In the Hole

Two rocking chairs on a front porch, brimming with two large women. The wet-blanket heat coats everything it touches in a slick sheen, salty and condensed. A brown paper bag propped open between the chairs is filling steadily with stringy corn husks. Dirty white aprons hold piles of unshucked cobs. The women work silently. A dog barks, far off.

The dog has jaunted ahead of its owner, who pauses in his walk to the forest’s edge, pulling out a rag to wipe his brow. He glances up at the sky, measuring time. He shrugs the shotgun up onto his shoulder and returns the rag to his pocket. Walks.

Behind the man is a barn, old as sin. It was once red, but is now a splotchy, dirty brown. Nails poke out half-hazardly from the slats, through which you can peek to see the inside of the barn. There’s the nameless cow, standing on a rug of shit and hay. She grunts and mews, shifting her weight from hoof to hoof. Her udder is swollen like a full, pink moon. No one came to milk her this morning.

Beyond the cow, there is the stifling heat of the closed-door barn. Like a tactile, menacing creature, it fills the room with its fury, rising to its climax at the second-floor hen house. The hens purr and cluck gently, ruffling feathers and readjusting over their eggs.

Feathers float down from the hen house and land on the pale, round face of a girl, splayed out on the haystack. Beside her, a bucket that was flung from her hand. Her crystalline eyes look up at the barn ceiling, her pink mouth slightly ajar, its edges turned down in a nearly comical frown. Somewhere in the mass of hay beneath her are three small, blue buttons that popped from her shirt as it was ripped open. Her mud-streaked jeans and white underwear languish in a pile around her ankles. In her stomach, a cavernous hole, meaty and dark red.

In the hole, flies feast.