The Old George Farm on Milltown Road

            There was a harvest moon, high and heavy in the evening sky; citrine-stained, perennially dimpled, and ripe with the secrets of centuries now spiraling off into infinity (so full, that moon.) It was a bellwether of the forthcoming season—an autumn that would auspiciously bear those predestined bounties that the Almanac had so knowingly foretold the previous calendar year. The hay had been cut in the morning and in its place lingered warm, wet air; sweetened and condensed by the setting of the sun. Fireflies would soon rise from the ground, playing timekeepers for the even’ star.

       A suntanned, chapped hand pressed against the small of her back, urging her to forge forward and onward through the labyrinth of trees and overgrown shrubs. She couldn’t look up ahead--- instead, her gaze focused only downwards to the ground, counting the footsteps that were taking her farther away from the remnants of light that clung for their lives into the retracting dusk.

       “Just a little further,” he growled, in a low, gravelly voice that sounded like stones being shaken in a tin can.

       Her hair, damp with an amalgamation of humidity and panicked perspiration, had fallen into her face, making it ever more difficult to see where she was going, or know where she had come from. One more purposeful push with his hot, broad hand and she was now on her knees, letting out what could very well have been a gasp if she were actually breathing. The sound of running water invited her to look up from her station, if only for a moment. A stream was partially visible through the dark, the coldness of its aura more acutely detected than it’s actual existence.

       “Now, I want you to wash your hands for me, doll baby” the voice demanded, sounding more and more rehearsed as time went on, within and without her.

       Bewildered, but too unnerved to question a thing, she reached down and out in front of her, hoping to catch the stream between her fingertips on her first try. The water was unseasonably cold and it, if only momentarily, shocked her into the present moment. She twisted her body around to face him, and let her eyes see for the first time what she knew was unraveling all along. He stood about three yards from her, just in front of an ostentatiously tall oak tree. His boots had been kicked off and his shirt draped over a lonely branch. The sound of his belt buckle as it hit a root and rang out metallically echoed through the woods before being silenced by the thudding mud in which it landed. Her eyes met his for the first time since they embarked on this (his and her) passage into the night. They looked into her, then through her; in their wildly azure blue depths she swam, and realized those very eyes belonged to her, by blood. The shape of his brow, the curve of his cheek, the pout of his lips; they were all too familiar, though alien to her tonight. His tanned skin was leathered and wrinkled with age, his graying hair told the story of his laborious love for the land in which he tilled and depended upon.

       “Don’t you look at me that way, or… I swear to God,” he pleaded, knowing full well it was his own sad self he was begging to.

       She shot up from the ground in an instant, mud under her long nails, grass stuck to her distressingly itching calves. The wind caught on quickly to her plan, and picked up its currents just enough to propel her forward, away from the clearing and back into the woods. Her heart, like the wings of a hummingbird moments before that great final moment, beat faster, quicker, surer than a million years of life and love and hope and virtue and strength and wisdom all combined could have ever taught her. The flight response permeated every morsel, every millimeter of her. To look behind her would mean death (though not in the literal sense, she knew, which was even more unbearable). The stars were her compass as she moved north, and her legs became impervious to the pain of her fleeting fury.  She moved faster, more deliberately, as she dodged branches and stumps (had she made this voyage before? She knew it was counterintuitive to let her mind entertain this line of questioning in this very instant.) Two more moments, they could have been minutes, and she began to smell that comforting sugary saccharinity of fresh-cut hay and hear the voices of her mother and grandmother. Salvation and sanctuary were dangling just in front of her, taunting her like a carrot on a string. The very second she opened her lips, happy and wide, to call out to these voices through the dark, that same coarse, virile, determined hand that smelled of pine needles and her childhood closed over her gaping mouth (where it would stay, and silence her heretofore). 

         As she was being carried by the disrobed man, back through the depths of the trees and on the very same course she had just used to escape, she let her eyes stay open and wander for just a while longer, before the inevitable, ineffable sin would become her burden to bear; she gazed only upward this time, her eyes pierced by the forsaken face of the man in that harvest moon. (So full, that moon.)