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by Mike Gutowski (Author)
It had become okay to play with dead things. Just had to be careful. Dead things may bite. In the places where farmers ruled as King or Queen, and cattle meandered as prey, a West Kansas town's fresh aroma of butchered beef surfed an invisible wind. A tart cow pooh scent pinched up the nostrils of tourists and short time visitors, but the locals were immune to the aroma. Wheat fields more than danced a jig amidst the wind's soft music. The wind carried a poison, unknown to a local farmer who had purchased, on the cheap, some bags of grain rejected by a sleazy out of town producer trying to make a fast buck on experimental seed product. Such was the risk and mystery of the farming ritual from year to year, sometimes from season to season. The town of Meadow City was a place where the hunger for food, for profit, for provenance the devil had noticed, so accordingly the un-sainted one dangled ethereal fables of quick riches amid the border towns. The tainted grain was sowed into the soil carpet, then nurtured in the ground for a few seasons, only to fail in quality and breadth upon the appropriate harvest time, when the product of the seed served useless except for a mysterious platitude of misery.
An open, barren plain just outside Meadow City, located about thirty or so miles east of the Colorado border, spotted by short, green grass mixed into higher beige patches, beckoned the lonely in spirit. There was one exception to this serene scene. One spot was dotted mostly by old gravestones sticking out of the ground and tucked under a lone, high cottonwood tree, where no seed wanted to grow. The tree stood as a monument to the Lincoln family who had settled this spot of ground generations ago, alone. Behind the tree a walking path led up to and over a hill.
Wind almost always blew in and around, sometimes funneled from the sky above, as a trance amidst the West Kansas plain and folk and nature's wonders. There was no escape. It had become kin to all that lived and breathed. If the wind ever had stopped, the absence acted as a bad omen. The meaning of no wind sprung silently among the townspeople the imminent horror of a tornado come to life.
On this day, the wind remained the wind, caressed the leaves of the cottonwood. All was at peace and on pace for serenity of the usual West Kansas moments of fealty to the land and to the life bestowed in a wealth of familial blessings abundant in such a place. The story unfolded like napkin linen skillfully placed upon the lap of an eatery patron who harbored a voracious appetite.
