i ended up turning this into a pilot, but found the beginnings of prose, a book, or something, in an old folder on my laptop. thought i’d share.
The way a field of barley sounds as wind passes through it, hushed yet vast, it could be mistaken for rain. The drizzle of cool April mornings, close your eyes and you can sense it, maybe. The way small birds chirp and dip through the mist, the smell of wet concrete and gravel, lush. You can sense it, but it takes concentration. Think rain as you mute out the oppressive summer heat, the bugs seeking shelter in the shadows of your ears, the sun radiating white through your eyelids, the work that needs to be done. The endless work. You have to concentrate, but by then, usually, the feeling of rain is gone.
The day’s chores -- the heat and weight of them -- are blunted by thoughts of worse case scenarios. Not worst -- that has either already passed, or eventually will come -- but just an image that makes the oven-like atmosphere feel manageable by comparison. At least it’s not cicada season, as the sickle meets the barley’s dry stem. At least those flying maggots aren’t falling from the fucking sky.
Or: At least the blisters have healed. At least the goat stew didn’t keep me up last night. At least rot didn’t get to this harvest. At least I am alive.
He remembers in school misspelling the crop’s name. Barely, he would write, the word then circled in red by a teacher, whose name he has tried to remember for the last several months but cannot summon. Awake on certain hot nights, sheets damp with the body’s lazy sweat, trying to piece back together a life once lived, partly out of boredom, partly out of survival. Trying to recall a second grade teacher’s name. She had short salt-and-pepper hair, cropped to her earlobes. She always wore a knit shawl, a chunky, plastic necklace. But her name.
Thwack. The sickle passes through barley.
What does it matter now? Does she need a name anymore? It’s been three weeks since he spoke to anyone, eight since he heard his own name, but these are loose figures. Time used to be measured in such short, specific intervals -- seconds, minutes, dragging on, twenty minutes till landing creeping to fifteen, tray tables in their up and locked position at a tediously slow pace. Files taking minutes to download on computers, and that seeming like an affront. Staring at a spinning microwave plate. The entitlement, he sometimes thinks. Now, noon is gauged by shadows, and night simply unfurls itself until dawn fades it away. A back and forth, a quiet rhythm. Arbitrary boundaries once drawn across the day have dissolved and now it’s the sun, pacing across the sky in silence, and a sickle gathering rust.
Thwack. A fly has nestled itself in his beard, resting.
People used to make patterns in these crops. This crosses his mind one day in the late afternoon, loading another barley haul in a cart, inspecting the harvested portion of the field. At night, people would sneak into the crop fields with a rope and board, pressing cereal flat against the land. Beautiful circles, visible only from overhead, would emerge. Patterns radiating out from a central point, jaws agape at the wondrous visual, immediate rumors of aliens marking the earth with messages from another world.
There came a point, right before the Great Chasm, when he wondered why aliens were no longer en vogue. Where did all the UFO sightings go? Crop circles? Abduction stories? High speed internet and cell phones and social media brought with them the death of mystery, an almost immediate debunking of anything supernatural. He realized he missed the days when a bizarre occurrence could take hold of the public’s imagination for more than an hour before being stamped out as a hoax. We’ve become less concerned with watching extraterrestrial beings, he jotted down on a laptop now long gone, and more concerned with watching each other. Instead of looking up, we look down. Screens and buttons and pixels. He felt preachy the moment he reread the words back to himself. And when was the last time he saw a pixel? Things like this cross his mind. At least it’s not cicada season.
Thwack. It was the kind of thinking that got him into this situation, anyway. Preaching.
But the teacher. Her name. He once heard that neural connections are like railroad tracks, never vanishing, merely falling out of use. Weeds and plant life grow over them as trains take different routes, other journeys through the mind deemed more useful, more routine. Things worth remembering. Thwack. The neurons perhaps still reach out toward one another deep within his skull, a suspended animation of thought, waiting to be called upon again. His teacher’s name could still exist, covered in daisy weed. He just has to search hard enough. He has to put in the work.
What the fuck was her name? His mind strains.
And what about those other railroad tracks, the ones crowded with impulsive thought? How do you let those fall out of use?
He wipes his brow. The sun is descending into orange. Fuck it. Wheels the barrow toward the barn, heads inside. It’s getting late, anyway.
His home was once rented out for vacationers. This was long before he arrived, of course, long before the small country home fell into decay, back when light switches functioned and the floors gleamed with wax and children slept upstairs. He found this out only upon discovering a crinkled sheet of paper tucked away in a cobwebbed kitchen cabinet. On it, a list of polite requests: No additional guests without prior notice. Throw out perishables before leaving. The master bathroom shower head is tricky, you have to pull on the faucet out, then press up hard. Strip the sheets and leave in the laundry room when you depart. Wifi password is BigSky4545. We have HBO.
He doesn’t bother going upstairs. Too much space, too much upkeep, might as well be an attic at this point. Cats and rodents use the rooms as shelter during cold winters, a miniature ecosystem where toddlers once learned to brush their teeth, their parents fucking quietly when they could get away with it, when they could find the time. He can hear the animals scurrying around upstairs at night, the sound like marbles rolling across uneven floor. If he claps his hands loudly enough, they stop, but mostly he lies in bed listening, a brief respite from silence.
Too tired to wash his clothes, he hangs his sweat-soaked shirt on a hook to dry near the front door, prepares a dinner of dried beef and root vegetables. As the sun dips under the horizon, he lights a kerosene lamp and wanders to his bedroom -- once the home’s den -- and picks up from his nightstand a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar from the ‘90s. The pages are yellowed, corners curling with age. He opens the calendar to February -- a beautiful blonde glancing over her shoulder, ocean water splashing in the air, thong bikini pulled high up on her hips -- and masturbates with the perfunctoriness of muscle memory recalled but moment forgotten. Tracks never laid. It simply needs to get done. Calendar squares beneath the model are marked with small notes from someone’s past: meeting with Elaine; termite inspection; Jeff L.’s birthday; 10:30am teeth cleaning.
After cleaning up, he pulls out the scanner radio. The antenna has been rigged with foil and tape, an effort to keep the sputtering device alive. Dials under “squelch” and “volume,” a series of buttons with orange-lit digits, one through ten. The kerosene lamp glows nearby. He turns on the scanner, places his head in his hands, and waits.
Static, hushed yet vast, washes over the sound of crickets outside. The scanner searches. Fifteen minutes, then twenty, but he can’t be sure, he isn’t counting. He sits still, listening, until he cannot anymore. That’s his mandate, self-imposed.
Amid tonight’s static, it arrives uneventfully: Annabelle. Her name was Ms. Annabelle. The second grade teacher, discreetly using hand sanitizer in the middle of class, demonstrating cursive handwriting on the board. Did she live long enough to be forced to choose? Did she see any of this? He prays, for some reason, that she didn’t, imagining her with a banging on her front door, when the confiscations began. Something about her affect, or maybe it was the hand sanitizer fixation, not strong enough for such change.
But then again, who was? Bravado and idealism only carried you so far back then; shout the message till your vocal chords cracked, a fist flying through the air, but everyone was eventually reduced.
He slides into his bed, beneath an old quilt, and turns off the lamp. Or maybe she chose the New Way. Maybe she’s in there now, washing her hands. Happy.
The scanner continues to exhale next to him, hunting in the empty night.
