by Anne Howkins
All day her voice has been in his head, niggling that harvest’s not over until the grain store’s swept.
Now he’s struggling to slide the huge doors open and letting the desolation draw him in, instinctively ducking as the last of the swallows skim past, screaming their objection to his presence. Late brood, he thinks, should be gone by now. He trudges through barley remains, raising a cloud of dust which fills his throat with decay, sets off his cough.
Before, there were golden years when mountains of barley piled high behind the sleeper-wall dam. Then the lean years when they relied on the bank manager’s goodwill to keep the farm going. Years when the St Swithin’s day rain kept falling until the fortieth day had come and gone, and the house sat like an ark above the floods; the barley grains soft things a child could crush between his fingers, the swallows lucky to raise a single brood. The heatwave years – every creature looking for shade and water, crops dried to a crisp; the barley grains popping empty in his hand and her wretchedness as heat-exhausted birds fell from the sky like feathered baubles.
Now, he picks up her old besom broom, mutters yes, I’m doing it. The mouldy dust settles in his throat—he pats his jacket pocket for the inhaler she’d foisted on him, remembers it sitting on the kitchen table. Every movement pulls at his chest; each new ache merging with the bigger ache, the one he can’t brush away.
Before, when the debris wasn’t left to fester for months, they’d have done the job together, shoulder to shoulder, the way a man and wife should be. He’d chide her for weeping over the little piles of feathers and beaks, the chicks that fell not flew; she’d say it had been a poor year for the swallows, even if it was part of the cycle of life. Never mind the poor years for the two of them, always the wildlife with her.
Before, there was a broken-winged bird, flapping over a golden mountain towards its nest, and a tractor wheel-nut to be tightened before he went to answer her shout.
Now, her voice is louder—he sees her face, reaches for her hand to break his fall. He wants to ask why she forgot about the cruelty of a grain mountain, how it could swallow a person, but he’s no breath left to say anything.
Anne lives near Nottingham, UK. Trying to assemble words into something meaningful is what she does when not sitting about prevaricating, or being stupidly busy. Bluesky @anneh23.bsky.social
Featured image Ylanite Koppens at pexels-nietjuhart-8545774
