Portent

Here's a little piece for a belated Three Word Wednesday. The words are earnest, layer and reactive.



Four dead cows.

It’s what I see when I drive by the farm, a flash of death just past the earnest farmhouse with its windows shuttered by tradition and Christian judgment. Everything else is a gray area.

Layers of dried mud crack on their flanks. They didn’t die where they stood, they were dragged there in those neat rows, their stiff legs all sticking out in the same direction, pointing toward nowhere. Before I congratulate myself on the 'CSI: Farm' deduction I chill because of what’s not apparent. Illness? Poison? Something reactive in their sixteen collective stomachs? Four times the chance something could go wrong, could morph through their odd, grass-processing bodies.

Was this the end or the beginning?