Fall
The stark decay of the barn stood bright against the glowering September sky, its splintered panels bleached and broken by years of alternating sunlight and frost.
Ragged strips of pink paint— remnants of the barn’s last good coat, twenty years back— bubbled off the wood in pale, crisp blisters. The planks were emaciated, silvered, split down their lengths by wide, deep cracks. During the winter months these cracks became bejewelled with hibernating ladybirds that embedded themselves into the grain, a find that could only have been made by the probings of a restless and lonely child. Now that small mystery had been reclaimed, lost like so much else, to a value beyond reckoning.
Above the barn entrance, stale mud clods of swallow nests clung to the eaves, the ground beneath them spattered with droppings that resembled wet ash. The barn doors were bolted shut by a spongey wooden beam that was slowly crumbling into a trail of sawdust. Set into the corner of the right-hand door was a hatch, just big enough for a man to step through.
Inside the barn was immense, dark, and cool. Dust glittered in long stripes of daylight that pierced the uniform slats. The floor was a carpet of compressed dirt splashed with grey, mould-eaten hay, long unswept. The far side of the room was cluttered with violent looking reaping equipment, much of which had gone to rust and was now beyond repair. What little there was to salvage would be sold for scrap.
Overhead the loft was pitched in heavy silence, as if a great deal of activity had been suddenly disturbed, then halted. Once, the loft been a place of warmth and security; a high perch tucked away from the world below. There may even still be small handprints up there, smeared in the dust. Now it only appeared dark and vaguely menacing. The air would be stifling and deathly still, a miasma of heat and old rot. A ladder granting access to the loft lay abandoned on the floor, many of the rungs missing or connected limply to one arm.
Dull metallic pings high up in the rafters began to tick into a steady, crackling patter on the sagging gambrel roof. The first drops of rain were falling heavily and darkly to the earth. It was time to head back.
Outside, swathes of nettles clutched and pushed themselves under the skirts of the barn, making it appear as if the building were slowly being pulled to the ground by the wild foliage. The barn would come down on its own regardless—but sooner than it was ever expected to. It would collapse into the brush in an enormous clutter of grey planks, like the forgotten skeleton of a vast, lumbering animal.
The scene blinked in a blazing reflexive flash—transforming the world for the briefest moment into a negative of itself. Then the storm clouds tore open over the fields, and there was a deep rumbling, like distant cannons—a sound so low and powerful it shook within the pulsing cavity of the chest.
A single reluctant tear peeled itself from beneath a greying eyelash, mingled with the cold drops of rain, then became lost, forever, to the torrent.
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