"Down"

Skyscraper sunflowers raised their seeds skyward, and then drooped at the last possible moment, just behind the blossom, in a creaseless arc; the translucent hairs of their stalks pushed my fingers away. Like thistles beneath a magnifying glass, great, veinous leaves, covered in a vicious fuzz on their undersides, gave shade to the yellow soil and hissed in a drowsy chorus as they brushed against one another in the breeze. Towering ten feet--twelve feet--to my four, the field of verdant pillars looked down to follow me with their gazes. Rare, broken stalks, fibrous and honeycombed like broken bones, (but much too brown), lay prostrate against the yellow earth. Trying to prop up those that were wilting, and failing to bolster them after all, I'd push the weak ones over with the same regret as if I'd felled a redwood. Pleas to not go too far, even if they'd been uttered, couldn't be heard over the dull rustling of fallen heads, browning and yellowing into the soil as they rolled and squished beneath my light-up sneakers.
*
A waterstained indentation in the ancient mahogany floor greeted the rare visitor. Slobber of patient bloodhounds pooled and dried in smoky, amorphous rings in strategic places: between the coffee table and the tweed, sun-faded sofa; at the entrance to the living room from the hall; in the middle of the living room, almost exactly five feet from the t.v.; at the corner of the dining rooom table, between grandpa's chair and the bay window; at the space next to the groove worn into the floor at the base of the sink. An old ring, at the door of the kitchen to the yard outside, was always slick with Ruby's slobber as she dutifully watched the chicken coop--bustling and writhing with dust from every crack and crevasse.
*
The King ambled with an awkward, rocking rhythm, his toes spreading wide--effeminate--through the fresh wood shavings. Despite the summer dust, and the inevitable dirtiness of the coop, he was glossy, and hits of amber glinted from his plumage as he passed a sunlit crack in the walls. Tall and red as rust from head to heel in the streaks of sunlight, he stretched his head skyward, with his redder crown higher than I was, until he looked down at me. The dark, weather-warped walls rose around him with rows and columns of tidy nests, dropping little bits of down and straw ont his feathers in a reverent whispers, as the hens above him shifted in their places to watch. The smell of freshly laid eggs was warm and sweet agains the dusty straw and wood shavings. The King circled the long, narrow trough, filled with seeds, watching me with a brown eye that dared me to take from him.
*
Smooth-tongued and blind, Roxy found the water in my cupped hands that I had scooped up from the large, aluminum tank. Runny-nosed snorts of protest from the cattle did not deter the pack of twelve bloodhounds from rearing up and draping their front paws over the tank rim for a drink. The water splashing into their mouths from their carnation-hue tongues made the same metallic plinking as the windmill chain, rising up and down, in and out--both instruments drawing up and sinking back down to draw for more. A whispered cacophony of cattle-snorting, tongue-splashing, chain-plinking--the breeze winding and hissing through the long grass just above the rest of the noise; blades of sunlight, rotating easily between the leaves of the windmill fan, conducted the Nebraska chorus to the empty, sixteen-hundred-acre amphitheater of grass.
*
Violent creaking of the termite-grooved oak sounded and reverberated in the combustible barn--no smooth surface, just tiny ridges and grooves over every inch, like a failed attempt at cursive. Driest straw housed brownest, fattest toads--to be caught in little hands. Toppled gas cans and oil barrels made for a grand arena in the sandy floor. Children--cousins and siblings no older than 13--rustled about in the hay loft, chasing their gladiatorial toads and dropping them down into buckets, while explosions of dry straw, breaking beneath their weight, crackled like fire.
*
The basement floor of concrete, coated in slate-grey carpet, pressed granules of sand into my knees and shins and the heels of my hands; the shrieks of so-much-more-than-a-spanking struck down like stalactites, but they were never so silent at their ends.
*
A tunnel of drooping willows of misty green gave way to a wall of stalks, yellower than the soil, and balding--only a few heads of morosest brown remained to look down at fallen neighbors. In four years, immovable skyscrapers of sunflowers forfeited thei green to the heat, and yellowed against the sun. They crackled and hiss and wavered in the breeze, trying to knock one another over--trying to push themselves upright on their neighbors' leafless shoulders.