Sometimes there’s an unexpected longevity in a short story and the thing becomes massive – I don’t mean on the page – but in the head. That’s what happened with this one. I didn’t even try to wind it down. I know when I’m beat.

It’s how novels happen.

But but but.

There’s no way I can take it on at the moment, I mean I have a job and am already juggling several too many writing projects, I am too busy to get gobbled up with anything new, I don’t see how I can possibly manage.

Except maybe another in the Next Door series – The Fields Next Door? – could be a family name or could be the fields themselves OR BOTH!

Good thing I work well under self-sabotage because I feel a serial coming on.

And so, as the narrator in this story – chapter? – so succinctly says, here fucking goes.

Barely Home by Sherry Cassells

My grandfather was barely a farmer. He preferred house plants.

During the winter months while my grandmother embroidered her way to heaven he learned to Frankenstein cacti. I was a childhood insomniac, I spent weekends at the farm and sometimes I’d get up in the night and I’d catch his monsters blooming. Some flowered for only a few seconds, others a minute or two, it was brief and gruesome and beautiful. 

He was always watching them, too, my fellow insomniac said he’d never missed a bloom, he waited in tearful delight. My grandfather never cried but for joy, and I have the same thing, equal and opposite, I laugh at sorrow. I am a nightmare, watch out.

My parents thought my grandparents were ridiculous, my mother admitted that she barely loved them, I am unsure if love can be modified by the word barely, I think it is love or it is not love, she said it was due to convention and obligation that she visited them at all, my father said they were harmless, he insisted they were harmless, but he later changed his mind, he said they had inflicted emotional damage on their only daughter, he said that his wife could barely love.

Whatever afflicted my grandparents afflicted me in equal measure, our kinship was undeniable, we squinted and stuttered and occasionally limped, we were insomniacs. While my grandfather and I watched the cacti, my grandmother spun wool in the corner, I remember the sound felt like the gears in my head, we were all allergic to dew and lint – and I realize only just now – perhaps prone to hypochondria. My mother pointed out that my weirdness, her word, was an enhanced version of theirs, more aggressive she said sweetly. I knew the sweetness was a put-on, she didn’t love me either.

On one side of the living room my grandmother embroidered like breathing, she dragged her home-spun wool through square holes, her arm exaggerating the loop, inhaling and exhaling, the occasional cough at a thick bit, she looked like a medieval surgeon. My grandfather on his side of the room practically levitating with delight, slicing his juicy monsters together, peering through a series of magnifying glasses that hung from the ceiling by strands of wool, they sent bubbles of light twirling about the room, perfect bright circles slid over my grandmother, I could feel them on my back. His abominations gnarled on the windowsill stabbing the winter sky, I half-expected it, the sky I mean, to burst and slip away, revealing sleepy galaxies.

She embroidered sentence fragments from the Bible, she stitched over her own penciled-in cursive upon burlap stretched over the skeleton of a collapsible dinner tray, her fork a needle her needle a fork, she picked around the edges of each word, pick pick pick, and then she filled them in, with gusto, PICK PICK PICK, her arm pumping the corner of my wide eye.

I didn't know how my grandfather maintained such a level of calm, how he was able to sit perfectly motionless and watch nothing slowly happen as his grafts took or did not take, he told me he was able to control his pulse, he said he could hold his breath for fourteen and a half minutes, that his heart beat in threes. I imagined a barely there waltz beneath his plaid pyjama pocket.

My grandmother did not have the stamina her husband did, she became bored of her work, I could never understand the words she chose, I mean if you had to pick a sentence from the Bible you would want to pick one with some oomph, but hers were dull and common – Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!  – is it any wonder she never finished a piece before she started the next. 

We used the incomplete as tea towels, the unstitched burlap eventually frayed away, little licks of it down the sink, between our cushions and toes, my father used them in the soil to retain moisture. A select few of the embroidered words remained intact, I scrubbed pots and dishes with Bible words such as behold wicked praise father, I don’t know why only the six letter words survived.

She eventually switched to Mr. Rogers quotations and my grandfather switched to roses, I could leave it at that but I feel the truth coming on, I used to lie and hide and execute enormously long and earnest stints with normalcy, I was good at it but it was unfulfilling and always ended in disaster.

As I said I am a nightmare.

What began my transformation into an honest farmer was the first quote she ever finished, she framed it and banged it into my bedroom wall: The greatest gift you can ever give is your honest self.

So here fucking goes. 

It’s barely raining, just a whisper over the fields. 

I inherited the farm and an inability to run it.