MELANCHOLIAC
Ethan’s eyes slide open slowly, sticky from sleep and alcohol. He blinks four times before the world jolts into focus. He sucks in the fresh air with a smile…and then pauses. He is staring at the sky.
“Dammit!” He sits up groggily from a bed of hay; he is roughly two miles from the farmhouse, a half mile farther than the last unconscious adventure. The marks on his arm are getting worse, harder to cover up.
—
The first time he’d wandered off, waking on the rickety porch, there had only been a small S-shaped scratch on his forearm. Ethan assumed it was a product of his clumsiness, and he wrote off the midnight relocation as sleepwalking. The marks, however, became increasingly peculiar with each new unconscious episode. Every couple of days Ethan woke up farther and farther away from the house, each time with a new and more noticeable mark. They weren’t like wounds exactly. The tender pink shapes were closer to scars if anything; they seemed to open and heal overnight.
—
Ethan looks down again at his left arm, now covered in nine strange pink figures. When Ethan had retreated to the farm from his shameful city life, he’d certainly expected to develop a certain amount of “oneness” with the land, or he had hoped he would; but now, dusting the dirt off of his left cheek, he ponders the healthiness of his growing “sensitivity” to the lot.
He knows he’s not the only one concerned; Ethan’s neighbors seem to sense the wrongness. The white haired couple watches him during the day, while he works the land in the heat. They squint their eyes at Ethan’s recent addition of ever-present long sleeves. Their gaze seems to follow him whenever he’s in sight, some sort of suspicious consternation; they only ever refer to Ethan as “boy,” yelling over the fence for a favor or a handyman. Ethan sometimes feels as though he should tell them that he is thirty one, that he wakes up to the same abandoned world that they do, but habits grow tough and deep with age, and he knows the couple will never call him by name.
The hay pokes Ethan’s leg through his boxers. He winces and eases off the pile, dizzy from lingering spirits and dehydration. He takes a personal inventory; his dark wiry hair is unruly and full of hay; his white T-shirt is too thin for the chilly morning air; his feet are bare on the cold earth.
He knows he is losing himself somehow. His previously clean-shaven face now boasts a formidable but unkempt beard. His eyes are muddy and desolate. He read once that the midwest has the highest suicide rate in America. Ethan’s ex-wife wanted to move back to the city, because, in the same article, she read that farmers have the highest occupational suicide rate in America. Since she left, he’s begun to understand why.
Ethan walks back toward the empty farmhouse with lead feet. His neighbors are visible in the distance, always watching, waiting for Boy to fulfill the morbid statistics, and, perhaps, they won’t be waiting long.
