Where grass no longer grows

The lost man stands on the hill, looking down into the once green valley. As the sun pushes through a thin blue sky, the morning mist gently dissipates, revealing the shape of the countryside for miles around. “Blessed,” murmurs the lost man as he wipes the ground’s dewy moisture from the side of his face.

Behind him, on the plateau, a solitary tree shifts slightly in the small breeze that has drifted its way from the beck below to join the lost man on the hill. Its companion looks at his hard, calloused hands, holding them aloft to the sky. He does not know why they are stained a bitter, dark brown - dried deep into the cracks and furrows of his skin.

The lost man does not know why his shirt is torn, or why the ache behind his eyes has not gone away.

***

It had all been so close, so hot, in that long remembered summer. Her mouth had been only an inch from his. Her breath, sweet as meadow flowers in spring. Watching from the sky, the sun, with its single scorched eye, regarded them as she had lifted her skirt and the wild horses on the far away hillside had galloped through the woodlands, descending to the shimmering deep lake below.

***

Beyond the eastern hills where the heated glow of the day is rising in a birdless sky, the village is waking from its slumber. The lost man does not see his wife, as with trembling hands, she gathers broken pieces of crockery from the tiled kitchen floor.

This is a different path in a journey she had never planned to take. The cat is waiting at the kitchen door. Its bristled fur now lies sleek and flat over its back and ears. The woman wipes away the dark marks that smell of iron from the door handle before opening it - and the cat departs, deep into the garden where a vole had met its end the day before.

On the hill, the lost man is walking in slow, wide circles around the lonely tree. His feet tread quietly over parched grass, dry and dead after weeks of heat that he thinks he has never known before. “Loved,” he whispers as he spins the gold ring on his left hand.

The tear in his shirt is bothersome. Everything feels wrong. He stoops and wipes his dirtied hands over the dry grass, spits into his palms but the staining remains.

The man removes his shirt and fastens it to a lower branch of the tree.

***

The young woman, lithe and bright, had run on slender legs down the lane and over the stile. He had followed her path, which took them into a lower pasture where the old farmer’s cattle quietly grazed and ruminated on verdant grass, green as the deepest wet greens in her eyes.

The sun had blistered in the western sky, still dark with heat at the day's end. He had heard the chirping of grasshoppers over the sound of her breath as he pulled her close. Years held onto the memory, no longer answering when he called.

***

In the village, the wife of the lost man knows that she will find him, even though he will not find himself. The ache that has beset her, hanging on her back like a belligerent child - she no longer feels its weight.

She shovels soft, dark earth from beneath the rose bushes and covers the vole - its body dry and parched in the persistent heat of its final resting place. The woman draws water at the tap to feed her garden. Everything still grows as long as she is there to tend it.

In a higher place of solitude, the lost man leaves the shade of the tree and allows his legs to guide him across the plateau. He faces to the west, his naked back turned to the sun. His eyes are open but he cannot see the path that curves its way over the edge of the hilltop and away out of sight, to a place beyond his reach.

***

Once, in early spring, the man had watched the hares with her. Had they come this way? He cannot recall. He remembers the little blue flowers that scattered the valley. Now, the once lush, soft green is brown and prickled. It no longer feels soft to touch. The lost man tries to remember when it had all changed. But the words and images stay buried below the surface, knotted around the roots of a tree he once clambered as a boy.

***

He knows they will come, because someone will tell them. He doesn’t know who, but they will.

Beneath the climbing sun, almost at the peak of its ascent, the man lowers his body to the earth. The brittle grass chafes against his pallid white skin, tight against his ribs, as he lies on his back. “So bright,” his parched voice whispers. He forces his eyes to remain open, directed upwards into the blistering blue above. “It was never like this…”

There is no breeze. The lost man’s wife has opened all the kitchen windows but the air still hangs heavy and saturated with something that her cleaning rags cannot wipe away. She has scrubbed and tidied all she can. The empty vessel that is her home, is their home - she cannot find the missing things to fill it anymore.

The man closes his eyes. He can see only her. His wife? Or is she the other woman, younger? He recalls how she had laughed. Or had she sobbed? She said it had made her so happy.

His hand clenches beside him, touching the coarse brown grass. His ring presses into his palm. “Blessed,” he says again, though he is unsure he understands the word's meaning anymore.

Time folds over itself in the heat. The blazing yellow eye pulses above, pressing through the papery eyelids of the lost man. He sees the blue flowers again. Her skirt. The blood.

Behind him, the tree creaks in the hot windless air and a crow that he does not see, lands silently in its branches. The sun climbs higher, and any lost thoughts or words that the man may have, now sit dry and empty in his mouth.

Dusk is falling and with it, a sound carries on the still air. Soft footsteps pressing the sun-baked earth of the plateau. Below, the valley is parched of memory. No longer sensing what is true now. What was true then.

On the ground, the man is quiet. He does not move. Only a flicker of a girl in a field moves behind his aching eyes. His hand is still clasped, blood still stains the creases of his palm.

She kneels beside him, silent. A hand hovers over his brow, but does not touch. “Come home,” she says, her voice low and soft. A voice from before.

The lost man blinks slowly but the sun has burned away the moving pictures that paint his eyes. He does not answer.

The woman looks out to the west where the sun is retreating. Taking all that it has seen with it, away from here. Somewhere to another place or time. She knows she cannot follow it. She must wait until tomorrow when it will rise again.

The crow leaves its branch with a single ‘caw’ and somewhere beyond the edge of the hill, the wild horses wind their way down to the lake to drink.

In the place where he can no longer find himself, the lost man’s shirt stirs faintly on the tree. The woman gently takes it down and folds it into her pocket.

Tomorrow at the sink, she will clean away the marks from the shirt. And in her chair by the kitchen window, where the sun’s rays touch her hands, she will carefully wind her needle and thread to mend the tears again.