Field of Dry Bones

“Rain’s coming,” Ezekiel muttered, adjusting his sunglasses while his cane tapped against an artificial leg. “I can feel it.”

“That leg can’t feel nothing,” Charles replied, sitting across the old porch in an identical rocking chair, his gut hanging over his thighs like a sack of potatoes.

Ezekiel had been blind for three years, having been out in the fields when the invasion forces began dusting the fields with an organic vapor that changed the genetic makeup of any crops in its radius. The initial invasion had been that of forced cooperation, a sort of Great-Leap-Forward where things were strong-armed to suit their own species’ optimal conditions. Ezekiel was out showing his son how to know when the corn was ready to harvest when the first wave of drones flew over. Ezekiel lost his vision and a leg, but his twelve-year-old adopted son began experiencing an odd illness. Exposure to the vapors had caused a series of alterations to his genetic sequence, and before long his body was eaten up by self-replicating cells until there was nothing left.

“Gonna be a good rain, yes sir,” Ezekiel continued. “Corn’s gonna be just fine.”

“I don’t see no clouds, Ezekiel. If’n a rain’s coming, it’ll be a right long time before we feel it here,” Charles said, rolling his eyes.

Charles peered out over the fields, looking at the sea of dead stalks that still nimbly ebbed in the wind before their dried-out masses disappeared in an ochre haze on the horizon. The sky was clear and crystalline, with only the sun standing lost in the middle of it. On most days, however, there would be enormous, churning clouds of ash moving across the sky like grazing cattle. Symptoms of the colonization process.

“You think things will change at all once they finish taking over?” Charles scratched his belly. “I mean, what are we supposed to do? Keep farming their crops and filling their bellies?” He took a sip of sweet tea, smacking his lips as the tart lemon shocked his tastebuds.

“No, Charlie, this is the one constant. Always stays the same, the growing season, the off season.”

Ezekiel planted the cane into a deck board and pulled himself to his feet. He was thick around the middle, same as Charles, who remained in his rocker as Ezekiel made his way to the railing. Ezekiel wrapped his hands, thick and scarred, around the railing’s rough hide. His head scanned from side to side, appraising his memories of the old fields as he cleared his throat to speak.

‘What’s left when there’s no hard days of work? What’s there to keep a man honest? Sometimes, sometimes I feel like all that’s left for me to do is just roll on over. I can’t fight, I can’t start another family. That boy was all I had, Charlie. What’s there for me anymore? Why we even bothering with hanging around?”

Charles stayed in his seat, but shifted his feet around uneasily. His boots thudded hard against the porch, sounding like horse shoes clacking against a barn roof. He cleared his throat, taking another sip of tea to wash out the first-draft words that almost rolled off his tongue. Then, without anything to say, he just sat there and thought for a while as Ezekiel waited.

“For the view,” Charles finally said with a laugh.

“Should’ve known you was pausing up for a joke,” Ezekiel chuckled. “Rain’s getting close, Charlie, won’t be long now.” 

Charles looked out at the fields and at the crystal-clear sky above them. Not a single cloud in sight. He stood up, feeling his legs almost buckle under his own weight and wondering when it was exactly that he got too old.

“I never had no family, you know that much,” Charles said, walking up to the railing to stand next to Ezekiel. “Don’t mean I didn’t never want one.”

“All’s left is the dirt, Charlie,” Ezekiel muttered, his hands shaking as they tightened around the railing.

“What are you talking about?”

Ezekiel fixed the collar of his shirt, as if presenting himself at one of the old types of funerals before bodies were all just burned and composted. A hand ran through his thinned hair, though he couldn’t recall what it looked like back when he could see, and certainly didn’t know what it looked like in that moment.

“Sometimes a crop can’t be saved. Sometimes you gotta just burn it all up and hope for the next one to come along and grow just fine,” Ezekiel said in a voice of resignation.

Charles let out a laugh, stamping his foot down against the porch. Ezekiel got like that from time to time, philosophical and all. It wouldn’t last too long, usually just a few minutes at a time. Sometimes, though, he wondered if Ezekiel wasn’t always thinking those things and just didn’t bother sharing it.

“First you talk about the rain saving the corn, and now you talking about burning it all up. Gotta makes up your mind, old friend,” Charles said.

“How much we even know each other? After all these years, I mean,” Ezekiel asked. “Fifty years, that’s how long it’s been since we got off that colony ship. How long we been turning the soil? How much we said to one another that wasn’t bullshit?” Ezekiel rambled, talking like he was running out of time.

“Oh, I reckon we know each other well enough,” Charles replied. “What’s there to know with words, anyhow? I know how you worked the soil, how you are when you get all drunk. I know how much you loved that boy, and I know what it sounds like when you cry. What more could I know about you?”

Ezekiel pursed his lips, his mouth full of words he wanted to say if he could only tie them together right. Some things were just never meant to sprout and take hold. Some things, he thought, weren’t supposed to ever bear fruit.

“I’d have liked to have known you better, Charlie, I just, I didn’t have the time. When the time came that we had the time, there wasn’t nothing left of me,” Ezekiel stammered, his grip loosening and tightening again on the railing. He held onto it like it was the only thing keeping him from floating off into the intense sky.

“I know,” Charles said. “Our cards just weren’t right, and that’s fine. Sometimes you just gotta daydream bout what might’ve been. Ain’t as good as living that life, but it’s better than nothing.”

Ezekiel let a slight smile open up on his old face. The rain was close. He could feel it in his feet now, vibrating through the boards. It wouldn’t be long.

“I love you, Charlie,” Ezekiel stammered, finally letting go of the words.

“I know,” Charles replied, closing the distance between them to wrap Ezekiel up in a tight embrace.

The almond-shaped bombers filled the sky at the edge of the farm with their silver hulls floating across the sky like indifferent clouds. Beneath them fell the curtains of atomic plasma, its magma as hot as a star and rolling towards them like a dust storm that vaporized everything in its path. The invaders had resorted to burning all the farmland, trying to cut off the food for the dwindling indigenous resistance.

The fire roared across the fields, dissolved the crops the moment it made contact. Still, they held on to one another under the fragile shelter offered by the porch. Charles and Ezekiel were far too old to fight, but they knew that, somewhere on the planet, there were those still clinging onto the world and, if the invaders wanted it, there’d be claw marks across the surface where everyone had tried to hold on.

Author’s Biography

Josh Poole is a visual artist and writer working out of a sleepy town in Virginia, United States. His work has been published in The World of Myth Magazine, Air Mail Magazine, and many other publications. He generally writes stories inspired by the strange things which often occur in sparsely populated areas.