking technology company. He’s got a wife and a kid on the way, and my Dad swears that we’ll go up once we get a break.

We never get a break. The hands we hire are seasonal, and most of the planting and fertilizing we do on our own. We sold our third tractor, my Mom’s tractor, to pay for a new dry fertilizer spreader after the old one burned out. My father didn’t trust that new liquid stuff, and insisted that we use the pellets. He would drive at full speed with the spreader on the highest setting. The slotted wheel below the hopper would spin at a blurring speed and would sling little green and white balls a hundred feet from the truck. We’d take turns jumping on the top of the hopper trying to push down the stuff as fast as it was being spread. That was always my brother’s favorite part.

    My sister she was an anomaly. Liberal Arts major, something with art or English or something along those lines. She went vegetarian, then vegan, then lesbian. She lives in the west somewhere and sends us condescending and preachy literature about the dangers of monoculture farming and unsustainable agriculture. My dad has a special place in the brush fire for them. We joke that we never hear from her because we can’t see smoke signals from this far away.
    I remember us, the whole family, planting one evening. It only took one evening with all of us there. My sister got stuck in an irrigation ditch because she took the one turn we ever have to take slightly too hard. She hopped out of the tractor’s cab in her overalls and starting kicking at the big back wheel. My mom stuffed out her cigarette and teased her for having zig-zagging rows. My brother joined in and was pelted with seed from the planter’s hopper. Dad wasn’t too happy about that so he nudged her with his tractor and she toppled into the irrigation ditch. My dad pushed his tractor a little too far and the tractor slid in too. My sister narrowly dodged it and started laughing uncontrollably through my father’s expletives. We all started laughing. We don’t own that plot anymore.
    The field is planted into neat, straight rows, and I watch as the sun is pulled below the horizon through the small green rear view mirror of my tractor. The shadows pool in the deep trenches between rows, and the cool evening air descends on me in a comforting blanket. I hear my father’s tractor start up in the distance, and his two cones of light shoot out in the distance. He was probably admiring the sunset as well.
    Back at the house we eat our tuna sandwiches in silence. Silence because of exhaustion not because of lack of things to say. The air is thick with doubt and uncertainty, and it pollutes every thread of conversation I can hope to weave. My father’s eyes are focused in a time and place far away, and his dirty hands clutch the sandwich like it’d try to escape if he let up the tiniest bit. I want to apologize for wanting to get out. I want to apologize for my siblings and for our shared desire to escape the days of sitting behind a tractor wheel. I want to apologize for Mom dying. I can’t. I finish my sandwich and say my good nights to my unresponsive father.
    My teacher announces in school that we’re to take a field trip to a sustainable development laboratory at the local university at the end of the week. A lot of the other seniors talk about a senior skip day interfering. Apparently “going big at Lake Big Crest” is more important to them than minimizing our carbon footprint. My teacher insists that the material covered in the tour will be imperative knowledge for the final. I text my sister about going, and she responds that maybe I could bring our father. I don’t send anything back.
    When I get home the fist-sized holes still dot the walls in the living room, but our family portrait has been mended. My mother’s reading lamp has been restored to its straight and upright position. The planting was over, and we had nothing to do but fertilize once every month; fertilize and hope. I’d now see my father pacing the floors and filling his time with little jobs that didn’t need to be done. He removed some of the obscenely warped boards on the porch, but never replaced them. He chipped off some of the barn’s old, weathered paint, but never repainted it. He cleaned out his side of the closet, but not hers. Hard candy wrappers were scattered about on tables, window sills, and chairs. Each one a vibrant color that grabbed your eye and screamed look at me.
    It was the end of the week and the date of the field trip and the first fertilization. My dad swears up and down that it’s fine that I go on to this university. “After all, it is the future,” he would say mockingly. I didn’t know if he was talking about the research or college, and I didn’t want clarification. My phone was turned off as per the guide’s request, and the class was pretty thin as it was, so I didn’t want to be that guy in the back with the cell phone in addition to that guy that eats loaves of bread with peanut butter.
    The college campus was a place of distinct polarity. We walked around while classes were in session and it was a ghost town. I had the feeling that I was supposed to be somewhere else, probably learning something. Even the rabbits and squirrels stopped and looked at us like we didn’t belong. Then I heard the rumblings of footsteps and doors opening. People pulling out phones and putting in ear buds. There were thousands around me all of a sudden. The squirrels and rabbits have vanished and in their place were people carrying on with recounting whatever crazy thing they had planned for the upcoming weekend. All certainly more exciting than “going big at Lake Big Crest” I’m sure.
    It’s dark by the time we get back into our town. I see blue and red lights reaching out into the darkness from down the road. A commuter got in a car accident I immediately think. I hope that they didn’t hit our barn. I see that the squad cars and ambulance are indeed in front of the barn, and I just know that if one of our tractors got damaged we’d be done for the year. The crack of radios cutting in and crack the silence as I approach. I overhear the word gruesome from several adjacent conversations.
    I’m informed of my father’s death by a polite police officer with a crooked nose and a cell phone that won’t stop ringing. He was found in the hopper of the fertilizer truck, well half of him was. The other half was “dismembered and thrown all over that field over there,” I was told. I don’t cry, I’ve somehow forgotten how. They say it was an accident, but I know my Dad had fertilized a thousand times, and never once lost his footing. My sister and brother have been informed, and were planning on coming back soon. I can’t say that I want them to.
    Curried mushroom casserole sits in front of me in a steaming pile. My sister’s life partner had just taken a vegan cooking class at the local community center, and she swears up and down that it has changed her life. My brother is busy tending to his very pregnant wife who has been struck by a crazy desire for a funnel cake. I’m sucking on a hard candy and trying to ignore the oncoming wave of immense pity. He wasn’t just my father you assholes, I’m just the one that is still here. I want to scream at them to all go back home. They can’t be sad, because they didn’t know him anymore. They didn’t wake up at 4a.m to plant feed corn; they didn’t struggle with decisions between selling land plots to housing developments; they didn’t remember our mother’s songs on the front porch. They could hum along, sure, but I was the only one who remembered the words.
    “What are we going to do with the farm?” my brother asks, with a weird doughnut thing in his hand. I guess it was the closest thing he could find to a funnel cake.
    “Finish the harvest,” I reply.
    “We could turn it into a community garden!” my sister squeals.
    “You’re so cliche,” I tell her.
    The funeral’s costs are split between my brother and my sister. Well, mostly my brother, but because my sister was living at some sustainable commune or something. He was cremated and placed into an urn usually used for “children, on account that we could only cremate half of him”. The debt of my father was inherited by all of us, but in his will he left me the farm, so it was decided by my brother to sell the farm in its entirety to pay off whatever debts were owed. I insist that we wait till the harvest.
    It’s weird and unnatural for other people to be in the house. Smells of roasting vegetables and sauteed tofu fill the air and tie a knot in my gut. My sister takes to baking pies and tarts from locally grown fruits that she picks up at the local farmers’ market. I stick to hard candy. Soon the refrigerator is full, and the freezer is shortly after. The china with the five years of dust is cleaned and used. My sister and her lover look fondly over the clothes in my mother’s closet. I see my brother sneak a smoke on the holy porch. He and his wife are the first to leave, and understandably so. He has a job and she is nearly bursting. My sister and her partner linger longer. I don’t know if it was because of maternal instincts or because of the free housing they were getting.

I wake up the morning after my sister hugged me and proclaimed that I was the strongest person she knew. I was 18 and legally an adult. The farm was mine by my father’s will, and I was alone in the kitchen studying the map of my inherited domain. The house was silent. Even mice and their mousers stood still in quiet contemplation. I reload the cleaned fertilizer truck with a new batch of pellets. I stop to take my boots off on the mat next to the door and see his boots laying there splayed out.

“Forgot your boots Dad,”

    I feel it coming and I can’t fight it. My chest is a black hole and is pulling the rest of me into it. I drop to my knees and tears gush from my eyes. Wave after wave of emotion pound my conscious being until I’m nothing more than a curled ball on our barn’s cold cement floor. It’s weird crying by yourself. I feel embarrassed for letting my interior break so far out of my exterior, and I have no cue to stop. I pick myself up and wipe off my face with a red handkerchief and find my place in my tractor’s seat whenever the knot in my stomach finally releases me. The fertilizer wheel spins and turns, and when it stops spitting out pellets I get on top and push them down.
    The longest drought since 1984 they say on the news. All of the farmers that are farther from town have already begun to start filling out the paper work to claim their crop as lost to the insurance companies. Some have already begun to mow their useless shriveled corn and soy down, but leaving one lone strip of crop to show the insurance companies that it was indeed the longest drought since 1984. Even walking was kicking up dust that seemed to hang in the air like a beige fog. That was, until you got to our fields. They thrive. The green of our corn is emerald and deep. The soy is thick and you could hardly see any brown between the rows. The companies that had sold us the seed had been out to investigate just how their strain was succeeding in our plots but failing so miserably everywhere else. And I hate it. If the crop had failed I could sell the farm without looking back. I could sell and comfortably say that this chapter in my life had come to a close. I could sell and go to college, get a job in consulting or vegan cooking and spend my days ignoring my family. But it’s winning, the farm, my father, my heritage is winning.

I missed most of the neighbors and corporate agriculture doorbell rings and letters because of college visits. Some in the North, some in the Midwest, some in the West proper. My calloused hands gripping brightly colored folders containing university information, potential for careers, diversity of study and of course the ever-expanding alumni association. My pockets are filled with hard candy and I pop one in right after the one before it disintegrates. My tongue hurts, but I can’t stop. Whenever I get home from these visits I stop to maintain the fields.

I hire hands personally when it comes time to harvest. I pick young men that don’t talk much, and don’t know what happened to my father. The harvest goes quick and I find comfort returning to our barn and seeing that the other tractor is gone. We fill the main silo fast, the second silo even faster, the third is filled the fastest. We stuff feed corn in sheds and the barn’s attic. When the time comes the hands and I load the large trucks that take away all they can carry and come back for more. I’m high, but my father’s debts run deeper. Just wait for another harvest, next one will put me in the green. I know it.

I pause as I walk through the kitchen. The map staring back at me with unblinking red Xs for eyes. The overhead light catches the vibrant colors of candy wrappers and college folders. I look back at the floor. I’m being followed by dark brown tracks. I had forgotten to take off my boots.