The view from the bus window is a blur of red rock and bleached sand, splintered through a spiderweb of scratches in the glass. I had left home when I was still a kid, and on this ride home to Arizona, the years I've been away seemed to dissolve in the humid, sweaty air.
Our homestead is still loud in my memory. We had a menagerie growling and screeching during the day, while my ma and pa shouted and cried at night. Every month, we slaughtered an animal for market, watching the life drain from another pair of enormous, frightened eyes.
Back then, we all smoked. My pa loved burning the surgeon general's warnings on the packets. He reckoned living to your sixties was long enough, but smacked me around if he caught me sneaking a drag on a discarded smoke.
It didn't matter. I still coughed up the blackness from vast smoke clouds wafting through the house, and my bedroom ceiling was yellow like dry weeds.
I pinch my finger and thumb together as though clutching one of those crooked cigarettes. My other hand itches along the scars where the fingers used to be. It hasn't held anything since the accident.
Pa's last will and testament is scrunched in my good hand, with crisp white paper poking from the edges of my fist.
The bus lumbers to a stop, and I step off, nodding to the driver. He looks past me to “For Sale” signs planted outside every home in town, then nods with pity in his half-smile. The silver carriage chugs over the dirt road and disappears into the next valley, as shifting sand erases its tire marks.
Cruel noises stir near the front door. The shed's weathered joints creak, loosened over the decades, and a raven squeals from atop a naked sycamore tree.
Instead of entering the abandoned homestead, I walk around it. Black moss grows over a log stump near the back door, spilling over the sides like a burnt stew escaping from a saucepan. I scrape at it with my good hand, exposing tree rings tinged red with rust and countless cuts where we chopped firewood.
The ax is fallen beside the stump like a dead soldier. Its blunt edge is no longer frightening, dappled with rust so similar to the dried blood that once stained this place.
I sit on the log and lay the blade on my lap. With each coarse passing of the sharpening stone, the ax brightens, and the nubs of my ruined hand tingle. Maybe this homestead could also brighten.
The “For Sale” sign sways on silver chains, and a few one-handed swings of the ax drops the gaudy timber.
THE END
Barry Johnson, author of The Albatross (2024). Wandering the trails from Arizona to Texas, Barry experienced the life within that landscape and the characters surviving in its extreme beauty and danger. He currently resides on the edge of the Australian Outback. His short fiction has appeared in various online journals.
Read more at https://barryjohnsonwriter.wordpress.com/