He sat back and looked at the words. They didn’t fit perfectly with what he felt, but they were a start. He took his time with his writing, and several scratched-out words lay among the others like casualties on a battlefield. Sometimes it was hard to write, and other times he couldn’t stanch the flow of words. They poured from the end of his pen onto the page, as if a pressure drove the words from within. He supposed that the pressure, in all actuality, came from somewhere inside him.
Lance looked back toward the yard and saw the passage of time had fully dropped the curtain on the world outside. He glanced up at the clock that hung on his wall and saw that it was well past ten. There would be chores to do early and he would need his rest.
The small farm that they lived on was a meager source of income, and at times a backbreaking one. They sold eggs from about fifty chickens to a small grocery store on the far side of town, and when the few head of cattle that his father owned produced calves, they would peddle these also at a local auction. On top of the animal duties, there were roughly fifty acres of alfalfa that yielded two good crops each summer. Lance could already feel the coarse strings of the bales cutting into his hands as he pulled each one from the baler’s chute, his father’s voice ringing harshly in the air, yelling threats that he would carry out if Lance didn’t keep up with the stream of compacted hay.
Getting up from his desk, he listened, and heard no more sounds from outside his room. His father and mother must have gone to bed some time ago, and the house was silent but for the cool wind outside that shifted its joints from time to time.
Lance made his way to his small bed and undressed, wincing at times as his body reminded him of its injuries. When his small frame was tucked beneath the thin blanket his mother had sewn herself, he finally let himself relax. All of the day’s tension, along with the worry that accompanied him every day like a sack of lead in his stomach, began to flow away. His breathing slowed, and he envisioned himself someday free of this life, traveling to other places that held beauty he had yet to learn, understanding the world without the fear of looking over his shoulder in a constant vigil.
With a final flutter of his eyelids, Lance sunk into a restless sleep, and dreamed of endless hallways and heavy footsteps echoing down them.
“Lance, wake up.”
The whisper trailed down through a whirlwind of sleep and distorted thoughts, and for a moment Lance slept on, thinking that the voice was part of his dream. When he was shaken roughly on his shoulder, he came awake at once, his eyes opening wide and staring into the white face of his mother. She kneeled beside his bed, her hair tied back in a tight ponytail, her lips pushed together so tightly they were just a thin line on her pale face. A bruise so dark and livid that it seemed to pulse in the low light extended from the circle of her eye and stretched down onto her cheek. Moonlight filtered in through his bedroom window, highlighting her hair with its pale beams.
“What’s wrong, Mama?” His voice came out in a hoarse whisper, coated with sleep.