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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3400 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Measuring Hairlines Jim Doss The four brothers’ faces weathered into the earth they farmed— overgrazed pastures, thinning soil, run off finding channels of least resistance. Posed before Sears’ holiday cameras in their too-tight church-going suits, a once every five year ritual to decorate Momma’s living room wall, they smiled, not like the angels they never were, but with the red-faced pleas of men asking for a loan for seed to plant the bottom-lands, a second-hand thrasher, or winter feed. After the last flash, they exhaled, relaxed back through the years, to remember their socks sliding across pine-wood floors in a race with expectation to see what lay under the Christmas tree. As they talked, their fingers could almost feel the texture of white plastic fences again, horses cast in mid-trot, stiff-legged cows chewing their cud, and the farmer riding his red tractor into this picture perfect life they are now too large to enter. |
