A Shadow Farm

Written by Miranda Le from Tarbut V'torah Community Day School, Vermont, USA

She had always lived on a farm. At least, she knew she used to live on a farm. Things had been feeling rather strange lately; nothing was as she remembered. But then, she couldn’t trust her memory, either. 

Take the sparrows and the crows, for example. Always rasping, clawing, circling endlessly, those ghastly birds coughed up whitish lumps of half-liquefied grain—rancid, spongy offerings dropped at her feet. After the disastrous storm of eternal white, they were smeared in chalk, their feathers ghostly. Disgusting creatures, she thought. 

She would swing her broom, but they never left. Perhaps they tried to tell her something. But every time she listened too closely to their desperate cries, a wave crashed through her mind, burying her memory deeper into the sand. 

Sometimes she feared she had disappointed them.

The cows stayed in the barn, three full-grown creatures whose names she reached for and lost. Had she fed them already? She couldn’t be certain. She kept throwing hay into their stalls, unsure whether the blazing sun outside signalled rebirth or death. They always refused her offerings. 

Their melancholic, damp eyes pierced through her, shattering something hidden deep inside. She could not look for too long. Those eyes were wells, bottomless and moist, and when she peered in, pain seared across her body–fused with a surprising explosion of tender warmth in her breasts– and drove her weeping into the cold. 

The cows would nudge her, ever so tenderly, just as some other beings she had loved once with the entirety of her heart had done. She couldn’t help but think of them. 

Yet she could not let herself grow attached. They were cows, for goodness sake. She was a woman.

In the stables lived a horse—her husband’s before he too vanished. A great dun creature with flanks like weathered stone, mane coarse as rotted hemp.

She had never dared ride it.

After her husband had gone, the horse changed. Its fiery snort vanished; its rage softened. It would trot to her, in the grassy fields, and just stare at her for hours with an expression she couldn’t read. She often tried.

“What do you want me to do with you?” she whispered.

She received only the slow blink of cavernous eyes in response. Yet she swore she felt words pressing at the bridle of its silence. She laid her hand on its muzzle. Warm. Damp. Trembling. Something stirred behind the coarseness, something she longed to unearth but could not. 

Confusion was a storm she had carried since strange things started happening.

When not shooing crows or tending the cows, she waited on the porch, playing on the edge of her apron, waiting for her husband to come back from work. Waiting for her children to return from school. 

They were always late. Or perhaps they had never come at all. 

At night, she polished her children’s trophies, wiped down photographs of curly-haired toddlers and toothy children. As timelines slipped, sometimes they would go out to play ball as five-year-olds and return that same day as teenagers.

Stranger still, new things kept appearing. Her children’s clothes stretched, swelling larger than her own. Her husband’s wardrobe seemed worn, though she never touched it. Perhaps the horse had crept inside, lying across the bed. She screamed at it for disturbing her order. The house had to stay neat, ready for her husband’s return.

Surely it was the animals. What a nuisance they were.

What dears they were.

In time she learned to ride the horse. Or rather, it taught her. They would roam through woods, gaze at the Lake and its vast, blue nothingness, and watch tiny suns scatter like dandelions. She told the horse stories of her children, though she knew it could never understand.

The crows kept on with their grotesque attempt to get her to scoop up the powdery mush. She always refused. 

The cows always lingered at a shy, wavering distance before drifting closer. Their dark eyes held a knowing, tender yet sorrowful look, as if they bore someone else’s sadness on her behalf. She could almost sense their pain. 

Her heart would tremble as they came near; her thoughts loosened and slipped away. Memories as thin and fragile as glass caught the light inside her mind, then fractured. 

For a heartbeat, the cows vanished into that silence, replaced by strangers she didn’t know. She blinked, and the bovine were before her once more, their endless pupils coated with moist tears.

Confused yet oddly content, she kept waiting for her family.

Spring came, misty, light, and fuzzy. She felt weightless, like the mists of moonlight that permeated her cherrywood floor, as she descended into the courtyard. Her animals waited for her. The crows, for once, held their tongues. They guided her onto the horse. She let it carry her gently through the trees.

The Lake was as clear as ever. Beneath the surface, she still saw the smooth stones her children had hidden there for later. The horse halted at the edge. She leaned over the water and met her own reflection. But it was not her. An old woman wearing a blue gown stared back. Strange, she thought.

A push propelled her to step into the Lake. It was warm and soothing. The water embraced her waist. Her chest. Then the blue shrivelled around her as if morning glory petals were closing-

As the tranquil cerulean caressed her mind, for the first time, she 

r

  e

     m

         e

            m

    b

        e

r

    e

                              d 

. 

The animals wavered. Cows grew into young men and women, faces wet with tears. The horse’s back wore a flannel jacket. The crows sprouted white coats, watching in silence. She blinked. They were animals again. She smiled. She knew better now.

So her family had returned. Or maybe they’d been there all along?

Water and memory rushed together. She submerged under it without a fight. She felt peace, concealed in confusion and obscurity. She felt words, so many hidden sentences that bubbled underneath. She felt–clarity. 

- - - 

My mother thought we were never there. I know that because she kept waiting by the doorway for us, even if we were sitting next to the dinner table. I know that because she is sick. 

She doesn’t remember us. Or anything, for that matter. 

Father encourages us to talk to her. He said the doctors recommended companionship. We would come back from work and start a conversation. She wouldn’t hear us. So we would just sit there, in silence, and in the shrouds of mourning. She would sometimes toss branches at us. Or murmur about how sweet her children had been as teenagers. 

Once, she screamed at Father on his own bed. She told him that Father was going to come back any minute, and she didn’t want a horse to mess up the bed she had made. 

She would clean the house so meticulously, but leave the pictures of our weddings and newly bought furniture untouched. 

Father said my mother used to live on a farm. He said she kept many animals until they all starved to death in a drought. Mother thought our garage was that barn. We tried to keep her humored. Sometimes, Mother would hold Father’s hand and rattle on for hours and hours about us. Father didn’t dare to move, but I saw his eyes blazing red with tears he didn’t let loose.

Mother died on a cold winter morning. She wore her best dress, the blue one Father gave to her when they were much younger. She sat neatly on her freshly made bed. We gathered next to her, fearing the worst. I traced the wrinkles on her bony hands, a result of her toil for the family. My stomach tightened. I wanted to cry, but my eyes felt dry. She looked around at us, her lips lifting into the faintest smile. 

She reached her hands up, touching father’s hair. Then it was my sister, and then my brother. Eventually, it was me. Her eyes were not clouded and milky as they used to be. They were clear, bright, the amber she was born with.  

I leaned forward to embrace her, I think, my mind entangled. 

Then she called out my name. Our names.

A gasp followed. From whom doesn’t matter. 

My eyes were arid. 

I always thought dying would be a sentimental, dramatic process. Perhaps we could even make out the shape of the soul drifting to heaven. But Mother wasn’t like that. She closed her eyes. Her smile stayed. Her head tilted to the side. 

Somehow, even when she looked like she had merely fallen asleep, I could feel her life slowly ascending to her cherished animals. 

For five years she had been sick. Unclear, untrue, unseeing. At the very end, she stepped through that fog. Past us. Into a world of clarity.

Just at that point, I started sobbing.

Somewhere, far away, the Lake, her Lake, rippled, then remained very, very still.