THE GRAIN ELEVATOR
Licensed obtained through Adobe Stock. Edited.
In the elder night when wheat hide their spotty heads below their wings, we climb the grain elevator, scratching up the side of each bin, which contains enough grain, teeming like locusts, to drown us like the bad guys in Witness. At a distance, we think we can fit these cylinders cut out of the circus tent of the sky in our hand.
We take a bloated flashlight, but never light it. Our boots know the flaking rungs to the catwalk. His hair is white at night. The land is a handful of flatness, and our tower holds the glass of our fragile union as long as the climb will last. The climbing blots out the night, and we can only see the body against metal. Tug of gravity downwards and muscles upwards. The rungs dry as smoking ice.
Lights arrive from the road, and people with the lights, and we skitter down the enamel of the silos. Away from the elevator, we fall into the fields that filled her up. Excavate a path to invisibility, plug our faces into the dirt. We touch the stalks the way the wheat touches the sides of the steel bins. And soon he will leave me behind like a scrap of paper holding a dentist appointment he already went to. The grain’s feathers settle against each other, the brush of each head embedding into another.
R.M. Fradkin has short fiction published or forthcoming in Fiddlehead, The Florida Review, J Journal, and Terrain. One of her stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She just finished her MFA at Oregon State University and is at work on a novel set in an experimental forest.