The Barn, After

from that old describe a barn from the point-of-view of a man whose son has just died in the war prompt, circa one year ago…

      I used to think we could fix the windows up.  To fill them with colour, to stain the glass with gold and blue, a violet something like velvet, a green the colour of the undersides of leaves.  I don’t know why I ever wanted a cathedral in my back yard. 
      Now it is a place for termites and their harems of mold and moss and cobwebs that look more like wrinkles than like lace.  Spiders cling at every corner, though most of them have been eaten from the inside out by fine-beaked birds.
      You’d think the drainpipes were spinal cords, hollow and barely white and filled with the mucus of leftover rain.  Sometimes when the wind shakes the frame, the drainpipes gurgle and belch, and then all resolves to a slow siding sound, the sound of water tearing against bone. 
      It is, after all, just a skeleton cremating in the sun, for it is the sun that greys the dark red paint, peels it along the panels, and urges it into ash.  There is only randomness in the way the wood aligns to form the walls.  Only randomness in the framing of the door, the way the windows no longer share right angles.  It is a miracle that the walls are still able to meet.  
      Even the shingles are headstones.  They read: “Buried here a barn, rest in peace livestock you no longer have a solid roof over your head.”  It’s irrelevant, though, because even the Canada geese have flocked back up North. 
      When I walk through the doors, which are always propped open, it’s cold, it’s wet, the dampness clings to my hair, my entire length of hair.  I can smell buried spills of gasoline, underneath the tractor rusted still.  Curled up, at the base of one window, rests a pair of children’s overalls, empty at the knees, the buckles torn right from the fabric, the cuffs stiff and almost buried by the dust.