When reading aloud in history class, each student was required to continue until they had encountered four new facts, which meant that the raptly attentive Arnold and Andrew would read almost a page apiece before stopping for the next student to pick it up, and conversely Judy from New York usually wouldn’t have to finish a sentence before Dennis, who sat behind her, resumed. The students were arranged in four columns of seven, and after completing a chapter each column would move into a circle and decide which of their aggregate facts were the five most significant. Mary, who was from Texas, was the lone-star voice of southern pride, and during the chapters on the civil war she spoke over her column’s scribe, Matthew, who was so bewildered by her outburst that the only thing he could think to do was continue to meekly read aloud from Column Three’s Five Most Important Facts.

            “Fact number three-“ Matthew began.

            “Southern industry drove the nation’s economy!” yelled Mary, standing at the back of column three.

            “Mary – sit down, please – we must remember that slave-“

            In the confusion, Matthew continued. “Gin dramatically improved the efficiency of cotton picking. Fact number four-“

            “Fact number four! The founders had considered slavery a necessary evil!”

            It was after this scene – for History class was the designated venue for such deliberations – that, in a unanimous decision, after giving her the usual buffer zone of two weeks since she had moved into town, the class officially found Mary weird. After all, she knew things about horses. Earlier that day during recess, Cecil approached her and Dennis playing.

            “Horses are really pretty,” Dennis pondered, looking at a poster on the wall.

            “Gross up close. They poop in the shower,” Mary dismissed.

            “Well of course – it’s their raison d’etre!” Cecil had overheard them.

            Mary and Dennis glanced at the whiteboard then looked back at Cecil.

            “It’s French, it means raisin de-eater.”

            “Dad gummit, horses don’t eat raisins!”

            “Of course not, they de-eat them.”

            Dennis sniffed.

            “It’s a metaphor.”

            Mary’s hand groped for the fire truck.

            “French.”

                        *                      *                      *                      *                      *

            Dennis thought that he had had a wonderfully humorous school day, and on his walk home, during which he enjoyed avoiding the irregular cracks between sidewalk tiles and feeling the warm sunshine on his bare, inclined neck, he replayed the day’s scenes, adding in his own details, like Matthew’s voice frequently cracking during History, and a breeze blowing the teacher’s scarf over her paper again and again while she attempted to write her notes, but in vain. Home was five miles from school, and Dennis would rather walk than take the bus with Cecil, so he gave his mother the impression that he was enrolled an after school program, the Checkers Club. As he just emerged from school property onto Route Twenty-Seven, a van passed by with a banner that read: “Art Mechanic.”

            This van was headed right towards Dennis’s home, where his mother, Leenie, sat nervously tapping her slender fingers on the kitchen counter, and jumped up to greet the Art Mechanic when he knocked a short rhythm on the door. Fixing her hair in the mirror, Leenie studied her deep-set eyes, and wiped a piece of oatmeal from her neck, and gave her large, right-slanting nose a reproachful look. She opened the door for the man and backed behind it to let him in. He was a tall, thin, gray figure representing a ghost in all respects except that instead of hovering, his feet seemed magnetically pulled towards the floor and as a result dragged so forcefully on the carpet that Leenie was afraid of a static shock when she shook his hand, which was abnormally small and surrounded at the fingers by minute, raisin-like warts, and made her own hand smell like the back-lot of a bread factory.

“It’s this one,” Leenie brought him to the five-by-three portrait of Tommy DeVito on the stairs landing.

            “And you said you can’t quite put your finger on the problem?”

            He approached the painting carefully, slowly putting his toolbox down without removing his intent gaze from the rock star’s tie. Leenie held her breath, which tasted like brown sugar and oatmeal from breakfast.

            “The trick with this sort of thing is to examine the texture of the piece in question. Everyone talks about framing, or there might be an indistinguishable stain somewhere, or maybe the material’s dulled, but the trick –“ he paused to kneel at the right corner where Tommy’s shoulder ended – “the trick is in the texture. Texture is the trick.”

            And softly, he ran his spotted thumb down the edge of the paint. He sighed, and raising his face to look up at her, he blinked three times, sighed again, and closed his toolbox, still fixing his eyes on hers, which were by this time bubbling forth from their caves in breathless agony. “It’s flat.”

            “What?” Leenie gasped, and, running to the portrait herself, she pressed her open palm to Tommy’s hair, recoiling from the unexpected smoothness. The entire portrait, originally in oil, now shone with an eggshell flatness that seemed to refuse any friction imparted by an intent viewer.

            “I’ve seen it before. Paintings just get flat. The tech you’d need to fix this kind of thing isn’t really available. For all intents and purposes, though, there’s nothing to worry about. It doesn’t get much worse from here.”

                        *                      *                      *                      *                      *

The door opened and shut – Charlie was home from work, finally. Charlie’s alarm is set to go off at five in the morning and again at five thirty, so that he can make an early train into the city for his job at GlobalTelos, whose logo is a red arrow circumnavigating a simplified globe. This logo is in the background of his ID card, which reads: SENIOR ANALYST. Leenie wanted to discuss the problems with the Tommy DeVito piece.

            “He says it’s flat and it’s going to stay that way.”

            “Well I think we all feel some attachment to the thing. It’s been here since Dennis was born, and we all know how you love Tommy-“

            “It shines, like a poster. Not a painting, a poster.”

            “And you’re sure it wasn’t flat when we got the thing? It seems odd for this to happen all of a sudden.” And what is it about Tommy DeVito that’s not allowed to be flat? Charlie wondered.

            “Look, Chaz,” Charlie’s eyes narrowed, and he rested his head against his hand, supporting himself on the red-and-white-checkered kitchen table by his elbow. “You’re not a mechanic, alright? He says it can’t be fixed. I’m getting rid of it.”

            “Just– look, let’s just ask Dennis first.”

            “I think Tommy’s kind of outdated.”

            So Dennis was sent to his room and the Tommy DeVito portrait was thrown into the garbage. After everyone went to bed, Leenie crept out in her pajamas and tore the canvas from the frame, rolled it up like a poster and hid it between the heater and the wall in the basement.

To be continued

A great herd of brown beasts came tumbling down a short ravine-wall on the right side of the road in front of my truck. To evade them, I had to smash the break pedal into the floor and rapidly shuffle my hands across the wheel, swerving off to the left and lodging my front left wheel in the road’s gutter.

My arms were so tense they wouldn’t move – the muscles throbbed throughout my wrists, and I noticed the feeling not only there but all over my body. My foot was still pressing the break hard into the floor, and it hurt to be pushing it down but I couldn’t stop; my joints seemed tangled, paralyzed by the mayhem caused by the shock.

I breathed; my neck came loose, and I turned to the left, but something was wrong with my vision. My eyes caught images faster than my brain could see them, and I felt dizzy. The edges of my sight blurred and my neck slackened, dropping my head onto the seat back. I gazed at the ceiling, examining the short, curled hairs of its surface, spotting shapes that looked like animals and faces. An acute pain in my ankle tore my head from rest and I saw that my leg was shaking incessantly. I peeled my fingers from the steering wheel and, rolling my shoulders, lifted my thigh up from the seat.

My foot came off the break and the pain in my ankle flared up – the truck also lurched forward and crashed down, the fender buried in the embankment, a few feet from where it sat before. The impact threw me forwards and my badge pressed into the car horn. Jerking back with my hands over my ears, my spine retaliated by cramping in between my shoulder blades and again in my lower back. I managed to unlatch the door and ram it open with my shoulder, tumbling out of the car into the dust on my back, my head tilted so that I watched, upside-down, as the last of the cattle crossed the road and ambled out of sight. Every muscle was sore – the sudden activity seemed to release my body from its paralysis and instead sent it into waves of pain. These were, I knew, signs of recovery, but they caused a splitting headache and I lay on the ground, relishing the warm sun and the coarse dust on my skin, while a slight breeze cooled the back of my neck, moistened by sweat.

* * * *

“Redemption is still a long was off.” The truck rattled over a bump, the keys in the ignition swinging and clicking and the passenger window banged against its frame. The radio rolled into static, through every bump brought the family in the read pickup closer to Mr. Elvis Presley. Except that last one; the truck’s back end was sliding forwards and the tank of fuel in the back crashed against the side of the wheel well. As the tires screeched against the pavement, and the sun spun around the windows, the two children clutched each other and their father, who tensely turned the wheel any which way – useless. The gravel on the roadside approached the passenger window and the two crashed together, shattering the glass and spraying the trio with shards and rocks. The tank in the back rolled out of the sideways truck, pulling the vehicle’s weight with it. Gravity slowly dragged the children from their seats and hung them from the ceiling by their seat belts with a final, shuddering crash.

The children were crying. Their father was unconscious- his head rested unnaturally against the floor, and his ear bled from rubbing against glass bits. There were two of them, boys, one five years older than the other by birth. Frank was the older, with red brown hair parted from left to right and dark green eyes with small pupils. He was crying, closing his left eye to stop the tears that leaked into his mouth and nose. He dropped to the ceiling of the car with a bang to get his brother’s shoes so that he could walk on the glass strewn about. 

I shifted myself upwards, out of the deep slouch I had been using to watch the speakers, straddling my door with my arm. Leaning my head out through the open window, I glanced around, and my eyes landed on Christopher, the account keeper for the Old farm. He held a clipboard in one hand and furiously scribbled notes with a yellow pencil, his wisps of red hair dancing as his head wiggled from side to side. He bounced on his heels in his massive, gray boots, whose necks ended right below the holes at the knee of his dark, denim pants. His eyes glanced up without his head moving, and he smiled at me, a small smile, hiding somewhat the bright yellow sheen of his teeth, and returned to his notes.

“Chris,” I addressed him and he stopped bouncing, immediately dropping his notes to his side and putting the pencil behind his ear, slowly raising his head to meet mine – though it need not go far, my truck rides a bit low.

“It’s clear to me that the Old farm has suffered a loss, and the New has a legitimate stake in the damage, not only in causation but also, more pertinently, in repercussion. We should remember that, yes, there are two farms here, but there is also Coldcreek,” and at this word the old man’s lip began to quiver; he seemed to know where I was going.

“Your prosperity is tied together-“ Chris, too, caught on, and took up his notes again. Richardson and Dean still glared at each other, quietly nursing their anger while the rest of us spoke our turns.

“As such, not only has the Old farm suffered a loss-“ I had become dizzy, the sun shone directly onto my bronze heat conductor of a dome; I repeated myself. “A loss, a loss that extends to the New farm as well.”

A sharp intake of breath came from Richardson, whose pale face now became tinged with a border of purplish red, and he cleared his throat with a groaning sound.

“Listen to Mr. Coldcreek, Dean. We are not responsible for this damage. We’re all real sorry about it, and I’d be willing to help you all fill in those rills.”

“Sixteen man hours,” belted Chris, and the old man quickly slithered over to him, looking over his shoulder at the notes. “Carry the one,” he uttered enthusiastically, “twenty six man hours!” he announced, “to fill in these rills.”

“What about the bales?” whispered Sandra, Dean’s aunt and legal owner of the Old farm. “We lost fifty three bales beyond salvage, and they were your trees, and you wish to fill in a hole? Your dirt-“ “One hundred and fifteen pounds of it,” interrupted Coldcreek – “your dirt is not enough…” her voice crescendoed here and then quickly became timid and wandered off into silence, and she smoothed down her blue sweater with hands shaking in irritation.

I sunk back into the car. Sometimes I think I just show up in these cases to prevent the more rash representatives from killing each other. Dean wasn’t harmful, but you have to be careful of Richardson. And cattle drives, into one of which I almost drove my truck headlong.

I put my hand into my pocket and slipped the weight of a half-dollar into my palm, clutching it as if to feel a pulse.

“I’ll head over there now.”

Walking out of the station back to my truck, I noticed a dark mass of clouds crawling over the eastern ridge, encroaching on the sun’s morning gaze. The clouds looked thick and heavy, full of water waiting to fall. The radio only plays a few stations when you drive out this way into the country. I let the tuner sit on “Classical Ninety-Five,” with the volume just loud enough to fill in the gaps between the jostling road bumps. 

“Trees,” my exasperated motto. In country like ours, with the most restless of winds, the majority of civil disputes consists of neighbors’ treefalls. Arguments ensue over whose tree it was, whose fault it was that it fell, whose property was even damaged, and on whom the responsibility falls. In my decade in this position, I’ve never encountered a rulebook, or even a set of informal guidelines, that would help a rookie resolve such conflicts.

A couple of years ago I was called out to Coldcreek, a pair of farms on the northern edge of town. I pulled into their dirt driveway under the burning, midsummer sun, and my truck was immediately surrounded by a group of five delegates from both farms. They still shouted at each other but apparently wanted to bring the discussion to me. I ended up holding the entire meeting in the driver’s seat, with the window down, because, though I had cracked the door as if to get out, Dean, who worked water on Old Coldcreek, didn’t get the hint, and wouldn’t budge.

Apparently a few dead trees from the New Coldcreek orchard had been uprooted by the storm, and overnight carried away by a flash flood. The waters rammed the trunks into the Old barn, puncturing the wall and ruining a substantial number of hay bales.

Dean was yelling, letting his voice rise and fall in volume, so that at its height it was all the more aggravating, yet also convincing. 

“No, you should have moved them, carted them off, cut them up! For firewood, you know. Only an irresponsible farmer in these parts would leave them trees lying around. That’s what you are, Richardson, irresponsible! You know they’re light, you know they float, you know there was a storm-“

Richardson, the massive, gaunt, ghost-of-christmas’-future head of the New farm interrupted. He held his left hand in his pocket and his right gestured towards the ground around the Old barn.

“I wonder, Dean, if you’re as much a water man as you act.” He paused, Dean stepped back, and stood with his weight on that back foot, his hands clutching fists, and was frozen. Richardson continued with a smirk, whose humor reached no farther than the corners of his mouth, the rest of his face solid as stone.

“Do you see these rills? This one, which is almost deep enough to be a gully? They point directly into your now-devastated barn wall.” I peered at Richardson from my seat, my hand on the wheel and slumping down to get a view of his sunken eyes, as he stood just by my sideview mirror, now resting his hand on it.

Dean faltered. “Those- those were dug by the lumber when it rolled over into my wall!”

“No, they weren’t.” This voice came from old man Coldcreek himself, whose substantial shortness was due to a stoop, but whose hair shone blonde as the sand, and whose skin and face were clean and bright, albeit a bit wrinkled and lumped up at points, like paper soaked under with paste. He carried a tape measure in one hand and an envelope and pen in the other. 

“Look at these figures,” he said, hurriedly shuffling to me, and I took the paper. “This column is the diameter of the trees’ roots, which I measured bent over themselves, as if rolling on the ground. The next column- you don’t have to worry about that, just look at the next two: the widths of the rills and the gully, and the differences. You can see that this argument is unfounded?” This was how Coldcreek had become one of the most prosperous of the farms in the area – the old man’s number skills were good enough to be the best in town, but flawed enough to escape ostracism, for nobody liked a bean counter. His upper lip quivered when he was crunching figures in his head, but he was still able to speak. One could hold a lively conversation with him about his plans for a new crop, but all the while he’d be calculating the free time he had left in the day, how many servings of bread he would need at dinner, or even how much gold to buy the next month, the hoarder!

I nodded, and looked over to Dean, whose face had gone pale, his bright blue eyes aimed towards the ground, into which he was scraping the letter “A.” He mumbled a few words about his own misfortune and the prosperity of the Old farm. He looked to me, as did the ghostly face of Richardson, and Coldcreek’s furrowed brow was aimed at the side of my truck, his lip still but clearly in deep thought. His glance up to my eyes impelled me to speak.

I stopped at the doorway, adjusting my tie in the mirror - though I developed a habit of only looking downwards when I tied it, and I suppose the mirrors are just for show. Two pairs of shoes lay under the light switch. The left pair was hard, brown leather, a tighter fit with western tassels and punch-holes. The right was a tall, wide black leather set with a white band around the outside of the sole. The laces were a dark green suede with chrome ends. I saw my graying beard reflected in their surface when I leaned down to peer at them. I stood up and flipped the lights off, looking down at the shoes the whole time. Turning them back on, I deliberated - hoping for an easy workday, I slid on the brown pair. 

As I walked to the car I felt a tiny dart of rain fall across my neck, and I instinctively looked upwards, but my gaze was instantly drawn downwards again when I realized that my truck’s end was situated just at the edge of the roadway. It’s not a busy area, but I usually parked it up higher. Why did I do this? I left that thought behind - this is the type of question that bores us so much - in confounding us - that we can forget it, and its consequences. 

The sidewalks at the town’s Law Enforcement Bureau were slicked wet, probably by the sprinklers, which sometimes activated as I walked up to the wide, heavy glass doors at the entrance, wetting the cuffs of my pants and dulling the sheen of my black pair of shoes, if I happened to be wearing them. The building was one story tall, subjected to the area’s strict zoning. But it stretched across the entire back border of the Richardsons’ apple orchard, offices within ranging from that of the Superintendent of Schools to the local weather emergency crew’s communications hub. The lobby was a long, wide corridor with elevators at the end that flew down two levels to god-knows-where, and four doors on each side, running through this oversized ant-farm to the various departments. 

I made my way for the second door on the left, and cut a right into the stairwell, going down one floor to maintenance, and continuing down the corridor to the stairs at the other end of my hallway - I wanted to avoid my neighbors, solitude, you know. I stepped into my office without risking eye contact with Sergeant Eriksen, and pressed the green light on my phone for messages. Thomas’ voice came through, tired as ever, seeming to sigh at the middle of his sentence, and catching his breath at the end.

“Another dispute from storm damage - Williams Property,” he growled, and the machine clicked off. The Williams Property, unfamiliar to my ear, had to be looked up in the database, just to the left outside my door, at the end of the hall. The blue and white striped walls terminated in a completely black wall with a steel door, left ajar during the workday. I slipped inside and flipped through my properties file. Memorizing the address, I switched to the maps of the area in the other corner of the room, around the tall island of shelves in the middle. The Williams Property was just past Pott’s Hill Road.

* * * *

I recall that landscape each morning, while I brush my teeth. gel my hair, tie my tie, and pin my badge to my jacket pocket; I see my reflection through the crystalline soap stains on the mirror. My left eyelid (or is it the right?) has a birthmark, a gray stripe of raised flesh curving from the tear duct to the corner, its mass visible even when the eye is opened wide. My jaw collapses inward slightly at the chin, a moderately successful reconstruction after a high school automobile accident. My beard is quite old, but it is shaved down to a two-day length by my ancient razor. Thin, black eyebrows skirt my forehead, whose wrinkled surface melts into the sickly sheen of my bald skull, draped around the sides by tangled, graying, thin tufts of hair. Water drips from my nose and eyes; I just washed my face. The countenance altogether pleases me; it is a map to the events of my past, in its own way. Ugly is, quite certainly, not out of the question, but these days, who’s counting? Justice is ugly - now there’s a pretty tagline.

Smothering myself with a towel, I cleared the thought away and turned off the radio sitting on the kitchen shelf, from which emitted an advertisement for a new type of dental surgery. My teeth are pristine.

The path was not too dusty, it had rained the day before, but its gravel was coarse and lay in piles knocked to the side by carts, and made it difficult to traverse the already uneven ground. The grass surrounding the path on the hill was lush, and cushioned an occasional large boulder with its brown tufts. The road continued down the hill and made a sharp corner at the foot of the slope, following the sheer rock face that comprised the hill’s side. Moving past the hill and along the shore of a small pond, full more of organic slush than water, the path ended in a driveway in front of a small brown hovel of two chambers, the larger of which was collapsed, its ceiling lying propped against the center wall. The front horizontal beam jutted out above the rubble, and a cat perched itself atop it. The animal’s coat shone in the sunlight; in held its right paw in the air as if hurt, and turning its head to the light, a beam caught the shining red surface of its closed left eye. Because of the recent rainfall, the structure and its ruins were wiped clean of the dust of demolition, and the broken bricks and splinters shimmered with shards of glass from windows and housewares. 

A quiet thump from within the intact room frightened the cat, who jumped from the beam, disturbing a pot on the way down, which fell and broke open. From its shell slowly leaked a dark red gel, which came to rest against the corner of the door frame. This was the Pott’s Hill home, in the town of Temtic.

Across the yard was a rust red wooden shed resting on the flat ground just before the hill’s slope began. Its door had two windows separated by a single vertical pane, and whose glass was warped, thickened at the bottom by time’s weight. It stood propped open by a pair of cinderblocks stacked against it’s hinges. Visible inside were a few shelves holding plant pots, a coiled hose, bags of soil, and leaning against these was a long, white, plastic cylinder covered at both ends by brown paper. 

The animal flew into this doorway and a moment later appeared serenely in the window on the wall facing the road, its orange eyes lazily tracing the path of a flock of crows through the gray-yellow sky. They seemed to race towards the setting sun, as the great orange globe fell off of the horizon, dragging its banners of color down with it. The darkening sky threw a purple veil over the ruins of this homestead, dulling its features, but bringing attention to a deep green covering stretched across the debris; it was moss. The moon’s shape shone white on the rubber surface of the coagulating gel. 

* * * *