Jessica Star Rockers
Rocky's Back Acres
The farm has fallen away. Every building, every barn, even the house a remnant of a time that is gone, the tractors and stables crumbling to the touch, long past their usefulness, colored in sepia tones and fading to yellow. Raccoon skulls floating in the foamy depths of the outhouse toilet, a chicken coop with moldy feathers and no chickens, the stench of old and forgotten hay. Peculiar shadows, the feeling it is eternally night, the land eternally settling to sleep.
The lawnmower is sinister. My cousin uses it to asphyxiate himself, and I can see my father lifting the garage door, the sound of the mower's tiny engine growing louder with each click of the door's wheels up the bent metal tracks. Someone grabs an oily rag from above the beer fridge to hold beneath my nose, there is not enough exhaust to burn the eyes.
My grandfather dies with one boot on, his last words to this world, Woman, don't tell me what to do. My grandmother searches for his other boot after they have taken his body. He wanted to die with both boots on, she says.
After that the farm is absent of animals, absent of people besides my father, my grandmother, and me. Hunters drive their trucks past the house, through the trees and up to the woods, but they never stop.
At night I am awake, to the sound of scratching on the roof and the window, tapping under the floorboards, the sort of darkness that falls over empty countryside, the black of it filled with nocturnal eyes, rustling of leaves when there is no wind. It is the ghosts, I am sure of it—my cousin in the garage or my grandfather everywhere, the spirits of animals long ago slaughtered.
Farms are filled with men in overalls, tractors in the fields, cows and chickens and pigs. Our farm has only rusty nails, fish guts hanging from an old hook, rotted boards and moldy hay and spidery dust. No one wakes in the morning to milk cows or pluck eggs from under chickens; no one rides horses or drinks warm goat's milk. The only animals we have are the fish in the pond, and after one harsh winter and a summer's drought, even they die.
My father heads the truck up to the woods for one last errand of the day, and I climb in the back and put my arms around the dog and duck from branches that hang low. The big light in the yard flickers on, thirty-feet high blue fluorescent, and I keep an eye on it as we bump along. Up in the woods, we throw water on smoldering ashes that were once black plastic coating twisted copper coil. Tomorrow , he says, I'm taking this to the dump, and that I can join him if I want. Then we load up, my father in front and me in the back amid copper and dog slobber, and we bump our way back home. If a woodpecker pecks or a hoot-owl whoos, my father stops the truck in the middle of the yard, turns off the engine and says, Listen. Listen. Hear that? Can you hear it? He's up in that tree somewhere. Shhhh. Listen. There it is again. Can you hear it?
Jessica Star Rockers is a writer and musician living on an island off of Seattle. She has a creative writing MFA, founded the literary magazine the strange fruit, and regularly plays live at coffeehouses around Seattle. Her latest musical work, Beloved onEarth, is currently available through her website: www.newchristhipster.com.