1/26/17

Autumn returned and calm settled over the hill. The anguished sun was tangential with the skyline drawn by distant headlands. The reflection of its parting rays emanated from the steel dome of a silo and the wind sent waves shimmering through the grass down the slope of the valley. Toward the peak of the agrarian precipice, a timeworn oak writhed from the soil with its appendages gnarling against the power lines. The ashen cladding of a rural dwelling stripped like bark revealing its raw flesh beneath the rot-blotched roof of corrugated tin. In the adjacent hayfield, a small riding mower had succumbed to the predominance of the landscape.  Its blades and gears were overrun with vegetation; the ghost within the machine had evacuated. Resuscitated brush encroached upon all of the inanimate clinging flush with any form or curvature. The vantage of the hilltop exposed decrepit smokestacks from beyond the pines exhausting an opaque white which diffused to meld a thin veil over the climbing townscape.
The boy unfolded rusted bilco doors with a metallic screech bellowing from the depths of familiar obscurity. Down he descended. The step began to crumble beneath his foot and he hastily braced the inner cement wall. The soles of his shoes started to skate down the stairway. Now on his hindside, the jagged fixtures grazed up the back of his shirt grinding against the osseous cogs of his spine. He landed with his bare back to the dank foundation with gravel embedded in his palms.
“Did you bust your ass, my love?” the girl jeered from above ground.
The boy peered up behind him at the inpouring rays that illuminated a plume of turbulent dust. Conscious of the rafters above, he slowly rose to his feet, brushed the soot from his pants and flapped the back of his shirt.
	“I scraped my back a little but I’m alright.” he said. He whisked cobwebs from his stubbled face and brow.
The girl followed, warily sliding by her rump down each step and the white of her thighs flashed from beneath the hem of her denim shorts. The boy studied her concentrated, dainty movements as well as each responding contraction in her facial expression.
“Very graceful.” He said.
	“Why thank you, sir.” She bowed an impish curtsy and patted out the dust around her hips and buttocks.
	They ventured with crooked necks through the narrow decay. The air saturated stale with unstirred sediment and musty timber. Putrid effluvia of aged motor oil lingered from rusted cans stockpiled years ago in the outer recesses of the crawl space. A brick support column stood as a monolith dividing the cavity into cardinal pockets of darkness, each hoarding their own silhouettes of miscellany. The boy blindly reached about until he snagged a line of yarn by the middle and forefingers igniting a sulfuric filament burning the age from its bulb.  They gandered through the novelty knick-knacks and scrap metal forlorn to the rural polyandrium.
“Who crammed all this stuff down here like this?” she said.
“My grandparents kept everything, bit of a hoarding problem.” the boy said. “It’s going to take some effort hauling it all out of here though. My family’s been lookin’ to renovate the place hoping to sell it. ”
At the end of the passage, the couple shuffled up a slender wooden staircase riddled with warp and rot and squealed a smudged sliding door off of its tracks entering the kitchen. The taupe linoleum bulged and eroded from the generations of incessant parades upon it. The windows sat matte with scuzz. In the center of the mangled floor stood an oblong dining table set for eight with a slip of cardboard folded in half twice and wedged beneath its corner leg. At one head of the table, a delicately embroidered pillow with lace frills was laid atop the chair. Kiddy-cornered at the opposite side was a praline fabric, button-tufted recliner chair, mammoth in stature, aslope upon a haphazard heap of archival newsprint and tabloid. Stowed away behind it stood a pyramid of mason jars and coffee cans with holes punctured through the lids; contraptions sealing away age old conjurations of candleflies that once flickered through the ethereal night. The disparaging rays which managed to pierce the voids in the plywood highlighted a residual film that over the years settled over the furnishings like peach fuzz.
“This place looks like death.” the boy said.
“I don’t know, I think it’d be real cozy if someone fixed it up.” She said
“Smells of it too.” the boy said. He reached to his back pocket and rattled the swill of a flask before draining the remainder of its contents and ambled over to the armchair.
“It has that country charm.” the girl said as she continued through the home. She poked about the dust packed curtains and picked at the exfoliated wallpaper.
He lit a cigarette before collapsing his weight into the cushion. His knee jolted up.
“I think I just got penetrated by a spring.” he said.
The girl chuckled behind her infantile hand and sat at the arm of the recliner and took a drag from his smoke then handed it back.
	“There’s nothing charming out here; nothing to speak of, just cruel Mother Nature.”
 He sank back into the cushioning staring blankly ahead, his shoulder brushing against the smooth oblique of her midriff.
The girl looked at him with her coy mouth skewed to one side and narrowed her amorous eyes and sank in after him. They sat stiffly as the ash crept up along the cigarette between his lips until the boy sprang from the seat and shuffled to the rear of the chair. A moment of silence lingered along the room with mock interjections of curious grumbles from the boy as he perused about the scummy jars and cans. Once the heat of his fluster passed the boy glanced back up to a derisive glare that instantly dissipated to a cool gaze.
“My grandpa’d probably be rolling in his grave to see me defile his reading chair with all the temptations of the devil.” the boy said with a desperate smirk.
She rolled the side of her head against her shoulder in dissonance. He leaned against the chair and peeked between the curtains toward the sanguine meniscus then motioned toward the cellar skidding his fingertips along the table chairs.
“We ought to call Pancho back before he gets into something.” said the boy.
After some calculation the girl rose from the chair and followed him out.

Across the road, the burnished tail bobbed like an angler above the reedgrass that stretched passed a stone’s throw against the tree line. The boy hollered but the rustle of the weeds without rhyme or reason willfully wandered.
“Go grab him before he goes out too far. Its getting dark.” she said as she opened the door of the sedan and turned over the ignition.
“He’s likely to get snakebit rummaging out there.” he said. Yet again he called for the heedless dog.
He reluctantly scurried, hiking up his jeans midstride and hopped over a ditch opposite the road plunging into the perennial. The earth beneath the populous growth was slick like clay from recent rain and the boy’s frontfoot skid backward with every skip until he slid downward into a kowtow. He rose to his feet and looked at his muck caked knees through the split denim. He was disillusioned to see the dog more than a pitch’s distance away. Embittered further was he to see the impatient expression of the girl resting with her elbows propped on top of the open car door. She funneled her hands against her mouth.
“Panchoooo!”