The Nest

The last time the room had featured an alarm clock the man occupying it had worn a far younger face, younger clothes too. But despite this absence, the only pair of eyelids in the room arose every morning like clockwork at 3:45am. The man swung his legs over the side of the bed, allowing them to fall to the floor without much resistance. He reached up and rubbed his eyes, in the past this might have invigorated him, kick-started his day perhaps? Now it served only to wake him and remind him that he had to face another one. His movements quickened in the following moments, he began to enact a dance he felt he had performed enough by now. He reached down and after fumbling for a time found a ragged old jumper, covered in holes, stains and smelling considerably worse than you're imagining. At great expense to his arms the man hauled it over his head and just to be fair, he expended his legs, raising himself to a standing position. From this position he could make eye contact with a photo of his girls that hung on the wall. He chose not to. Instead, he staggered forward towards a screwed up pair of jeans on the floor, he suddenly felt regret for the way he'd carelessly discarded them the previous evening. Acquired and fitted, his look was complete, not that he was a gentleman with a look. Not that he was a gentleman.

In the kitchen he found a cup of coffee, it's age, much like his own was less than you'd expect from something that had formed such a crusty surface. Unlike the man however, the beverage didn't have to suffer the view of the unsightly kitchen much longer and was quickly disposed of down the sink. After replacing the coffee and unceremoniously guzzling the whole cup to satisfy the caffeine addiction he'd picked up in his twenties, the man walked back towards his bedroom. Back past the photo of his wife and daughter, again ignoring the closest thing he had to their memory outside of his head. But this time continued walking until he found himself in the bathroom, which was, as you'd expect from a man of his scent, underutilized.

Despite what you might assume the man washed his face, brushed his teeth and even made a conservative effort to tidy his ever unyielding hair. Although it remains unclear if these actions took place because of an instilled sense of self-presention, or if they just so happened to exist within his routine, unbroken for so very long now. Either way the tasks were completed and so nearly now were his preparations for the day. He scuttled over to the old pine cabinet that had been pushed to the loneliest corner of the room, there he collected his torch from its usual spot and slipped it into his jean pocket.

Several years had passed since he'd last felt the need to lock his front door; no one ever came out this far, he had nothing of value to anyone and perhaps most damning of all, he did not care. The crisp, cold of a mid-autumn morning he was greeted with also provided no barrier, his first hurdle of the day manifested as two dead batteries in his torch. Looking out at the thick murk that lay over his property and fields he considered chancing it, in his youth there would have been no consideration. But he was not in his youth anymore, he knew better. Finding himself back in kitchen the man strained to remember where he had left his spare batteries, but having lived his whole life as a doer and not a thinker, he attacked the draws crammed full of things from a previous time. Items removed from the draw were placed randomly on the worktop above, without divine intervention they would likely remain there indefinitely. Finally, he found what he was looking for, two batteries rolled forward in the draw and were scooped up and jammed into the torch, their spent counterparts taking their place.

His second attempt to leave the house was by far and away his most successful of the morning so far, getting as far as the crooked fence at the front of the property before the cold began to eat into his bones. It was one of those mornings where breath meets the outside world and reveals itself, a child's mind would run wild with thoughts of dragons and their fierce roar. In fact if a child had existed in that tiny corner of the countryside as they once had, they would likely think the man the oldest and wisest of all the dragons. The man felt old, but he knew himself to be a fool.

Gravel shifted under the man's feet, the torch was worth the delay, it had rained overnight and the puddles made it even harder to make out the many indentations in the dirt track that led away from the only property in view. One wrong foot and the man risked injury and in the unlikely situation he found the willpower to pick himself up off the ground, he would find himself at the start of a long walk to seek medical attention. He gazed out over his fields, he thought of his wife whom he had loved so long, his daughter whom he had loved so much. A farmer since birth, his day was to comprise twelve hours of hard manual labor, often more, always daily. But the man, now wallowing in his despair, would double the workload, triple it even if it spared him his quiet morning walk alone with his own emptiness. Quickening his pace, he reached the crest of a small hill about half a mile straight out from the house, although he could have sworn it used to feel smaller. A hidden valley now sprawled into view revealing far more developed farm land, fencing that was still functioning and a collection of buildings, the size of which matched the modest size of the man's property. They included a silo, an impressively sized barn for the farm, a smaller barn lucky to still be standing given the condition of its exterior and a large shed missing one of its sides and accomplishing the task of housing the farmer's two antique tractors surprisingly well.

The structures grew in size as the farmer continued to stagger down the track, his progress reinvigorated by the sight of these faithful lands, illuminated as always by a flickering spot lamp hung over the barn doors. The man stopped, after the rough edges of the track had given way to more civilized fencing and defined borders. In front of him lay the yard he had tread a thousand times before and for the first time he forced himself to consider, why? Such a thought would not have stunted him, would not have even wormed its way to the front of his cerebral cortex had he not spent more time than he cared to remember enacting this daily dance for no one but himself. All this swelled doubt did nothing to stop the weary farmer putting one foot in front of the other and beginning again.

A decade of disorganization caught up with the farmer on an almost daily basis and today was no exception. A trip to the dilapidated, smaller barn was in order after a misplaced folding saw had almost certainly found itself hidden between floor boards or dropped somewhere in the empty expanse of a nearby field. Having satisfied himself by spending the traditional amount of time searching, he resolved to just fetch a spare he was sure he had stashed away in a tool box somewhere in the old barn. Now only used to store various items the farmer had no energy to sort through, the lesser of the properties two barns was surely grateful to be considered a barn at all. More outside than in, the structure owed it's continued survival to a large juniper tree that had taken root a few meters from it's eastern side. Without the tree's residency the building surely would have succumbed to the relentless weather an age ago.

For better or worse the barn still stood and it's doors scraped along the ground as the man cracked them open, the hinges screaming every inch of the way. He slipped inside, finding his path lit only by the very begins of a dawn sun streaming through a small, centered window positioned above the opposite end of the building. The barn had proved unworthy of electrical instillation through the years it was in regular use and now proved unworthy of even basic maintenance. A handful of splinted pieces of wood had fallen to the floor since the farmer had last bothered to clean up his makeshift storage unit and it that seemed unlikely to change soon. Tired eyes scanned the piles of toolboxes and spare hay that littered either side of of the barn, no order applied to any of it. He concluded that the spare saw lied somewhere within a oversized toolbox packed higher than is sensible with all varieties of hand tool, sharp and blunt alike. As soon as he found himself facing down into the toolbox, back bent at a nearly ninety degree angle, he heard the hay on the other side of the barn move all by itself.

He remained still, the pupils of his eyes found the corners of their sockets and with his growing assurance that he wasn't hallucinating, he arose and spun slowly on his heels. It was rare for the routine to be broken, almost unheard-of, but the sight of an infant child staring back at him in the early morning gloom was routine shattering. The lack of teeth possessed by the baby didn't prevent it from presenting the farmer with the largest and only smile he had experienced in what felt like a lifetime. Suddenly aware of every cell in his body, the man didn't move for fear of falling. The child, on the other hand, was experiencing a joy unlike any it had known before, older than new, the man knew the baby had been abandoned here, not birthed. Maybe it was this mix of emotions that spurred the farmer to action, maybe it was the adrenaline, so dearly missed. Regardless, the man dragged his jumper over his head with his arms, now not feeling quite so expended, and staggered forward to wrap the bare infant in this scratchy blanket. The jumper, with all its holes and frayed threads, was only marginally better than the shooting cold of the early morning, it was however, better.

With his heart only just beginning to come back to him and the baby now ready to transport, the farmer allowed his mind to open up to questions. But before any hypotheses could be dispensed, another sound, this time from his right. There was no hesitation in his response, with a twist of the neck his eyes met with the barn's second unexpected visitor of the day. Two deep black orbs placed central to a ghostly satellite of a face, the owl wasn't prone to intimidation and it certainly wasn't about to back down to this ragged looking human, however resolute he appeared. Standing, child clutched close to his chest, blissfully unaware of the transfer of guardianship taking place in it's name. The owl filled the window at the far end of the barn comfortably as it continued to stare down the man, but their time was ending, and they both knew it. As the first slice of sun surfaced over the hill, the man put all his dejection to the side and finalized the encounter with a gentle nod. The celestial acknowledged the end of it's term and swooped effortlessly into the dawn.