GONE One-Shots

Grain to Dust

I hadn't, in all my life on american soil, seen anything as strange. The rolling planes of this land had been ripped up by wind. Once an open stretch of prairie for riding and filling of heavy stalks of grain was plowed and blown away. It was suffocating, that fear of it, and all that dust and nothing. I scooped up a handful of fine... sediment, that was the word, from the field, and watched as the hope for grain and cash drained away as it slipped between my fingers. It carried off in the wind.

I couldn't dream this up, though it reminded me of some dusty painting of western idealism that didn't quite pay off for either me or its artist. Although, that artist wouldn't know me if I got in his face. I'm Edilio Escobar. And if there's anything pretty or prospecting about the wild west, it isn't me and it isn't this dust. I guess that's what we're stuck with.

I tugged up the cloth over my nose and mouth, the moister in my breath collecting dust in it. i could hardly look above the wide brim of my hat to see the dusty turmoil. After all, there was no more sun. With my eyes stinging in the harsh weather, I could feel the wind, it's welling of dust.

A barn shambles into view, it's pressed inward on one side facing the wind, the wood giving to its gusts and the pile of sediment collecting against it. It's lost it's bright red paint, now flaked and coated in all this dust, and it's not nestled in grain fields, it stands alone in the empty cloud of dust.

The whole barn shudders as the door flys open, assaulting the side as it bangs in the wind. The animals inside, so lean their eyes bug at me, shuffle hooves in the layer of dust around their feet. I manage it closed again.

Yanking away my cloth, I spit out wet globs of granulated sand. I wipe it's grittiness from the corners of my eyes. Beating the dust from my hat out on my leg, I go to check up on Amado.

The poor horse was hardly breathing, suffocating on his own dust filled lungs. The bones poking up beneath his hide were coated in a thin blanket of dust. Amado has laid here for too long. His eyes don't recognize me.

I arrive in a billow of dust. "It's Amado." The family is gathering their final things, their frail mother is stacking dishes. The ceramic disks lay brim down on the table so they need not to be washed as dust inevitably settles on them. I had passed her husband tying a chair to their model t. He couldn't hear me over the wind. "I won't be accompanying you, Mujer."

She gave me a look, and stood with an arm load stacked full of dishes. I let her through the front door, holding it open against the wind. Turning to the window, damp rags shoved in cracks to seal it, I watched them.

The situation, no money and no farm and now no farm hand, was absorbed about as well as the little rain there was these days into the dusty ground. What was reasonable to expect from them?

She set the dishes in the bed of the truck, turning to speak with her husband. They didn't frown for the loss of me or my horse, but they were broke and starving, had already lost enough. My courtesies didn't mean much anymore.

Still, I helped them with the truck. I carried the heavy furniture while the father tied it down. They would be headed out west, leaving me with a dead dusty prairie and a soon to be dead horse. Eventually, without a place to live.

I waved shallowly at their retreating truck, the children bouncing in the back had waved back at me. If the wind had died down, I could have heard them yell, "g'bye Ed!" Despite me telling them I was Edilio, not Ed too many times.

They vanished in a puff of dust, not most of which was kicked up by their tires, leaving me to look out at the barren land of a dead farm. Fields that once swayed with wheat, the only sound it's brushing stalks and the low bay of a cow, now blew dust and nothingness for miles. In time, the farm would be 'foreclosed, due to lack of mortgage payments.'