Misery Loves Company

The vagrant exploded out of the rickety barn doors and into the stormy night, rattling the hinges angrily, and sending a palpable shudder up through the walls. He fell face first into the mud outside, but did not stop running despite the storm that raged across the vast Iowa plains. He disappeared into the maze of corn fields and did not return. The barn doors from whence he had emerged flapped in the flashing wind and rain, closed and then opened, in cadence with the thunder’s rhythm; beckoning anyone bold enough to enter the gaping mouth of pitch blackness.

There was nothing and no one for miles, and the adjacent farmhouse that had been abandoned for years, was now dilapidated and collapsing; It’s shingles and boards flew off and away in the wind, like dandelion thistles spread by intentional breath. Carpenters warn that a house not lived in, will crumble, as if warm bodies residing inside serve as a lifeblood energy force, keeping the structure “alive” and standing. The barn, unlike the farmhouse, still stood, despite its very apparent lack of upkeep.

Metaphysics posits that man made architecture serves, not only as necessary shelter, but also as navigational landmarks upon this 3D Plane. Fabricated rooms and floor levels threaded together by staircases and thresholds link multiple dimensions to a single point of intersection within the erected confines of walls, doors & roofs. So it further begs the question: Do we humans breathe our life and purpose into a building? Or do we validate our occupancy in this world with the brick and mortar we build around ourselves?; houses, churches, office buildings and temples as our anchored islands to hop between, rooting us into the Earth; so we are not tossed openly exposed upon a choppy sea, disoriented by the chaotic confusion of our own consciousness.

(50 years earlier)

Emily crept down the steps of the farmhouse where she lived with Papa & Mama, careful not to wake them with the creaking of the red oak planks her Daddy had carefully laid down to construct the wrap-around porch. She passed the mailbox on the road with their surname “Briggs,” painted with pride and precision on her nightly walk to the old barn. The family had bought the homestead 5 years before when she was 7 years old, and Mama had been quite pregnant and sick at the time, so it had been up to Emily to help Papa haul and hold boards for nailing to ready a room in time for the baby. All that was there when they arrived was the old barn, which they had slept in while the farmhouse was being built 200 paces away. Emily had grown into an exuberant budding beauty of a 12 year old young lady, cornfed and healthy with plenty of fresh air and sunshine, nourishing her honey locks of long blonde hair. But each night, she left the comfort and warmth of her upstairs bedroom in her embroidered nightgown to feed a certain secret her parents hid in the barn behind high walls of hay.

Emily had a feeling her parents knew she snuck out every night. If they didn’t know, how in the world did they not wonder how her little brother was still alive? Someone had to feed him, and they sure as heck never went inside that barn! It was her job to feed the goats and pigs: let ‘em out in the day and close em’ in at night. The family of three never spoke around the dining room table at mealtimes about what else Emily cared for in the barn. He was isolated and tucked away like an animal they were all ashamed to allow into the light of day, but one that Papa couldn’t bring himself to put down the way he would an injured animal or a runty pig.

Emily had named her brother Elijah a few years ago, once she became old enough to realize he wasn’t just another animal on the farm for her to feed and play with. Elijah was born disfigured, and once it was apparent the Pastor couldn’t pray away what ailed his body (he was about 3 years old), Papa had laid him down to sleep on the hay in the barn, latched the door, and never looked back. He never learned to walk, just scooted around, the clothes he had arrived in the barn in, he had since outgrown, and he removed them from his handicapped body by way of his ripping teeth, resulting in filthy rags scattered about the dirty hay pen in the back of the barn he now inhabited. There was no reason to lock the barn door. He couldn’t escape the wall of hay bales that restrictively encircled his hellish pit. Emily hopped up and sat on the hay wall above Elijah, facing the rickety wooden barn door hanging off its hinges. She pulled some linen from the pocket nightgown. The mere sight of the greasy white linen sack emerging, incited excited grunts of glee from him, accompanied by involuntary muscle spasming of his tiny arms and legs that could not climb, run or aid him out of this mess in any way. Despite his inability to leave his prison made of straw, he possessed a dynamic energy that surpassed typical human capability, so Emily had named him Elijah after the prophet in the Bible. She prayed to God every night she came to the barn to feed him that a whirlwind would come and take her brother and this old barn full of sorrowful secrets just as it had taken Elijah in the Bible “swiftly to Heaven”. She dangled a rib bone above him and cringed as she saw him salivate like a hungry dog, head upraised and ready to receive all that she dropped down to him below. Soon she would have to return to the farmhouse, and that was always hard. For although her brother could not speak, she could feel his desire to leave this barn, and his anguish each night as she abandoned him.

He never asked for any of this, and she sometimes pondered how her parents would have done the same to her had she been born so ugly and helpless. Would her brother have been so kind, bringing dinner scraps, if he were in the embroidered nightgown and she in the miserable pit? She saved the largest meat piece for last, so perhaps he would be distracted by it when she climbed down the hay and left him. But Elijah’s hungry grunts swiftly turned to sobs of despair as she walked out the barn doors and into the night air. The church picnic was tomorrow, and her mind swiftly shifted to daydreams of lemonade and 3-legged races as she latched the door shut, muffling his cries inside and removing him from her world once more.

The vagrant had arrived at the barn in tattered rags, embedded into his skin from the harsh exposure of living outdoors. He used his incisor teeth to pull out the fibers of cloth that had interwoven into his flesh. He was dirty from head to toe in mud, sweat, and his own feculent filth. He continued across the vast open landscape of cornfields in search of shelter and maybe an old horse trough for a much needed bath. The barn had appeared on the horizon at sunset, and he made his way to the old abandoned homestead, now collapsing, but the barn still stood. He threw open the creaky barn doors as the sun disappeared, and revealed in the back of this vast enclosure, a towering wall of hay bales. He smiled. He could wash his clothes and allow them to dry. There would be no threat of freezing with all that hay. He jumped atop the wall and looked down at the muddy pit below. He knocked one of the bales down into the enclosed mud pit, and jumped on top of it, spreading it for his bed for the evening. The hay was old, and smelled of mildew, but he had slept in worse.

He awoke with a start and a shudder from one of those dreams that did not entirely feel like a dream. He had dreamed he was in the pit surrounded by hay nestled in a barn, just like the place he “awoke” within, but with frightening sleep paralysis, he found himself suddenly unable to move, with the perspective of looking up at the towering walls of hay that imprisoned his motionless body below. He could not tell if he had awakened from a dream or if he had always been awake to experience the disorienting sensation of helplessness. After many anxious breaths while laying there looking up at the hay, he remembered where he was and began to move his arms and legs again. Calming down, he drifted off again to the booming thunder and pelting rain that roared outside the barn.

This time he knew it was a dream, but he was handicapped nonetheless. He felt himself rolling around in mud and worse, eventually scooching up to the perimeter wall of hay. He lifted his head up, pain surging up his spine, but in doing so he could see more than mud. Relaxing his vertebra from the forced posture, his head settled back into the filth he found himself trapped within. Relief from the pain invoked a different discomfort, there was the hunger and thirst that were in no way satiated by the moistness he found himself immersed within. He heard the latch open. There was no rain outside...and yet, he had just heard the rain. Confusion abounded from the lucidness of the dream he found himself a captive audience to.

“Elijah? I brought you something special from the picnic”

A young girl in an embroidered nightgown with the monogram EB climbed atop the mountain of hay above his head. Her clean blonde hair and crisp linen nightgown were stark contrasts to the dark colors of damp Earth that saturated his nude body. He looked down at his hands and his legs that refused to move. They twitched and spasmed with excitement at her sudden presence above him. He tried to tell her. He screamed from inside himself that he isn’t supposed to be here, that this is all just a nightmare...but all that emerged from his chapped mud encrusted lips were grunts and sobs; unintelligible moans that he could tell were having the opposite effect of gaining her attention.

“Wake up!” He screamed inside of himself.

“You are not this. This is not you. Just WAKE UP!”

Restrained by the boundaries of his own suffering, and the hay acted as one insulated layer to the enclosure of anguish that kept him from “escaping” this experience. The barn enclosed within itself an entire consciousness wave that somehow he had stepped into. He had merged with it seamlessly upon entering the Old Barn.

Thunder boom. Eyes open. Upon waking he sprung into action, scaling the wall of hay using his arms and legs once more as the vagrant who had entered this barn, no longer maimed by whatever horror had taken place in this awful space. His heart beat pulsed in his ears driving him relentlessly towards the barn door. He would spend the night in the rain. He needed a bath anyway. Grabbing his wet clothes hanging on a rafter, he sprung out of the creaky old barn door and landed in a faceful of mud, not stopping until he reached the comfort of the cornfield, away from the infernal black hole that had so graciously welcomed him to explore its misery. He heard creaking behind him and the doors banged as the wind tossed them about in the storm that saved him. A presence kept the barn standing, and lured those that found alignment with it, calling and coaxing them inside.