Barn Burning
on Sep 19 in Blog Post by johnhornor
We walked through fields asleep with snow in the twilight of the year. Clouds skittered across the sky, pale blue and indifferent to our grief as we came upon the weathered old barn, paint scaling, where she had hung herself. Underneath the sky we diminished and shrank, down into ourselves, hunched into parkas, billowing breath into the air from mouths too dumb to speak. She had climbed into the loft, still smelling of summer hay, and shimmied out onto the rafter where she let her leaden body fall to swing by the neck until her father found her. Erik spread the gasoline along the old planks and soaked the walls while Mary and I smoked cigarettes she’d stolen from her mother and drank brandy from a plastic flask, holding the matches in our trembling hands like bright unborn sparks. When Erik finished, dead-eyed, we lit matches and threw them together, holding hands and running away from the blast of heat only to turn and watch from the treeline as the barn turned yellow, red, and golden, drawing a long gray line from the earth to heaven.
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Six sentences.
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So Random
Get Some Books, Y’all
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Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” was longer (imagine that) and a prequel of sorts to his Snopes novels. Is yours a prequel? Is it? IS IT?!
Seriously, good stuff, man. Nice prose.
Jesus. Well done.