Exactly What You Run From

The day was a simple one like any other:

Wake up and groggily make the short trek to the well just outside the gate, then bring that water back, take a long swig, and fix some bread with goat cheese for breakfast.

Tend to the sheep and then the goats, weed the garden and search each leaf for bugs or eaten spots.

Fix a small lunch and start new bread baking for dinner and breakfast the next morning.

 

If it were a market day, the rusting old sedan might roll out of the gates in front of the farmhouse, puff down the long dirt driveway, and eventually come to rest in town, where simple wool yarn, and sometimes yams, would be sold out of the trunk in exchange for small change and foodstuffs.

But it was not a market day, so the wheels lay idle.

 

It was a day for shearing, however:

Line each sheep up in a row and slowly work through the masses until the slitted eyes stared back at the man to whom the home belonged, not from fluffy and warm bodies, but strange naked ones, tufts of wool still clinging to their rough skin.

 

Gather up all the wool into bundles and carry it to the shed, careful to place it on the tarp instead of the rough dirt as the rocks and grit may damage the wool. Best to keep it on a smooth surface until it can be spun.

 

Next, it was time to milk the goats. Grab the stool and the pail from the shelf in the shed, the rickety one he’d built when he first came here so many months ago. He was still green in this life after all.

 

Milk a goat and bring the pail back inside to the ancient cast iron stove, seemingly just as old as the land itself. Get a fire going and start a stew with the bits and pieces of last night's meal. Yams, spices he’d bought from the market, scraps of mutton.

 

As he sat down though, the routine became irrelevant. Tires on the long dirt road, not rickety or clunky like his neighbor's tractor that had scared him so terribly the first night, but crisp, new wheels. They came to a stop and the man abandoned the stew on the stove, the fire illuminating the room in a warm orange as the sun dipped below the horizon. Bright white streamed from the crack beneath the door and from the window.

 

Stoop down low, near the bed. Pry desperately at the floorboard that lay loose when he’d first come to the one room house so far out in the prairie it’d never be searched.

 

Voices whispered in harsh, hushed tones outside. He could barely hear them but he knew what they meant. Any neighbor of his would have knocked by now.

 

Fumble with the zipper on the duffle collecting dust under the floorboards. Take hold of the cold metal barrel inside.

 

Quiet footsteps fanned out around the house, covering every angle, checking every exit. The soup on the stove cooked silently, though the milk started to scorch in the bottom of the pot, filling the house with an unpleasant aroma. The warm orange light fought desperately for priority over the cold illuminating headlights, but it flickered and faded in the face of the headlights luminosity. The fire burned on, but the light of the room was white and tense.

 

Check the load on the rifle, a sound surely audible to those outside the house. Take careful aim at the doorway. 

 

Tense moments passed, and as the stew started to boil, the bullets started flying. It didn’t take long.

 

The vehicle drove off and the house burned to the ground— no one ever put out the fire. The sheep ran free and the goats scattered at the sight of flame.

 

The ashes left little— just the foundation, the pot that had held the stew (almost all of it had poured out through the bullet hole that pierced the pot), the sedan, and the old cast iron stove, as ancient and imposing as ever.

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