Psychopomp Magazine Summer 2016 | Page 30

30 | Psychopomp Magazine

That late October, a week before goblins roamed, the stars shot down one of their own.

Boom! Then fizz. After the brief roar of sound, this plummeting crimson spark, sputtering like a rain-drowned campfire, hurtled towards the furrowed fields of Bell Farms Inc. More scraggly piles of red rock than cash crops, but we had six-hundred breeding head of Brahmans, pale-skinned Kennebec potatoes, and paid irrigation bills and stocked pesticides enough to keep the grass yellow-green, potatoes unblighted, and the garlic from drying out before the first frosts.

Jimmy had stayed up late to shoot at skulking coyotes. More of a hobby than a necessity—we never could drive them off for good. He flung his half-smoked Marlboro on the dirt and stomped ashes with the heel of goat-hide boots, cured by Grandpa Shel back in ’59 and worn by Jimmy’s father William before Jimmy was even an abrupt rise in his father’s faded Levis.

Jimmy ran after the scarlet streak out into the potato fields. It crashed in blood-orange fire not far from the entrance to Alkali Caverns.

Lungs aching, Jimmy found the crater beside a smoldering clump of cow’s tongue cactus. Bulging like purple potatoes, the cactus fruit bubbled and hissed from the blaze of heat. Boots squished over wild hog scat, cactus kernels gleaming like those violet seeds in a pomegranate’s guts.

Nearby smoked a far richer prize than these fertile miracles of our scabby stubborn soil.

Shining his mini-Maglight upon the gape in the earth, Jimmy clenched his jaw and fists. Not much wreckage. Just a half-foot long bit of melted metal, crusty, brittle-looking, and burnt stench—like one of Aunt Ruth’s coconut meringue pies.

Neither molten demon nor slithering worm of alien aspect greeted him. Not even a wounded robot with a cyclopean eye glared from the fifteen-foot-wide hole. Jimmy had read sci-fi pulp from Mr. Peakes’s bookstore,