Trembling With Fear 05/01/2019

Drought Demon by Will H. Blackwell, Jr.

It has been dry many times before, here in this far-west finger of Oklahoma—lying, almost like an afterthought, above the equally barren Texas-panhandle—I mean prolonged, damaging, dry-spells in which even the most ‘arid’ wheat-varieties didn’t make crop.

But, this time is different—worse—much worse!

There is a kind of strange stillness out there, this time—a nefarious calm, just sitting there, not far in front of the death left behind in its oven-like wake.

I can sense it, out past the toxic, tallow droppings of the far-yard’s last, living chinaberry-tree—beyond the scattered heaps of brittle cicada-shells.

I am becoming increasingly aware of this ‘presence’ in the closing distance—cruel and crouching—inching forward, among the prairie’s remnants of blue-grama and buffalo grass. It stretches from where level land rises into the ambiguous horizon—like some flat joke of a mountain—to, now, disturbingly near the borders of my sprawling property.

But what does one really see out there? Nothing? Nothing, is precisely what one sees!

No matter! I know it’s there—this deceptive, potentially fatal, void—this slowly encroaching, hollow body—is definitely there!—regardless of what’s not seen!

And, it is patient—Oh, so patient!—this pale, diffuse corpus, unfurling, yet hiding in plain sight—and now, with time seemingly on its side. It is as surely there, as anything obviously resident—as surely as the tumbleweeds, that stack up against the fencing.

This insidious, vacuum-like presence—still all but invisible—is so cleverly, perfectly, staged—temporarily perched quietly, but threateningly, in a potentially dangerous position—like some huge, transparent vulture, wings spread wide, on a low limb of a phantom tree. It expands just ahead of a dead-zone, already consumed, trailing back in the prairie-rise as far as one can see.

But within it, now, a centrifugally growing, nebulous ‘substance’—an ominous haze, like some interstellar gas-cloud blocking stars at night—is suddenly making it more difficult to see, through it, beyond it—as it gains its own being—its own life.

Why, I’ll bet it’s even humming its own, inaudible, hideous tune—just waiting—wanting—wanting to suck the life right out of me—like viscous, yellow juice, pressed slowly from the abdomen of a June-bug.

It edges closer still. I can feel its desiccating presence—its unseen, dehydrating tentacles.

The depressingly tabled, fallow fields sense it too; I can tell. But they offer no protection. There is nothing out there left standing, at least that can be seen—no line of cottonwoods, anymore, to break the dry wind that stirs, angrily, then dissipates.

Even the dust-devils—as common this time of year as the orange-dirt itself—are afraid, and have ceased their swirling patrol over the diminished landscape. They turn now only within my mind—the brain’s increasingly lonely expanse—a kind of spinning memory that funnels revolving, powdered silt into static, granular, ever-more-useless gray-matter.

It’s hard even to think! My mind has gone numb, in the awful dryness.

Breezes, only sporadically coming through, lift into the air from the heat, tilting the rusted rooster-vane above the barn-eaves—causing it to creak, and rock awkwardly—sometimes making a squawking sound, almost as if alive. Or…..hell…..

Maybe it is alive!—brought to life, oddly, somehow, by the infusion of this drastic climatic circumstance—or perhaps by the tenuous, apparently supernatural being, gathering—ever-so-slightly coalescing at times—just outside the near-pasture.

Many things that were living here are now dead. No doubt! And yet, it is possible they are being merely altered to another state by this shimmering, surreal environment of heat, light and drought.

Are they being mummified, by such unnatural conditions, even as I attempt to ponder this insane situation?—bizarrely preserved—like human bodies left out in the sands of very-ancient Egypt, before the time of the pharaohs.

Or, maybe some dead objects, recently alive, are even in the process of returning to life?

Perhaps such transformations could occur!—a kind of dust-imbued ‘sea-change’ in the midst of this broad ocean of dry, cracked earth. Who knows?

Maybe my old redbone hunting-hound will come back to life?—or maybe the longhorn-steer that hung itself in bends of barbed wire last week—or, maybe that stray coyote shot near the waterless creek-bed.

I mean, this weird stuff gets to you after a while. Your mind starts playing tricks. You can imagine all kinds of things, while watching—waiting—for rains to come, that never come—a wait that stretches the minor pain of patience into a long plain of deepening frustration—into an anxiety, that turns rain into mirage.

But I tell you, that gaining abyss is out there—still stalking from a distance, but now closer—close indeed! It is a silent, merciless, parching predator that searches, seeks and enters—mind, body and soul, or what’s left of any of these.

I think it has already slipped through the thin perimeter of prairie-dog mounds, and is moving in toward fringes of the yard—or what used to be yard before the lawn-grass, and carefully hand-planted shrubs, dried up—no water left to irrigate! The well went mostly dry some days back. I can only get enough water for a strictly rationed drink.

It is so close, now, I see beyond it again—its swathe through the scorched farm-sections—the accruing squares and rectangles of burned-out rangeland.

It is near enough, that I feel the outflow of its hot breath, beginning to burn my flesh.

There is no doubt, any longer, of the brutally harsh intent of this lucent, protean beast—seemingly born from the margins of hell.

Maybe it is a lobe of hell, that has been secretly rising, perhaps for a while now.

If only I could clearly see it, where it comes from—its devious approach. If I could just take a picture, I could prove its existence, at least to myself.

Or, perhaps it’s better—until that singeing, widening, enveloping maw from Hades finally surrounds me—not to know the horrible truth, for sure.

So I think I’ll just try to savor these last moments, as best I can, and memories of this place in better—if often hard—times.