flash fiction by sabine wilson-patrick
Modern Agriculture
They have vertebrae the size of tin cans. They loom over us—18 months to slaughter. When the field gets cold they bring us blankets that are rough like cat’s tongues and burlap; coarse wool that breaks the skin shaves our breasts to bone. We are red, like raw nerves in the winter.
They sit and they watch us as we shed life and sanity. Ann stares at the blue sky and the storm clouds as they roll in and out of view; she gives them names and makes them into the face of her aging
earth mother, so that she does not feel so foolish and alone. She treats the rain like it is physical affection, like it is mother’s love. Mary’s body is weighed down by dozens of wool blankets so that she doesn’t waste her energy shivering like the rest of us. And when they carve her open they’ll sell the skin of her back to a rich man that will pair her with Malbec and eat her rare.
Elaine is empty behind the eyes, but she nods her jaw endlessly, like there is food to be had.
They feed her obsolete technology like VHS’s and antennae TVs, led pencils and ballpoint pens. She vomits up cinderblock hard drives and rolls of film that she pulls out of her throat like something from a magic trick. And when there’s nothing more left she gnaws on her fingers that grow ever thinner. From her they will make something new. Jane hasn’t been the same since her baby came, all wriggling and wet. She sits up against the fence in the far corner of the field and pretends to cradle him in her arms, pretends she must sooth him as he cries. Further into each day she realizes that there is nothing there, that he is gone. That he was never really there. Jane makes a lowing sound with her throat and clutches her stomach, like all her insides will run away if she doesn’t hold on to them. She wails and moans and spits, bangs her head against the metal fences—wails, moans, spits, goes very still. She is still for so long that they come take her body away.
In the nighttime they usher us back to the barn, sighing noises from their gunny-sack lungs. They roll the door shut behind us and we lay hip to hip in total darkness. We break the silence with sucking and biting noises as we try to rub the dull throb of the day off on one another. Jessica and Abigail scream and moan the day into each other, to climax, to contentment. They lick the other’s brands like they’re still burning flesh. As though they can save each other. Sometimes it works and they blear out the world with spit and wetness.
Some of the girls lie on top of each other from night to night, holding each other’s faces and sucking and biting. Some girls just lie still and sleep until the sun rises and they sigh us out into the field again.
Lenna likes to chase butterflies. She runs to the edges of the field behind the marigold colored monarchs and laughs as though she is still joyful. She has learned to twist her body into knots to lick the singed patches of skin from when she wanders too far off and they have to prod her back. When it is May’s time to die, the tin-can goliaths take her by the hand to the slaughter house up the hill where we never come down from. They wrap their arms around her until she goes limp, and they hold her as she shudders and bleeds.
Sabine Wilson-Patrick, originally from Barbados, is a literature student at Cardiff University in Wales and an intern at Cleaver Magazine in Philadelphia.