Alex George

Lapsing Solipsism

 

 

          It was a bright and sunny day when the farmer killed his wife and daughter.

         He trudged around in the soil, feeling the gaining chill of the coming winter. No crops were growing, no matter how much he watered them. As he lumbered about, tending to the seeds, he stubbed his toe on a rake he had left lying in the field. The impact brought him to his knees. He stared at the soil, at the tiny, white dots on the brown, seeds lying above the soil where he could see them. And all the premonitions of the hunger of the next winter hit him and broke him, and he wept, salty teardrops falling from his face. The soil devoured them.

          When he rubbed the tears from his eyes and finally opened them, he beheld a tiny, green child plant bursting out from its home, among an ocean of tiny white dots.

          Impossible. If this plant was there before, he would have seen it. The field was too empty to miss it. Insanity. But what if…no, impossible. But he tried it nonetheless, if only to make peace with himself. He put himself over another seed and brushed his face, letting his table-scrap tears dive into the earth. It was done. He blinked once and the earth went from barren to barren with a speck of green gold.

          He needed to use the magic of his tears. Whatever necromancy or witchcraft had caused this could be blessed by a thousand gods for all he cared. All he cared about was the crops. To get himself to cry, he tried yawning and sticking his finger in his eye, but no tears sprang up. Then he took more drastic measures. He took the rake and beat himself with it, each time increasing the intensity, but it didn’t work. His eyes were as barren as the field.

          The farmer’s wife called out to him from his small house. He ran his thumbs under the straps of his sun-bleached overalls. Loss. He flashed back to the memory of his father’s death, where in a momentary surge of philosophy he realised that loss was the only true source of unhappiness. At least, nothing had made him as truly unhappy as that. His father had once taught him one thing that he treasured forever: the tough choices in life are what truly define a person.

          So here was the choice: survival or love. His daughter was inside, probably brushing her hair. Probably playing with a doll. It wasn’t even a question. He called his wife out into the field and, with all his might, struck her in the head with the rake and, as she lay sprawled there, her face submerged in the soil, he struck her again and again until her head caved in.

          He didn’t cry.

          The farmer thought of his daughter again. So here was the choice: survival or love. It made sense that he didn’t cry over his wife’s death. He had argued with her constantly for years, trapped in an unhappy marriage. But his daughter, he loved her more than anything. But only he had the magic tears, only he could bring food to this wasteland. And it was better that one survive than none. It wasn’t even a question. He went into her room and dragged her, kicking and squirming and yelling, out into the field, where he could complete his work.

          He cried. But first, he had to spend an hour contemplating the gravity of his loss. Then he saw the sky go from yellow to orange to black as he filled the soil with his tears. It was done. The field was now a sea of little green children tickling his covered legs as he trudged back to his house.

          His room had a large window which faced the bed. It would be dark, but at least he would be able to see the vague silhouettes of the results of his work. He did. As he lay under the covers, he saw them all, but he saw more of the field than he usually did. It seemed as though the whole thing lay before him. It was much brighter as well. He could tell it was night, but he could pick out every single plant in the field, yet somehow their shade of green looked darker than it did on the field. He assumed they appeared that dark because of the surrounding darkness, but he wasn’t sure. It was strange.

          They were getting closer.

          The farmer threw off his covers and rushed outside. He ran along the path carved out from the field, still aware of the vague outlines of the plants on either side of him. On the edge of the field there stood an outhouse with a star hole in the front. He rushed inside and stayed there for what must have been an hour, in a place still somehow smelling of his own excrement, staring out into his field in darkness, watching as no plant moved an inch. Only when he left the outhouse did he walk in a straight line to his house. At least, that was how it felt, as if the plants had cleared a path for him so he wouldn’t have to take the previous path that turned and turned him around in circles. That was how it felt. He was sleepy.

          In the morning, the farmer decided to cut the fruits the plants were now bearing. When he got a machete from his shed and went to cut the first pod, the plant grew, shooting up into the air, expanding, its stem enlarging and its leaves multiplying, going off in all directions. The sun shone down and burned his eyes when the farmer tried to see the top.

          The ground rumbled. Beside him, another plant shot up, and another to the opposite side. And soon they were all sprouting all over the field, pillars tearing into the sky. The plant under him shot up, and for a moment he was being raised, raised and seeing the field with all the stalks jutting up into the sky, and he saw the almost endless grass sprawling on for miles beyond his farm, monotonous in its green covering.

          And he fell, his stomach twisting and rising up in his body as the wind pushed up from under him. The plant was still rising behind him as he landed on the field. The fall had hurt him enough for him to be immobile, just lying there as the field rose above him, the sorcerous impossibilities infinite.

           Eventually, the ground stopped shaking, and the plants stopped growing, now the tallest structures the farmer had ever seen, but now the plants were rumbling a bit, and the farmer noticed that large pink flowers which had not been there before now topped each plant, and the petals now came apart, fell from the flowers, floating down onto the field, and what the petals covered revealed themselves, all giant rainbow-coloured butterflies, larger than the flowers themselves, wings wrapped around their bodies.

          The butterflies flew into the sky and took mere seconds to organise into a perfect ring, circling the field like vultures, the sun’s rays beating down through the hole, yellow connected lines. What did vultures do? A dread filled the farmer, not unreasonably, he thought, given the situation, though they were still butterflies, and such insanity could only be expected when dabbling in magic.

          The farmer pushed himself up from the ground, his back aching from the fall, and ran to the tractor in his shed. If he took the tractor, he could probably find someone in town who could help him. He could already imagine it, those butterflies descending to feast on him, but he couldn’t think about that now. Starting the tractor, thunder burst out from it, storm clouds coming out from behind it, and though it was not lightning, it would do.

          He ran the tractor straight through his white picket fence, not even brothering with the proper exit. And soon noise filled the silent air of the countryside, a line of the land blackened with lingering smoke. A butterfly descended and glided beside the tractor, and the farmer was certain that it would destroy him, but it just glided, and it flapped its wings twice, and the grass bowed under its majesty. The farmer needed to be careful. One wrong move and the butterfly would destroy him.

          It rolled around, wrapping its wings around like they had been in the flower, and it flew back up to the sky, its wings now spread.

          The butterflies seemed to not to move but their ring followed him like the moon.

          When he got to the town, the butterflies seemed almost invisible to him in the glaring sun. He could turn his head to the head to the sky for no more than a second without his eyes burning.

          The tractor made the only noise in the town. The streets were barren, dust blowing in faint clouds, slightly hovering. The buildings stood without activity, some with windows boarded. No people shouting out windows or running through the doors or anything of the sort.

          The farmer turned off the tractor and hopped off, his legs quivering a bit as he landed. He lumbered through the town, which was definitely as abandoned as it had appeared from atop the tractor, and headed for the town square, where he had set up shop time and time again to sell any surplus of food he might have grown during the summer so he could buy more farming implements and other things. He didn’t have that surplus now.

          “Turn around, now,” a man said, his voice dripping with sand.

          So the farmer turned around. A man stood in front of him, holding a rifle to his head, sporting a silver star, a lawman, standing in front of the inn, which had really been the whorehouse, from the farmer’s experience. A look of recognition flashed across the lawman’s face, and he nodded and lowered his rifle.

          “Where’s everyone here gone to?” the farmer asked.

          The lawman snorted and turned around, gesturing to the farmer. He followed him into a small building near the edge of town, a place that served as both the jail, the rusty, jagged bars enough to kill a man accused of petty theft, and an office for the high-ranking lawmen of the town.

          The lawman opened a drawer and took out a revolver and twelve bullets for it. He used six of those bullets to load the gun, and then handed the gun with the leftover bullets to the farmer.

          “Only turn on the safety if you know you need to.”

          The farmer nodded and put the bullets and the gun in his front pocket.

          “What are we doing?” the farmer asked.

          “We’re leaving here and going to the city. They probably have something that can help us. But to actually get out of here, we’ll need a strategy, so I propose waiting until night and lighting that wooden building up on that hill a bit off from here on fire. That should get us the opportunity to get out of here. You can go, and I’ll be here in case anything goes wrong on this end, which it probably will.”

          So they waited until night. The farmer took a bed in one of the urine-smelling cells and watched dust move on forever through light rays streaming through a crack in the cell wall, seeing that light dim and dim until it disappeared, releasing the dust. Once, he thought a bird chirped and asked the lawman about it. He claimed to have not heard it, so the farmer cursed his faulty ears and went back to listening for the bird’s next chirp. It never came.

          By the time night arrived, it was nearly impossible to see, so the lawman took thirteen torches from a room in the back of the building and went out to put the torches on the ground in front of thirteen buildings, each held by pots with bases of candlewax. The light, negligible as it was, would be enough to get them out of the city, as well serving as a place for the farmer to meet the lawman after he set fire to the building. Going up that hill would be tough in the black, but the farmer would manage.

          The butterflies still circled in a sparkling ring, bright as a second moon.

          “Remember what I told you about the safety on that gun,” the lawman said as the farmer was getting into his tractor, which the lawman had brought to the building earlier.

          The farmer nodded.

          The people in the city could help them. They had stores of food.

          He started the storm again and started climbing the hill, the tractor making even more noise than it did before. The grass on either side of the road stood and fell and stood again in the breeze, now green and black, now black and black in thick clouds. The wheels sounded as though they were crushing the ground, and for a minute the farmer thought they might have actually been doing that, cracking the earth and releasing whatever demons lurked underneath, but he didn’t check to see if this was the case. It wasn’t.

          The farmer looked to the sky, at the ring of butterflies. Why did he need to bother with this convoluted plan? Who was to say it would work? Who was to say that the lawman had not tricked him, that he would not abandon him as soon as he lit the building? No, he couldn’t trust him.

          But what was to be done with the butterflies? He pulled the pistol from his pocket, and it seemed to gleam in an absent light. He shot twice into the ring off in the distance, the force of it rocking him and the sound silencing the tractor. One butterfly fell from the ring, plunging without a fight, rainbow-coloured flakes falling after it, lighting up the darkness.

          The butterflies dispersed. A dozen they must have numbered, all gliding with sparkling, rainbow-coloured trails until the sky was lit again, until the whole sky was a colourful day, a messily woven dye. He shot twice again, and another fell.

          He needed to be careful. He needed to aim carefully. He knew he could kill them all if his shots were accurate. He could destroy the plague on this place. He would be the one to do it. He could do it, just if he closed his left eye and held his arm straight. He knew that was the proper way to do it. The farmer was not stupid. Now, where were his other bullets?

          They ate him.

 

 

 

Matthew Martin: “I am a writer and student living in Jamaica. Most of the stories and poems I write try to maintain a nuanced view on conflict. When I'm not writing, I'm reading or watching movies.”