Lit

Anthology Submission

Working the front half you’d sweat out salt and ammonia and any other toxins in your body By the time you’d gotten to the back half all that came out was water, pure like well water

None of that mattered when the storm struck Despite the downpour water, salty or pure, was no longer the enemy I kept working anyway picking up the pace, not even stopping to brush the water out of my eyes Wouldn’t have helped and I didn’t want to see what I knew was coming

There was a snapping sound followed by a bright flash and a crackle so expected I didn’t so much as flinch Didn’t hit true but left behind sparks like fairy lights following each other straight for the field as if the corn was all they’d come for and that damn corn leaning towards them, as if in longing

I kept at it a few minutes longer even after the lovers met and joined though there was nothing extraordinary in the meeting. A slight glimmer, a glow, then a fading The calm before as they say as all seemed to quiet and quit while the corn rustled and sighed

There was a beat of perfect silence dimness, peace but then as if shouting, “Surprise” all the corn seemed to go up at once and with it my hopes for keeping my daddy’s farm from the bank in the middle of the concrete city and for keeping him alive

City folks don’t understand how transient human life can be amidst all of their gadgets they believe keep them safe which just shelter them from how lacking in control they really are

Up it rose smoke and tassels and fire and all below airlessness a sacrifice to a god whose cruel ways may have aided the boardroom bureaucrat in his fancy skyscraper but which never aided a solitary farmer on the back half picking corn by hand with no money to fix the broken harvester

A flicker from behind but I didn’t need to turn to know It had circled behind me I looked upward in complete disappointment as I realized the reality of what would be

God had chosen his ram one that had been sweated pure and washed clean One that would barely warrant a line in the newspaper, full of important goings on that they opened with their morning latte the perfect beige sweetness totally ignorant of the fact that only a handful of miles away all was charred, burnt, dead, gone.

Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had her poetry featured in several anthologies including Untimely Frost. Her fiction has been published in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others.

Natalie Frank, Ph.D. (Clinical Psychology) 2019

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