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Ripped by the Roots

A Melanie Black Short Story

· Short Stories by Melanie Black

Water drips taunting rejuvenation

Moisture collects, causing an expedited decay

A mold grows so thick it blocks the sun from entering

There is no light left in my mind, 

Just the silence and stillness of perpetual night

 

Yearning for a sense of warmth to graze my cheeks- 

Lift my cold, hardened heart from above these plains

Nothing but the wind whistling through me- 

Flattening itself against my bones and everything else around me

I feel shattered, torn, ripped by the roots and yet I wait here silently to be harvested

 

He comes early in the morning for us,

The collector of bodies in the field

I can't see him coming, but I hear his footsteps against fallen corn stalks

I smell his copious amount of sweat staining the air around us

He is a poison, come to kill and remove

 

Today is the day he delivers his load of locally grown corpses

None of us know where we will go 

But it will happen; we are already gone, removed,

On the way to decay... 

 

I stand here and wait for the ripping to be mine

I will collapse unwillingly into his arms as he lifts me into his truck bed

My life was created to be farmed,

I was grown here to die

Something I have had almost thirty years to think about