Heartache in the Heartland

This is actually an RP post that I wrote a while back, but enjoyed enough that I felt it belonged here. It demands explanation before reading, however. The RPG this post is taken from is called Contretemps, part of Stan's wonderful site All The Little Branches. In Contretemps, all creatures of the earth have had their physical and behavioral aspects mixed due to a scientific experiment gone tremendously wrong. Brock Hanover, our protagonist, found himself hybridized with a sheep - which is not nearly as bad as what happened to his wife, who blended very unsuccessfully with a deep-sea dwelling fish. The result, well... you'll see.

The rolling fields that stretched vast around Brock Hanover were painted in graceful strokes of golden brilliance in the light of the setting sun. A gentle breeze rustled through the tall grass, a million tiny voices whispering the intimacy of their gingerly touching stalks. Wild flowers of blue, red, and gold nervously raised their colorful faces to the sky, just barely peering out from between the protective embrace of the wheat like wayward children. Brock stooped over, the chitinous black tips of his fingers tenderly grasping the stem of a cornflower before plucking it free and moving it carefully to his other hand, where a soft, bright bundle of black-eyed susans, daisies, baby's breath, and cosmos stood in contrast to his rough, dark skin. Picking another cornflower, he held this specimen to his flattened ovine nose as he began to walk, inhaling deeply with his eyelids fluttering slightly shut in the rapture of a memory. Cornflowers were always her favorite, simple and beautiful just like she had been.

In his mind's eye, he pictured the first day they had met. He was driving down rural route 40, the day of a sunset much like this one but over the halcyon bluegrass fields of Kentucky instead. It was so hot out that even at that late hour, shimmering waves crept from the asphalt, creating optical illusions that were the only interesting thing around on the flat, featureless stretch of highway. Her car, a little red pick-up, had taken a nose dive into an irrigation ditch, its back wheels raised off the ground still spinning as he pulled the truck over to assist the woman hunkered in the grass nearby. He'd been terrified that she may have been thrown from the vehicle, the way her body convulsed from its seated position on the ground, but when he asked "M'am, are you alright?" she only let out a sob and presented the body of the bird she'd been swerving to miss when she lost control of the vehicle. It was a little eastern meadowlark, common around those parts, but you'd think she'd just run over a child the way she grasped it tenderly, stroking the soft feathers on its head as he dug a little grave alongside the road at her insistence.

Then like a powder keg ignited, the happy memory was blown apart by more recent recollections of digging graves. Every grim shovelful was engraved in his memory, the sound of the metal biting into the dry summer soil, its occasional scrape against root or rock. The depth, though he made no measurement, was as precise in his mind as if he'd carefully blue-printed it before hand; he remembered that no matter how deeply he dug, it just didn't seem deep enough. He'd pulled his shoulder badly that day, frantically pitching shovel fulls of earth, not wanting to wake in the morning with a reminder more horrible than that solemn mound of dirt left behind by prowling scavengers. Oh, the awful noise of the cloth-wrapped body touching the soil, sounding heavy no matter how gently he lowered it. God! Could anyone ever really be the same again?

He mediated on the thought of her smiling face, her curly blond hair falling in front of her eyes over and over as she tried to tuck it back without using her hands clad in dirty gardening gloves. Brock could remember kneeling down and tucking those rich golden locks behind her ears, kissing her gently on the forehead while she smiled... and he remembered the sound of the shotgun blast before that same forehead, now transformed into wet and leathery gray flesh, exploded all over their kitchen floor. Bits of skull, some human, some animal, scattered across the linoleum, sharp and delicate and all too white in the red lake that bloomed around his feet. It reminded him of shattered porcelain, like the plate he'd broken the one time they really fought. Together, they'd pieced it back together and hung it over their bed that night, a reminder that no matter how hard it got, their bond would never be broken like that. Wives, you couldn't put back together so easily - he found this out in the desperate moments after he relieved her suffering in which he tried anything, everything to undo what he'd just done, crying on the floor hugging her body as he tried to hold bloody gobs of pinkish-gray brain tissue back in place with slippery fingertips too small for the size of the hole in her skull. ((run on sentence ftw!))

Tears stung Hanover's eyes, streaking down the patches of odd black flesh in the curve of his newly prominent snout as he came to stop over the obscene mound of dirt below a willow tree adjacent to the small goldfish pond in their back yard. The fish moved silently beneath the surface, scales glimmering in the fading sunlight. The bouquet of flowers in his hand was wilting by then, stems crushed by the clenching of his fists in the throes of the awful memory. He stood over his wife's makeshift grave with its haphazard oak branch cross for a long moment as the shadows began to engulf their little yard, his little yard now. Gently placing the bouquet to the dirt, he twirled the solitary cornflower in his fingertips for a moment before letting it join its companions. The wind swayed the long, drooping branches of the weeping willow so that they brushed gently against the weeping man as a meadowlark cried out from the field beyond.