The Barn

The Barn
Copyright AUG 2009
Word count: 882
This came from a challenge: We were supposed to describe a barn through the eyes of a man who had lost his son in "the war"...We were to try NOT to mention the son, the war, and if we could avoid it, we needed to avoid mentioning the man. While I had trouble adhering to the rules of the challenge, I still liked what came of it. This story is fiction, but the place was real. Any similarities to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.


The farmhouse smelled of pancakes, bacon, and the low musk of eggs and butter in the morning. Each room carried the lingering odor of furniture polish and old, dark wood. And the sounds of muffled sobs.

He knocked softly on the door again, calling her name, but the door remained shut to him. His feet creaked along the floor boards, head down, mind-blind, his thumb felt for another latch and he stepped out into the dawning air, his breakfast offering untouched. The clouds, not content to relinquish the cold earth yet, curled about him, brushing cold fingers along his coatless neck. The thick treads of his work shoes crunched through the twigs and drying leaves left from the last night's storm.

He felt, somehow, that things should at least have the courtesy to look differently, but the farm was still much as he had left it the night before. The little farm house looked neat and crisp, the black-eyed Susans – the last of the season- swayed gently among the delicate swarms of baby's breath in Esther's garden. Colors of white, yellow, purple and brown waved gently at him. In the calmness of the waking day, he could hear the low grrrrrUP! of the bullfrogs taunting their rivals among the cattails. Sparrows and chickadees hopped about, brazen and fat from Esther's sunflower seeds. A cardinal flitted through the branches of an old pine – a glint of red in the corner of his eye.

The shape of the barn surfaced in the fog...an ancient gray whale in clouded seas.

Out of habit, he opened the barn door – with a movement that was a combination of a heave and a push. It succumbed to his efforts with a wheezing groan of aching wood, and he moved from the bright perfection of Esther's world and into the soft charcoal of his own. The interior of the barn smelled of oats and warm hay, oil, iron, and dust. Light shifted in angles from the cracks between the boards, catching motes by surprise mid-dance. Mourning doves rustled in the eaves, and there was the occasional dark streak from the corners as a rat or mouse dashed from one pile of straw to the next.

Little Fella, the crotchety sixteen-year-old pony, whickered impatiently, and stomped in his stall. Without a word, he went over and removed the wooden beam from the end of the stall. Little Fella backed out, and then walked in arthritic clomps to the rear doors of the barn, where he snorted disdainfully and nudged at the door, jerking his head up and down to make his point. The man made his way to the pony's side with no particular haste, shifted the latch, and patted Little Fella's hindquarters to send him out into the back pasture. He felt in his pocket for a crumple pack of cigarettes, and as he pulled it out, a piece of paper fell from his pocket and landed on the floor in front of him. He froze, eyes locked onto the folded creases...the dark shadows of neat type bled through the creamy white...and even upside down and backwards...he could still read the words...those awful...unbelievable words.

He had never backed down from anything in his life, but he backed away from that letter...never moving his gaze from it. He turned, eyes unseeing, brushing against an item in the second stall...knocking a dusty child's saddle off of a sawhorse. It fell to the boards with a startling loudness that echoed through the barn, and disturbed the cooing doves in the rafters. Somehow, his feet found their way to the stairs. He climbed up in slow, measured steps, and each board creaked and gasped more warnings than the last.

Though most of the second story flooring was weak, questionable, or gone altogether, one could still cross via a few well-placed beams. He was on the far side in minutes...oddly enough, positioned just above the offending paper, sitting on an empty orange crate in front of a nearly forgotten box of family artifacts.

Something gleamed dully near the bottom of the box, and he reached for it numbly. His hand came out covered in dust and cobwebs, and clutching a solid bronze figure.

The weight of the six-inch figure felt good in his hand...it felt right. The figure had once been part of a trophy...a small child holding a bat in mid-swing....The detail on the figure was stunning – the expression was open, excited, grinning and filled with pride. He remembered the day that trophy had come home...remembered...how happy...that day had been.

As he held the figure, he noticed that time and exposure had left a green-black patina He scratched at it with a thumbnail, but it wouldn't come off. He tried harder, with increasing desperation...in his eyes, the patina mark seemed to grow...until he couldn't see the smiling boy's face, only the damage that had been done to it.

A low moan left his mouth, as he held the tarnished piece of brass to his chest. The moan continued, louder and louder.

Below him, a folded piece of paper skittered gently along the floor, dancing in the soft morning air.