So Barren Soil

by
Caucus de Bourbon

THE TIME FOR DYING rightly had passed long ago.

It didn’t start out this way. There were plans and motley dreams as to what the family might achieve. There was hope, diminished, since seized.

In a sullen pitch beneath the big, dead tree, Penn mulled such things. He’d been mulling them a while, because the decision to murder his family hadn’t come easy. There were the boys, Jericho and Bob — ”Bob” named so only because Sara remained a Dylan fan — and Rebecca, so small and sweet, with chestnut hair much like her mother. It’s just tonight, they all had to die.

“The myth of America,” Penn chuffed, concluding aloud the verdict looping endlessly in his head for weeks like an ear worm, about the prospect that a man really stood a chance to die better off than in what circumstances he was born.

Penn looked beyond the tree, across the blanched landscape to where a gated community shone brightly in the night. There they had a functional power grid. They had access to cyber. To civilization.

Not that the residents knew how to maintain it. That was the lowly job of men like Penn to do. Those who worked with their hands. Who toiled in tangibles. Who fixed the physical things broken — engines, pipes, treadmills, dogs.

The rabies forced Penn to “fix” his family’s dog some while back. What little, lasting joy remained in the house, or the barren soil outside it, vanquished in an instant by a single round.

The kids had seen him do it. Sara, too. The horror in her eyes only confirmed in Penn’s mind that the time had finally come. With debts insurmountable, a future that promised only further punishing servitude, mere survival was no longer enough.

Penn rocked off his knees and into a clunch, chin pressed into the top of his chest. He placed the revolver on the dry earth before him, kicking up dust, its chrome surface glinting pallid moon. Five unspent bullets remained inside. All Penn would need.

He squinted tears, then glanced one drop to the ground. The most wet this ground has felt in memory, Penn thought, fixating on the dark splotch of dirt between his feet.

Yet in it, for much longer than a moment, Penn spied a fitful bloom.

FLASH FICTION

SO BARREN SOIL