Another scene from my story Next.
The air had thawed in the sun and a flock of starlings followed us through a dead cornfield thatched with sagging telephone wires. Above the crisscrossing lines they sang in a swirling vortex the sound of their wings like propellors, their flitting shadows a trembling patchwork over the till of the earth. In the mud the corrugated tracks of some machine had trapped puddles of rainwater and within these the birds circled and the white clouds soared in the looking glass sky. A window to the underground world, rippled by the occasional wind.
By the rusted hull of a pickup truck in the shade of naked elms you had taken off your coat and I sat on the slumping tailgate while you stripped a length of barbed wire from a fence post and wound it around your hand. The metal was brown and brittle and when you had enough you looped the wire around the post and gave it a turn over itself and tugged lightly and it snapped with a twang and the fence shivered loosely.
What’s that for, I asked.
Traps.
You tucked the coil into our pack and sat beside me on the squawking pickup bed. Overhead the starlings lighted on the black branches of the elms and filled the canopy with their quarrelsome calls.
November still, I said.
Yes.
It’s warm today.
Mm.
Warmer.
A quiet laugh cut short as you coughed into your fist. It took longer than usual for you to stop. I waited.
After a ragged breath you wiped your mouth with your sleeve and said Let’s go.
Crossing the last empty plain I watched your shoulders as the birds carpeted the field and feasted on insects surfaced by the rain. Our feet sank in the mud and lifted fragrances from the earth. Wet seedbeds and deeper roots still green. The smell of life waiting dormant beneath the guise of winter.
A world is made many colors by the sun. Under the sailing sky you were every color in perfect pointillism. Torn and patched and stitched with brighter shades underneath, a quilted impression of imagination unbound. When I wake at night in the antiseptic silence from the same vibrant dream I try without success to return to that unseasonably friendly day, the clouds like Alpine mountains caked in snow, the fields freckled with yellow sunlight. I can picture your muddied boots and the imprints slightly wider than mine, slightly farther apart. I can feel the give of the soil and the gentle pull of weeds. But I cannot see you in such color again.
The wind sharpened and the starlings veered and funneled up from the ground over the telephone wires and toward the woods to the east. It was three minutes or more before the last black wings danced past the trees and flickered out of sight. Gauzed in sudden silence the farmland darkened in the umbral reaches of a cloud. There was a dull pain spreading in my leg but I said nothing about it and we continued on into the wild gray woodland alone now save for the cotton white vapors following weightlessly above.
