Their barn had been nailed tight at right angles, the beams planed, hinges oiled, hay raked. It once rested in a tended field, spring green from the windmill’s well water clear and deep. Apple trees in their orchard bloomed fulsome.

Then she was gone.

In time the barn’s beams swayed in decay, his attentions distant, his eyes vacant.  Doors hung askew on rusted bolts, stalls echoed emptiness through wormed wood, and mice entered sibilant, filling the void with mischief, their scurrying feet the chatter of thrown bones.  The windmill shattered, lightning struck, its blades airless in the farm’s dead breeze, and the field’s grasses dried like barbed wire, cicadas screaming in the summer heat.

One dusk, he packed his truck: their bedspring with splines spent, a bent rocker, and his guitar, strings sprung, sound hole stuffed with calendar clippings of lost birthdays and anniversaries. He turned the truck onto a rutted road, dusty with a past harvest’s wheat chaff, and left his life, once green, now the color of sunset under cloud-worried skies, the color of sepia memories.

Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance.  He's proud to have published in Panoplyzine, Route 7, Poets Reading the News, Crack the Spine, the Decadent Review, Underwood Press, Dillydoun Review, In Parentheses, Vermilion, and more, plus his chapbooks Once Planed Straight:  Poetry of the Prairies and Viral:  Love and Losses in the Time of Insanity from Spartan Press.