Ghosts: Has your muse ever seen something they couldn’t explain?
There’s ghosts in the fields of Indiana.
They’re old and they moan and twist, vicious and bloodied in the name of progress. Old families and old houses, eaten by time and by the fields that sprawl on and on. You see them sometimes, standing on the edges of rows-
their clothing tattered, face gaunt.
Sometimes, they have nooses around their necks, despite the tallest tree having been cut down generations ago. Sometimes they look at you from windows and from barn lofts, a feeling of creeping cold you can’t quite shake.
Of being observed, God’s cold touch a soft frost that steals across your skin and takes your breath. He hears them when he’s pitching hay, whispers from cornstalks and hissing from the silk that makes up the tassels. They follow him to the edge of the fields, the noonday sun casting shadows that don’t belong to the rangy boy.
He hears them in his mother’s voice, his father’s laughter- a split second of time that’s there and gone again.
In the wailing of his sister’s cries, newborn and newly bereft.
They follow him from field to field, from war to war- a consistent companion in the best-
and the worst of times.
And when he’s old, tired and aching- the ghost he fell in love with, finds him.
There’s ghosts in the fields of Indiana, but thicker still- are the ghosts that linger in the open edges and torn places of his heart.
@cuiomae @fromtheshadcws
