The divarication station

It’s still rotting out in the west field, streaks of ash running down the planks- gooey like war paint, sodden by late April rain. The coffee-stained moon marks the grave.  You’d never know it was ablaze last October.

Just an infant scaffold of a barn then.  The sawyered oak and cherry glinted in the sunlight- it’s what Christmas smells like- pine-sapped and cinnamoned.

I helped build it, you know.  All by hand.  While Pa ran his mouth, supervisin’.  My fingernails scraped the inside of the buckskin gloves, the sawdust peppered my forearms and conjured the whiskey out of my blood.  Always the sunlight turning denim into sauna.

The new barn would stand as hard work and deliverance from dependency. That’s what Pa said.  An autonomous edifice.  Lady Liberty’s torch.  What platitude!  He didn’t know I nailed and hammered, lifted and beveled at night with the Tull boys from Jefferson.  Hired ‘em.  Paid ‘em, too.  Told Pa I was gettin’ ahead by myself.  Tricked him into freedom.  We painted it red with crisscrossed stripes white like militia frontlines.

Three weeks later sulfur and orange slithered across the field and I woke up knowing.  The mare screamed like a string section – or maybe the soprano herself.  I ran across the field, skiing on the dew-stained grass, face blazoned red.  Bovine and equus were rescued.  Hay bales and instruments left molten. 

It burned into the morning.  The pinked flames a mirage for sunrise.  Pa strangled my hand as the barn dissolved into black carbon and oxygen.  Like a house of cards, it collapsed without a sound.