Everybody smiles in the countryside, as if they can’t smell the distinct and potent reek of fresh shit which fills the air. They exercise their cheeks up and down and up and down, like it is some sort of obscure hobby that they picked up when they were young and haven’t ever been able to let go. Their cheeks are full from their constant use, rosy and made of dough and oblivious to the fact that this hobby has become disconcerting in their continued pursual of it, like a group of adults who still meet up at the park for a weekly game of hide and seek; people in the countryside are a bit like that. They don’t seem to care much about the outside world. They’ll be hiding and seeking with arthritic knees and crow’s feet, wheeling each other down dark paths full of sticks and stones and a lot more safety than the alleyways of the city.
People in the countryside roam the pathways in the mid-morning bearing their pearliest of whites and knock you off balance with statements like good morning which leaves you pondering for the rest of the day if they were right and you just hadn’t noticed. By the evening you’re almost convinced that they were in fact correct but by then it is too late to return the sentiment as they have been busy enjoying the rest of a day which you have wasted standing beside a hedge pondering silly human trivialities like right and wrong.
So the people in the countryside keep smiling and greeting one another as they stop to let someone past on their walk or to cast another line into the river and they pass each other small bouquets of laughter in the form of anecdotes about their dog who just minutes ago tried to drink out of a fast-moving stream, only to slip and dunk his head under the water- what a dope. Oh the hilarity, the excitement, how you wish you could have been there and they pass around smiles and the dog looks up and wags its tail, tongue abandoned down the side of its cheek and smiles a big slabbery, I love you, smile either unaware or amused that it is the subject of hilarity. All it really wants is to join in with them all because dog’s are a man’s best friend- so they say, and maybe we would all be smiling a little more if we spent this much time just walking with our friends in the afternoons instead of grinding our teeth at the sound of our co-worker who insists on hammering the keyboard and spending coffee breaks telling us about reality television show characters as if they were their friends. They never wash the cups either.
And then it rains in the countryside and the people keep on smiling from beneath their hoods and underneath the branches of trees where they watch as the skies open and little streams push acorns down the hill and they say things as you pass like good afternoon as if to tell you that we are not already drowned yet and if it gets really bad then they have a friend who owns a small boat, and you spend the rest of the day pondering silly human trivialities like if you should buy a boat.
And the fishermen smile and continue to throw in their lines and you don’t know if the fish have maybe cottoned on not to eat the worms with the giant hooks in them because none of them seem to be catching anything but also, none of them seem to care and even if they did hook a tiddler they would smile and kiss it goodbye and throw it back into the river to learn not to eat the worm with the hook in it next time, and the fishermen would wave it off and pack their bags and head on home after another successful day.
Still, the people all smile in the countryside with an abundance of white in their eyes like they are supressing a screaming secret inside of their mind like these woods are full of the bodies of unsuspecting city dwellers who followed their sat-nav down the wrong road and were never seen again and everybody in this little village is in on it when they give you directions or suggest obscure and undiscovered beauty spots for you to visit. It looks like there’s no path but just keep going and you’ll find that. Maybe that spring in their step is a tiny jig of excitement as they watch you take another step towards their doom. Probably not.
But still, everybody smiles in the countryside and you can head the wind and the locals as they whistle while walking down the street, whistle a song that gets caught up in your head for the rest of the day and everyone knows everything about this tiny bubble of the world and they all know all about you, they want to know all about you- you exotic piece of meat, you wonder, they want to know what it is that brought you to their tiny little pocket of the world and this brings them joy and they smile when you tell them about things like your city job. What’s their secret? What is this hack for happy that they have found? Surely your mundanities cannot bring such entertainment.
The people all smile in the countryside but maybe they’re not happy-perhaps this is the natural amount of elation that human beings are supposed to exude and all of us cooped up in the city have been too busy masturbating at the walls of our cages and worrying about beating the lunch rush at McDonald’s to realise it.
Because the people all smile in the countryside, as they willingly surround their houses with piles of manure to be cooked by the sun and caught by the wind and delivered fresh to their doors, or their bedroom windows where they take a long and lasting hit deep down into their lungs and hold it there for a moment before they exhale and as they do, they smile. While all of us worry about silly human trivialities, like the smell of shit.
Everybody smiles in the countryside, there must be something in the air.
2087
titsay
vaporwave
andulkaphoto
stormborns
yousharknotpass
janainaart
