Write-On Prompt: Gone

 Note: Tuesday night was Prompt night at the Write On Writing Group in Rock Falls. I wrote the below based on the prompt: "You hear news of your next door neighbor vanishing without a trace." I decided to write a story in multiple short segments in hopes that the sparseness of the scenes would help to build the tension. I like how this turned out, and hope to maybe develop it some more. Let me know what you think if you get a chance to read it. 

Gone

The rooster crowed, belting out it’s daily greeting like nothing was changing. Annie stayed in bed, a film of sweat covering her face, the weight of the damp air pressing on her like a rolling pin. The sun wasn’t up, but it was already at least seventy degrees, something unheard of in Illinois for late October. It would be another day in the 90s, the thirty-seventh consecutive day to be exact and the fiftieth in the last sixty. Annie wondered if people were melting.

***

The hens rarely laid eggs anymore, and the eggs they did were like golf balls, hard and hollow. She scattered corn on the floor of the pen, halfheartedly, they clucked with just as little enthusiasm. Routine was the last comfort for Annie and the chickens. Only the rooster seemed to have some gusto, tearing around with his breast pushed out and pecking the dirt with such vigor that she was sure he might crack the dry ground open revealing a gorge that plunged all the way to the earth’s core. Annie envied him, she could barely eat anymore, her nerves had twisted knots in her stomach.

***

Eli arrived at 10, wearing nothing but a tattered pair of cutoff jean shorts. He was thirteen, tan and lean. His yellow hair was long and unruly, and his bare feet look battered. His eyes were pink and puffy.

Annie was trying to get milk from her last cow. The others had either died or run off in search of greener pastures. Or just were gone, just like folks around the country. Gone. As if God were plucking them right from the earth and taking them up to heaven. Some reason though, Annie suspected God didn’t have anything to do with this.

“Mama was gone this morning.” Eli said. “Same as papa last week. Just gone.”

“You check the barn?” Annie said.

“You think I’m stupid.” Before all this, everyone knew Eli was going to age into a real heartbreaker. Now, he just looked sad and angry, the sort of angry that turns potential into disaster.

“No, Eli.”

“They just are gone. Papa was in the middle of fixin’ the tractor last week. I went to look for a wrench he asked for, and when I come back, he was gone, and the oil was running out the engine into the grass.

“And your mama?”

“She was frying the last of the bacon. I could hear her humming while I was laying in bed. It smelt so good. I must of dozed off because the next thing I knowed there was smoke all over the house. She’d never just leave with bacon on the stove like that. It was burnt as black as charcoal. I looked everywhere for her.”

“That makes six on the road.”

“Aye.”

“Did you go tell Charlie and Millie?”

“I was gonna, but I was scared. I thought for sure I was the only one left in the whole world.”

“I guess we better let them know.”

***

Charlie and Millie lived a mile east in what they called their retirement home. Their son, Angus lived in the farmhouse a farm block over and managed the family’s three hundred acres and a hundred head of cattle. At least Angus did until two days ago. Angus was gone now. Charlie was unretired, he’d told Annie yesterday, but there was no charm or humor in it. Just heartbreak.

Millie was a thinning, gray-haired woman, who’d already lost one son to the war and a daughter to the big city. Since the radios and phones and anything with an engine went down a month or so earlier, Charlie and Millie didn’t know anything about their daughter. Just like all of them out in country didn’t know what was going on with the rest of the world.

“I prayed for six hours last night,” Millie said, her hands wrapped around a cup of cold coffee. She hadn’t taken a sip since making it hours earlier. “I think whatever all this is has shorted out the prayer waves to God.”

“Where’s Charlie?” Annie said. She hadn’t asked for coffee or cookies, something the two women had shared almost daily as neighbors for the last five years. No one had any extra to share. Besides, Annie couldn’t eat.

“Over at the farm,” Mille answered. “Don’t know what for. Angus let all the cattle go, and we can’t get the crops out anyhow without a combine even if they weren’t all burnt to sunder.”

“Maybe Eli and I should stay here. Just till Charlie gets back.”

“Suit yourself,” Millie shrugged and then didn’t say a word while they sat there for the next hour. Annie and Eli set back out for her farm later, not knowing what else to do.

***

Annie’s husband had died before all this, thank the Lord. A sudden heart attack at the age of thirty-one. Healthy as an ox otherwise. Annie hadn’t known how she was going to make it, but routine had got her through, and she’d become the lone female farmer in three counties. She’d survived her husband’s death. She’d made it through the tornado that cost her half a crop two years ago, and even a bad case of pneumonia last winter. This though. She suspected this would get her like it was getting everyone else.

***

Eli insisted in sleeping in the same bed, terrified if he left her side that one of them would be taken. He’d had a pungent odor until she made him take a warm bath and put on some of her husband’s old clothes. They were too big, but at least they were clean.

“I don’t know the last time I really slept,” Eli said. The room was dark and humid. The moon was big and round outside the window, even its light seeming to add another degree or two to the stifling heat.

“Me neither.”

“When it takes me, I’m going to scream,” Eli said. “That way you can run and try and see what happens.”

“Okay. What if I go first?”

“Will you scream?”

She didn’t know how to answer, worried she might just drown in the thick air before a scream got out.

***

Charlie came in the night, brandishing a shotgun. Millie was gone.

He walked off down the road and they heard a blast shortly thereafter.

***

They killed a hen in the morning, deciding the meat was better than empty eggs. It ran around without a head for three minutes and then fell in the dirt. It barely bled at all.

Eli cleaned it of its feathers and carved off the cuts of meat. Farm boys learned such things. She cooked the breasts on the stove top and served them for lunch.

Neither of them ate a bite.

***

That night she woke to a scream coming from the yard. Eli must have gone out to use the outhouse.

She rushed to the window, but couldn’t see anything in the dark.

She called his name for an hour. And sobbed.

***

It rained the next day, fat plops of water were swallowed by the scorched earth in mere seconds, and Annie took it as a sign.

She let the chickens free from their coup and led the cow from the barn. She packed a bundle, what little she had left of value and that was edible.

She started walking.

Leaving behind her life, hoping to walk until she found someone, anyone, or until she was gone.