That Day
I see my sister — the youngest — the one who waits for me.
I see her discontentment rising and the inkling of fear that blossoms within.
I see her drive aggressively, leaving the place where I am not, but should be.
She takes the road that is not a road,
the dirt path lined with sunflowers that smile and wave at me.
Their tall stalks stand sturdy in the wind.
They, like me, will soon lie twisted in the sun.
I didn’t see it coming.
I didn’t understand the magnitude of its force.
Please forgive me.
We live on the Saskatchewan prairies surrounded by undulating waves of wheat in the summer and the same waves of snow in the winter. The beauty of this flat land is something that I love and will long for.
My family farm sits amid a tall stand of trees four miles northeast of here. The road home looks like this: Head straight east until you hit the grid that travels north and south between Richardson and Kronau. Take a left and enter the “S” curve where the gravel twists away from you in both directions. When the path straightens out, take your first right. This is our private access, half a mile long, and when the lane curves to the left, the house and the yard will present themselves to you. There is a dip in the lane at the point where the barbed wire fence reaches out to touch the ditch on the right side. If it has rained recently, this low-lying part of the road will be consumed by a large puddle and there will be deep, rutted tire tracks veering to the right and the left. You will see the pine posts from this vantage point as they follow the banks of the creek bed on both sides in an orderly manner — they confine the space where our horses roam. My sister Sandy, the one who wanted to be a cowgirl, strung most of that wire and hammered the u-shaped fencing nails with the determination of a hired hand.
A quarter mile from the grid, the rows of caraganas begin. These bushy, fast growing trees are the choice for many farmers who attempt to divert the wind and the snow. At the approach road that enters the wheat fields to your left and your right, you will see the woodpile. Beyond the orderliness of the stacked and aligned wood lies the horse graveyard. The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out. There are sinkholes where their bodies rest, as the earth has succumbed to their decay. Buried six feet deep. I say their names: Pal, Chief, Raider, Summer…
Where will my parents place me to rest? Will the weight of the burden I have placed on them ever allow them to forgive me?
Follow the fence line, and you will see all the farming equipment spaced evenly and parked just so. I know each of the implements, the tractors, the swather, the combine. I know the sound of the tractor starting up on a crisp fall morning, my breath visible before me. I breathe it in deeply. Surrounding me is the beauty and the peacefulness of a life in the country. It fills me up inside, for I am a farm boy at heart.
The world has been muted.
I have left my anatomy and departed with my soul.
I hear things, but for now I am unable to process them.
My brain sits battered and bleeding in the fractured skull below me.
My mind is not my own.
But, my spirit, my inner being, my life force is.
My life flashes before me on a mini screen inside my mind — the reel winding tighter and tighter.
The frames keep flashing glimpses of a nineteen-year-old blond haired boy with dimples.
Me.
Interspersed with episodic glances of a crumpled car and a corpse.
Splicing the reel to the unreal.
The farm is my Heaven. It represents a simplicity that can only be expressed in sensory responses to the uncomplicated. I feel immense joy at the sound of a tractor chugging away on a hot summer day, straining against the pull of the shovels digging deep in the ground. The simple pleasure I feel when I see my mom carrying a thermos and cooler, walking out toward me in the field with a sandwich, some pickles, an iced tea, and homemade cookies (has to be homemade with my mom). I am thick with dirt and hot and sweaty, but the taste of that simple offering is as pure a pleasure as I can conjure up in my mind. The pride I feel when I see my dad take on the work of ten men and never complain. The gratitude I have for my three sisters — Bonny, Sandy, and Tricia — who allowed me to be the favorite without complaint. The affinity I feel for animals that wag their tails and lick your face every single time they see you. My friend Chris, who has known me since kindergarten and will extend his friendship to include my parents and sisters when I am gone.
My dad is a wheat farmer who works harder than most and expects the same from his offspring. He is a man of few words. He would tell you that there is no such word as “can’t” and that hard work can produce anything you want. He would also tell you that having children is the most important thing that you will do in your life. He loves the country, the fresh air, the open spaces, and the hard work that it demands. He approaches any task with the determination and the work ethic of a Clydesdale. He stands tall in judgement and short in praise. He is the man who complains about the barn cats being under foot, but when you encounter him in the quonset alone, the cats are on the workbench, tails curled tightly about “henning” bodies, noses in the task at hand and my dad’s calloused hands lightly touching arching backs. My dad will never fully recover from what I did today.
I was only three years old when my dad tore down the old barn and built the quonset in its place, a massive building to house farm machinery. There is a picture of me sitting on one of the tires of the old Minnie tractor. My face is filthy, like I had been eating dirt, and there in the background are the rafters being raised. The term barn raising is when a community comes together to build a farmer’s barn, in this case it was a quonset, but the concept is still the same. My mom baked a huge pot of chili, there was garlic toast and coleslaw and pickles and beer. One at a time, the rafters were elevated against a clear blue sky, arches that formed the sides and the roof.
The quonset is a huge building and when I think of it, I think of my dad. As long as I can remember, he rose in the dark, a habit I thought he would never be able to break. I always imagined that even well into his retirement he would still be getting up before daybreak. When I was older, I often accompanied him, walking briskly across the expansive yard, the splendor of a sunrise ahead of us in the east. He always wore a pair of oversized coveralls and his hands with hardened skin were dug deeply into his pockets. His steps were quick and he always seemed to be in a hurry.
He will leave the farm like me one day and never come back.
Neither one of us would have ever expected that.
My mom is a farm girl through and through, happiest with her hands in the dirt, the dogs resting in the shade of the trees around her. She is at her best when she is doing something for someone else; she oozes selflessness. Each morning the horses whinny to her, calling for carrots and bran mash, which she obediently delivers. She is the only one who doesn’t ride, but the horses respect her just the same. To watch this petite woman amongst the slayers of the quarter mile is heartwarming. They paw at the earth, they root at her pockets; the biggest, the palomino, places his head on her shoulder — such tenderness, such admiration.
My mom is small in stature, but a strong and capable woman on the inside. She has been referred to as a “tough old farm girl” by my seven-year-old nephew and quite honestly, the portrait fits. She has not worked outside of the home for thirty years, but she can whip up a puppy Halloween costume right now if you change your mind about trick or treating; she can drive a three-ton truck like a champ; and she can infuse you, her child, with so much love that you feel buoyant. Her happiness depends on her children’s. We are lifted and floating like balloons in the sky. She is our anchor. She walks beneath us, smiling, ready to catch us if we fall, holding tightly to the strings, releasing us a little when we are ready to venture farther.
And suddenly, SLICE.
The string is cut on one of the balloons.
It rises up and up.
She can’t reach it, she can’t help it, she can’t live without it.
She lets go of the other three and clutches the limp string in her hand.
I have three sisters, all of whom are older than me. Two, Bonny and Sandy, have left the family farm to build their own lives, and the third, Tricia, is a university student like I was. I was on my way to meet her when it happened. Tricia and I shared the same parking pass and when we didn’t travel to school together, we had a plan to meet in the parking lot for the parking pass trade-off.
I didn’t ever use my seatbelt until I got to the highway.
These dirt paths that define the patchwork quilt of farmland that I lived on are the fastest route to the city, and I liked to drive fast.
I saw it at the last second.
The blur of green and brown, of headlights, the GMC logo, a silver grill.
I tried to brake.
Its size enormous,
its weight unstoppable.
It was transporting grain from a farm outside Balgonie.
Another teenager sat in the driver’s seat.
I should have cranked the steering wheel away from it.
I would have rolled, but might have lived.
He was going too fast.
So was I.
My youngest sister Tricia and I are very close. Our bedrooms are directly across the hall from each other. She has grown up hearing me snore each night and I have grown up accustomed to her plugging my nose and mouth to make me stop. She is funny as hell and my dad is harder on her than he needs to be. Today she will lose so much of who she is. Goodbye carefree, goodbye hopeful, goodbye sister.
Tricia is still waiting for me.
She parks her car and runs inside to call home.
My dad answers.
“Is Jarett there, Dad?”
“No, but he didn’t leave that long ago. Give him some more time.”
This morning my mom and I spent the early hours crushing peppers for her to put in her homemade salsa. Picture me, six-foot-six, at the counter beside my five-foot-two mom — I smile at the thought. My mom single-handedly plants and maintains a garden that would fill a food pantry. She lovingly pickles and cans and preserves. This will be her last harvest. The jars in the root cellar will still sit on the shelves when my sisters sell the farm a few years from now.
I can hear my voice as I leave — Bye mom — And the sound of the door closing on my existence.
I left her with a smile and a wave and the heat of crushed peppers on my hands.
It is a magnificent fall day. A beauty. The path that brought me to where I am now is uneventful and as everyday as every day can be. Tricia left early this morning to get to her classes. I followed shortly after, but I will never become anything as a result of my education — a doctor, a lawyer, a farmer. I will, however, be the cause of my youngest sister’s personal ruination.
My death will sever her heart and soul.
She will see the accident first.
She will come undone.
We met at the intersection.
I just a little before him.
I came from the east.
He came from the north.
My dad left the farm this morning after sharing a pot of coffee with my mom. He was off to Kronau, the small town where we get our mail, and then to the city to get the oil changed in his diesel truck. My parents drink 2.5 cups of coffee each and every morning together. This will be the last of their morning rituals that feels the calmness of a new day breaking. The parental bond they share will be severed today. A life they created together will rip them apart when it sits in an urn in their closet.
My dad is the proud father of only one son.
I will take that from him today.
My oldest sister, Bonny, busies herself with the mission of getting two elementary kids off to school. Lunch boxes, signed permission slips, and “Don’t forget your sweaters!” She drinks tea because the caffeine in coffee is too damaging to her Zen-ness. She doesn’t believe in vaccinations, or x-rays or medication.
She believes that what will be, will be.
She does not worry about things that haven’t happened yet.
My middle sister, Sandy, lives far from us in Boston.
She rises early to get to the gym and then hustles off to work.
She will be the last to know.
The poison will seep quickly into the matter of her brain.
Paranoia and anxiety will reside there.
She will suffer my loss throughout all the days of her life.
In her mind, death begets death.
The next opportunity that my family will have to see me will be at the morgue. They will be advised not to identify me, as I will be too fucked up to look at. They will take the officer’s advice, but grapple with the decision until they find themselves in the morgue. We snivel at the monotonous tasks that stupefy us day in and day out, again and again, but long for them in the face of tragedy. Oh how my family will yearn for the humdrum day.
Point of impact.
Red shards from my Taurus suspended against the blue of the sky.
Blood red.
A lifetime of blue.
Steel buckles, absorbing a life; plastic shatters, stealing hope; aluminum crumples and whines in pain; glass fractures, breaking a family in pieces.
On impact my head led the way through the windshield and my body followed.
I see my corpse lying on the hood of my car.
I see the glass and the blood and the broken bones.
The red liquid that circulates through my veins and arteries creates a kaleidoscope of color on the hot metal where my body stopped.
I see the distortion and elongation of bone and muscle.
I feel nothing.
I see the driver of the semi walk over to me.
He is a mess at seeing how fucked up I am.
I see him walk painfully toward the nearest house.
I know that house.
It sits beside the house of my best friend since kindergarten, Chris.
A nurse, well versed in applying pressure to stop the bleeding, mobilization, BP’s, head trauma, setting broken bones, and saving lives, lives there.
She cannot help me.
I was dead before the other driver reached the house.
I am nineteen years old.
Primary impact — car meets semi.
Secondary impact — my organs collide with the front of my body.
Tertiary impact — my organs slam into the back of my body.
And back and forth my innards bounce.
I am alone.
I am surrounded by fields.
Sunflower, wheat, flax, and oats.
I am not aware of how much time has passed.
A first responder from the small town of Kronau arrives.
He is the father of a girl I am friends with.
An ambulance from the city arrives next.
They will make my death official.
They radio it in — Code 5.
It’s that simple.
A life has ended.
No one who cares knows.
There is death all around me and I am acutely aware of its presence. There are grasshopper guts smattered against the GMC grill that drilled into me at about 110 km per hour. A collage of shapes: heads, wings, abdomens, and legs. Crunchy exoskeletons unable to protect them from the trauma they endured. Fifty feet from where I lay is a dead gopher — road kill — like me. A hawk sits on an abandoned building two hundred yards from here. I watch it take off from its perch, ascending rapidly, wings furiously flapping, then floating on feathers outstretched in the sky. It searches for movement, a sign of life. Again and again it descends aggressively. I am certain that each time it will slam into the earth, but it never does. It lands with such precision on its prey that I am bewitched to watch the ritual of death. Three times it soars from the fields, barely touching down, with a squirming ball of fur clutched in its prehistoric talons. I watch with uneasiness the tiny outstretched claws of two field mice and the thumping pink paw pads of a baby bunny grasping at the air as they rise and rise.
Tricia calls home again.
My mom answers.
“Jarett still isn’t here, Mom.”
“Well, he left an hour ago, about twenty minutes before your dad. I am sure he is on his way. Just wait a little longer.”
Tricia and my parents think that my car has broken down and that I am stranded on the side of the road somewhere. I drive a piece of shit car, so that explanation is reasonable. I am also a pretty good mechanic, so I can fix most problems, at least temporarily.
The farm will mutate today into something ugly.
It will become the place that I am not.
I am the heartbeat of the land and I am too big a part of every particle of dirt that they walk on. They will see me everywhere.
They will see my lifeless body just up the road.
My dad will act as if he is cultivating me into the ground each time he enters the field to work the land. Each swath of the wheat will render him powerless to my absence.
Every furrow closer to the demise he secretly longs for.
The seeding in the spring will not bring promise and new growth, but rather drudgery and resentment. The fields will soon be filled with weeds. Fast growing, unwanted plants that will suck the life from the farm, as I have done to my family. The coroner has arrived and he orders a post-mortem examination. I died suddenly of unnatural causes and I am nineteen years old, so my body will undergo an investigation that requires gutting me like a pig at the slaughter. The pathologist will determine the cause of my death and whether or not I was drunk or high. I was neither.
They are taking my body away now.
I leave the site in an ambulance.
No sirens.
No urgency.
My car sits mangled at two intersecting dirt roads. The one I was travelling on will take you to Highway 33 and the other will take you to White City to the north and Chris’ farm to the south. My red Taurus rests in stark contrast to the beast that killed me — a semi-tractor trailer filled with grain. It is fitting that I am the son of a wheat farmer and that the hardened kernels I have planted and harvested throughout my days rained down on me as I died.
Tricia couldn’t wait any longer.
Her questions about where I am will be answered very soon.
My dad has left Kronau with the mail.
He takes route 33 straight into the city.
He passes Tricia headed in the other direction.
She waves, but he doesn’t see her.
Goodbye father of four.
They are less than a mile from where I died.
My youngest sister turns east off the highway and I can see the wake of dust that billows behind her. The dry prairie dirt turned to powder from the lack of rain. She drives faster than she should, the dread coursing through her veins. She is vaguely aware of the coming change that will knock her on her ass and pin her down. It is unlike me to not arrive on time. She is angry at me because it is the only emotion she has right now, angry because she is scared, angry because she has a foreboding feeling. She knows the road I take to get to the city and she returns home that way, hoping to find me broken down on the side of the road with a flat tire. The closer she gets to the farm, the more panic stricken she becomes. She needs me to be. She waited as long as she could. The fear descending through her body, her thoughts unstable, hobbling her movements and her mind, the ground feeling unsafe, like loose wet sand giving way to the weight of her thoughts, yielding easily, sucking her in. All she could do was drive home and hope to find me en route. The path she takes will lead her to me.
Neither my mom nor my dad are currently overcome with the same worry that devours Tricia. Being completely unfamiliar with the parking at the university and having never participated in our foolproof system, their responses of, Just look around, he is there somewhere, don’t help to calm Tricia’s mind. I am glad that my parents’ thoughts are so devoid of distress right now, because soon, those optimistic notions will be pried from their minds by ratchets and pulleys and chains.
Tricia crosses the railway tracks that run perpendicular to the highway.
She will be the first to see it.
She sees a fire truck, police cars, and numerous other vehicles.
Mostly she sees a mangled red car.
My car.
I see the red brake lights.
I see her heart slam into her chest.
It stops.
I see her running toward the chaos.
Four seconds of hope — He is at the hospital.
Police officers are pushing her backwards.
She is screaming.
“That’s my brother’s car. Where is my brother?”
One police officer kindly says, “I’m sorry.”
Two police officers are physically restraining her.
“Is he okay?”
No answer.
“Take me to my brother.”
She knows.
She flails and she fights them, lashing out and screaming because I didn’t come to her.
I tried, but I didn’t make it.
My mom is at home vacuuming.
She gave up her career for pablum and diapers, homemade costumes and curtains. The quintessential mom who suddenly doesn’t like pie when there is only one piece left. A woman who takes pride in her home and washes her floors on her hands and knees.
She does not hear the banging on the door.
I don’t want her to hear it.
But teenage death takes no prisoners. It will plough through that fucking door and effortlessly squeeze the breath from her lungs, immobilize her heart and mash her petite being onto the floor like a bug.
Don’t open the door, Mom.
My dad demands respect above all things. He could never be accused of not practicing what he preaches. He completes no job “half-assed.” His motto, if he had one, would be, “If you are going to do a job, do it right the first time, or don’t do it at all.” In the city that surrounds him, police officers search the local oil change shops for the man who drives the silver Silverado, license plate ANS 209. They start in the east because he entered the city on that side.
My dad sits at the Jiffy Lube where he waits for his oil change to be complete. He would normally do the task himself, but with all there is to do on the farm right now, he opts for the 20-minute service. You can hear the employees yelling short, informative phrases to each other as they empty the oil and then add the new. All clear on two. The chairs are utilitarian, with metal frames and orange vinyl seats, built for sturdiness and ease of care. Draining four. The air is heavy with grease and oil, which mixes with burnt coffee from the machine in the corner. Filling two. There is a basket under the table with obsolete toys for the kids and some outdated gossip magazines for the adults. Starting engine three.
I see the police officer approach the counter to inquire about the now sonless man. My dad thinks his name has been called because the oil change is complete.
“Are you Dennis Speers of Kronau?”
“Yes,” replies the six-foot man who will soon seem small to all.
I see them go outside where the news of my accident will cripple the man I respect and emulate. I see my dad stumble and fall.
I look away.
I struggle with how this can all be playing out before me and I have no way of interjecting myself into the scene.
The shock shackles me.
Observing from above baffles me.
My heightened senses overwhelm me.
The black, bagged bodies don’t enter the hospital through the emergency. There are obscure doors around the backside for cadavers like me. As we pass by, I longingly stare at an ambulance with red flashing lights. I let my physical body go on without me. I am drawn to the sounds and the colors and the promise, the siren dissecting me with its spinning reverberation, the swirling, the headiness, blood red blazes of light ripping into me, parsing life and death, alive and dead, here and gone. I want my body to go through those doors. I watch other people’s families and I see the fear in their eyes, but I also see hope. Hope because they went through those doors. There is so much to offer inside — code blue, clear the airway, take him to the operating room, apply pressure, scalpel, suction — I want to have a chance too. I want to give my family more than a telephone call, a knock on the door, a policeman with the news of their worst nightmare. But life has slammed the book shut on my being and all of the characters in my story will soon lie flattened between the empty pages.
I return to see my body again.
Rigor mortis has started to creep in.
My joints and muscles are stiffening.
Rendering my escape impossible.
Three out of five family members now know that they will never see me again. My mom is at home with a female police officer — bewildered, mournful, shrunken. Tricia is being physically carried from the accident scene and my dad is being driven home from the city — a limp, lamenting man in the back of a police cruiser. All alone when they were told of my fate. They will collapse on top of each other just inside of the mahogany front door with the lion knocker and the brass plate that says D. E. SPEERS. The police officers will look away at the sight of so much pain.
What have I done?
How the fuck did this happen?
They call the eldest first, Bonny. She gathers her children, her wits, and enough clothing for at least a week. Her husband steadies and guides her. The anguish circles her, stalking her mental acuity. They drive the six hours in a blur, the children seated in the back with their educational toys to occupy them. Nothing plastic, nothing suggestive of perfect body types, and nothing gender specific. Bonny is an educator and she takes every opportunity to teach a lesson with numbers and letters and shapes. Always imparting wisdom, I have seen her make a lesson plan out of sledding down the creek banks in the winter. Crouching beside her children, she talks of friction and weight mass and gravity. She never uses baby talk, but rather, speaks to them as she would to an adult. She never adopted the cutesy names of bubbas or doo doos for all of the baby paraphernalia. There is no dumbing it down here. A baby bottle is a baby bottle, a blanket is a blanket, and a death is a death.
They will tell my sister Sandy in Boston last. They let the day squeeze the life from them while she lives on in blissful ignorance. They won’t call her at work. They will wait until she is home and her husband is present. Many hours have passed. I died around 10 a.m. and it is now close to 4 p.m. How must that have felt for them, knowing that Sandy was smiling and laughing and still living life? My dad struggles to find the strength to tell the one who started worrying as a young child and has never stopped… He understands what this will do to her and how it will validate all that consumes her mind. Worry will cripple her now. It will take her hostage, it will fester, it will bloom. I watch as Tricia and my dad stand at the phone in the quonset and dial the number. My dad states to his youngest now, “We will need to be strong.”
It’s ringing.
My dad longs for the ringing to keep ringing.
Click.
Sandy’s husband answers.
My dad asks to speak to my sister in the voice of a man who struggles to make the call — monotone, quaking words, stretching syllables to stall.
Her husband thinks nothing of it, even though my dad has never called their home.
He yells for his wife upstairs, not saying who is on the other end.
Sandy picks up.
She hears our dad’s voice and knows something is wrong.
No prelude to what is coming.
No intro, no explanation, no laying it out gently.
“There has been an accident. Your brother is dead.”
Sandy drops the phone and screams.
My dad and Tricia know that her heart beats to a new rhythm now.
They know what she wishes for.
Stop breathing and you will feel nothing.
The death of me — the young, the vibrant, the promising — rips into them again and again.
The pathologist cuts my clothing from my stiff remains. He starts with an external examination, noting unique identifiers. He will write in his report that I have a pencil lead mark under my left eye where Chris stabbed me when we were eight years old. When the gory shit begins — the cutting and the sawing — I leave. I return to find all of my organs in metal bowls. I watch as the medical examiner holds my heart in his hands and I weep as only the dead can weep — dry, paroxysmal whimpering that those blessed with life cannot hear or ever comprehend. I force my dead self to watch the process of examination that each of my inner body parts goes through. There is the making of a profound “SPEED KILLS” commercial in all that I see. I read the notes detailing which parts of me were damaged when my body crushed the steering wheel and the dashboard and when my head shattered the windshield. I wonder how all of the organs will fit back into my body. There is no attempt to return them to their rightful positions. Like meat at the deli, the pathologist piles them in haphazardly: a liver, two kidneys, intestines, a spleen, a bowel, a stomach, two lungs, and the heart that I loved with. They sew me shut and complete the paper work. I have been released for burial or cremation.
My mom calls one person — her only brother.
His exact words, “I don’t know what I can do for you, Joan.”
His words speak volumes for his future actions.
Next stop. Embalming.
The embalmer pulls me from a refrigerated drawer. I am covered with a sheet, which I am grateful for, as I keep returning to my body. I can’t stop myself. I am in a state of shock. Can that really be me on that table? He cleans my body with a disinfectant spray and then makes an incision in my armpit to find an artery so he can inject the formaldehyde. As it courses through my body, I watch as the death grey color fades and my body plumps up. Very sci-fi. Finally, my blood will be suctioned from my body. There will be no attempts to create a life-like peaceful look on my battered face. My parents saw me for the last time this morning.
Sandy is pacing. I watch as she fidgets and twitches in agitation.
The shock is setting in.
She is alone, as her husband runs next door to the good doctor who he hopes will sedate her. Numb the fucking mind and all will be well.
Sandy will resent from the start that he tried to drug her.
She will resent that he tried to lessen her pain with narcotics.
She still has that prescription bottle.
None of the pills are missing.
She was brave that way.
My mom takes the pills 2,500 miles away.
She needs them to anesthetize the truth.
I am her only son.
I am her hope and her future and her strength.
She is a woman in her fifties who life has left alone on the farm.
The wandering husband, the two grown children with lives of their own to lead and two more at home making strides in the direction of the door.
She left her teaching career as an eager young parent and now she finds that everyone is leaving her.
I didn’t mean to leave her like this.
Sandy sits alone on the floor of her closet in Boston.
Black garments burying her in her own grave.
Her husband sleeps soundly.
Tricia pulls all of her being into herself.
The transformation begins.
Twisting and turning, she flips inside out.
She emerges not as a butterfly, but as a vulture.
She has already begun to gnaw at herself in the name of guilt: Why not me?
She will devour all that she was before I left her.
Bonny is almost home.
My dad walks like a zombie through the yard.
He must keep moving or the stillness will swallow him whole.
The silence is deafening at night on the farm.
He listens for the sound of a car approaching beyond the trees.
The red Taurus with the muffler that needs replacing.
My body rests on a cold metal slab at the morgue.
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