Where the Barley Grows

You do not know me, stranger.

But I grow where the barley grows.

And once I was fat and happy, but that was many years ago. And I am tethered to this place, because I grow where the barley grows.

You cannot see me, stranger.

But I sleep in the barley fields.

Until the night. When I up and creep...

Through the whispering barley. Through the old barn. Under the eaves. Through the garden. On the roof. Upon the windowsill.

My, my, my, look at that.

An open sash. To help Baby feel the breeze. Why, if I were to push the cradle...

No, no, no. I'll do this slow.

It's what you're owed.

You cannot hear me, stranger.

For I've learned to breathe with the sighing of the pearls, the rustle of the barley bulbs. And when I up and stroll about under the pregnant moon I breathe with the lowing beasts in the barn, with the mule in the garden, with the mouser, with the baby. The little listening ear in its room with its red light will not detect me, just enrage me. More plastic, more metal. More things which the barley cannot eat.

You believe you cannot smell me, stranger, but you can. Every breath of sweet rotten air long before autumn, every fleeting hint of soured milk in a fresh pail, every unfound mouser's prize. All me. And you twist and turn about, face clouding with confusion for a second, before you shake your head and return to your happy ignorance. Your world full of things you know and understand. Your world with no room for me.

You can feel me, stranger, but you don't know it. Don't know what those unsettling dreams you've had; of you bound to a throne of ashen stalks, or with the hollowed head of gourd, or under the patient, hungry fields, really are. You wipe the sweat off your brow, and muse to your sweet wife about your imagination, unaware that the shivers you have in July are my hands around your throat.

I do not like you, stranger. For I know what the barley knows. I've listened to the twisted histories of the root-threads, and I know how you took something vast and mighty and brought it low. How over millennia you tamed the things, and in the taming you starved me out, your feed nourishing only my misery. Now my guts will not stop gnawing as I watch you taste me.

You have tasted me since the moment you declared this earth yours. Since you first drew water from the well. Since your sweet wife baked you barley bread. Since you drowning-grew the seed-babes to make the poison you love so much. You especially taste me in that. When you tip too much down your throat and see the prayer in your wife's eyes for your soul to keep bonded to your flesh another day. How touching that she cares for your health and your spirit, when both of them belong to me.

You did not know me, stranger, but now you're starting to. You know me in the seeds I planted in your children's ears at night, that made them so bored of the barley that they up and flew away. You know me in the papers the woman who was your wife handed you in tears before she left. You know me in the stiffness in the bones of the beasts in their stalls, inside that other place you know me in; that ancient, creaking, leaking barn, as you delay the inevitable. Patch the roof as best you can, only for it to break again. Fight back the mould with an age-bended hand. Coax your flock to eat the hay you swear is fresh, because it cannot have gone rotten in a single night, under a pregnant moon.

You think you are starting to see me. In a warp in the silvered mirror. In a shape underneath your eyelid. In a shadow under the barn doorway on a clear day. Your lip starts to tremble with a fear that wants to call your dog to your side, but she bolted a week ago. What did she see, I wonder...?

You finally know me, friend. I'd hoped we'd meet at last in the barley, but I found you where you fell in the barn, purpled and bloating. I let the cattle out to graze, to become fat and happy on fresh and bountiful pastures. But not you. You will stay here, in the belly of the barn, as its ribs show through the crumbled roof, forever.

It matters not, though. For the floor is earth. And the barley fields are patient, and hungry.