Nebraska "Mosaic"

*
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 followed me with their gazes. Pleas to not go to far couldn't be heard, even if they'd been spoken, over the dull rustling. Fallen heads, browning and yellowing into the soil, rolled and squished beneath my light-up sneakers. Broken stalks, fibrous and honeycombed like broken bones, (but much too brown), lay in rare prostration 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 same regret as a fallen redwood.
*
A waterstained indentation in the ancient mahogany floor greets the rare visitor. Patient bloodhound slobber pools and dries in smoky, amorphous rings in strategic places throughout the living room, dining room, and kitchen: 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 room 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 is always slick with Ruby's slobber as she dejectedly watches the chicken coop—bustling and writhing in amber- and rust-feathered isolation.
*
The King ambles to an awkward, rocking rhythm, his toes spreading wide—effeminate--through the fresh wood shavings. He's tall and red as rust in the sunlight from head to heel, and always stretches his neck skyward, with his redder crown higher. Despite the Nebraska dust, and the inevitable dirtiness of the coop, he's glossy, and hints of amber glint from his plumage as he passes a sunlit crack in the walls. The dark, weather-warped, pine walls rise around him with rows and columns of tidy nests, dropping little bits of straw in a reverent whisper onto his feathers, as the hens above him shift in their places to watch. The smell of warm eggs, freshly laid, is sweet against the dusty straw and woodshavings, and the King circles the long, narrow trough, filled with seed, watching me with a brown eye that dares me to take from his treasured harem.
*
Smoothe-tongued Roxy found the water in my cupped hands, 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 the carnation-hue tongues made the same metallic plinking as the windmill chain, rising up and down, in and out—both instruments drawing water up from below. A whispered cacophony of cattle-snorting, tongue-splashing, chain-plinking—the breeze hissing through the long grass on a barely audible major third from the rest of the noise; blades of sunlight rotating easily between the leaves of the windmill fan conducted my Nebraska chorus in an empty, sixteen-hundred-acre amphitheater of grass.
*
Violent creaking of the timelessly scraped oak rungs sounded and reverberated in the combustible barn. Driest straw housed brownest, fattest toads to be caught in hands half their diameter. Gas cans and oil cans stuck into the sandy floor, toppled onto their sides in the heady Nebraska heat, create walls for toad-runs. Children—cousins and siblings no older than 13—rustle about in the hay loft, chasing toads. Explosions of dry, breaking straw crackles like fire under their weight.
*
The basement floor of concrete, coated in slate-grey carpet, presses granules of sand into my knees and shins and the heels of my hands; the shrikes of so-much-more-than-a-spanking strike downward like stalactites, and just as silent at their ends.
*
A tunnel of drooping willows of misty green gives way to a wall of stalks, yellower than the soil, and balding—only a few heads of morosest brown remain to look downward at fallen neighbors. In four years, immovable skyscrapers of sunflowers have drowned in the heat and yellow against the sun. They crackle and hiss and waver in the breeze, trying to knock one another over, trying to push themselves upright on their neighbors' leafless shoulders.