conworlds.info

[Nugan]

Edit: You can now read a full draft of the story near the end of the thread if you want to skip past all of my drafts and read something resembling a finished story.

This is the text of a never completed short story that I began. It may be set in the same conworld as the Magic Beans thread I posted or it may not be.

Since this is an unfinished work it does not have an ending, is stylistically unpolished, and is, in fact, missing all character names. I'm not putting this up so much as an example of fiction but instead as an example of the kind of balance between real world political/social concerns and fantasy that I'm struggling to create through conworlding.

Here's the almost-story:

[name] could not appreciate the ice. He had been told that ice storms
create landscapes of extraordinary beauty, that it was as if the trees were glass or crystalline and the earth had become a freshly polished parquet floor. He suspected that those who spoke this way—mostly the older female servants who had spent enough time in the master’s house to see someone point at an object that had been framed or secured within a glass box and call that object beautiful—thought beauty was a preservative. For them, he thought, the trees might as well be encased in the dried sugar of hardened maple syrup. As long as they seemed to have a protective barrier, as long as something seemed to shield them from age or movement or change, they would have been beautiful.

For [name], as he watched a frozen maple sapling assume a willow’s posture from where he sat in the doorway of a one room, bent-roofed, rotten-walled squatter’s hovel, the ice only embodied the destructive potential of stasis. In his imagination it was the force of unfulfilled potential, of energy forced into motionlessness, that bowed the sapling and anchored the limbs of the adult trees, not the simple weight of frozen rain water. He felt this static pressure too. Even though he had discarded the once wet, now frozen chain smock, made from discarded planter’s stilts and fencing wire, and the equally frozen workman’s overalls that he wore beneath it, he still felt weighted, bowed by the insistent frost of possibilities denied.

It was not even his squatter’s hovel. He had found it, complete with its squatter, shortly after the rain had begun to transition to hail and the mud had begun to feel slick below his boots. The squatter lay behind him now on a cot constructed from three pairs of ragged pants held together by bailing twine and supported by the poles of four rusted pitchforks, very near a cracked and food-stained cast iron cook stove. He was dead. During the night, before [name] arrived, an oak bough, already weakened by parasitic fungi and burrowing beetles, had frozen and collapsed. It fell on the shack’s frail tin chimney, which even while it still stood had been no wider than a drinking glass and half-clogged with accumulated ash, and left it incapable of venting the smoke created by the twigs and leaves and flammable trash being burned within the stove. With nowhere else to retreat, the smoke filled the hovel and then the lungs of the squatter.
When [name] looked at the squatter’s corpse, he imagined that the body, like the trees and himself, might only be experiencing paralysis from frozen potential energy, that if he could force himself to overcome his own inertia, he might be able to rise and shove the man out of his cot, giving him enough force to create the vigor needed to roll by himself and eventually to stand and to walk and, perhaps eventually, to make demands of life again.

[name] had only seen a corpse stand or walk once. An amateur folk magician, intoxicated and recently insulted, had reproved his detractors by retrieving the corpse of an elderly serf who had suffered heat stroke in the field, been allowed to die by the medical ignorance and apathy of his overseers, and, conveniently for the magician, had been left, half tilled into the soil, to compost the row of wheat that murdered him. [name] watched, sober and separated from the rest of the observers by stalks of adolescent corn, as the magician lifted the fertilizer-man by his armpits, forced the corpse to stand upright as best he could, considering that was a task that alcohol had made difficult for the magician himself to achieve, embraced the remains with mock tenderness, and released them. Once freed, the fertilizer-man took two steps forward, walking awkwardly on the sides of his feet as if afflicted by gout, unearthed a shaft of wheat with his right fist, stared, uncomprehendingly, at what he had just harvested, and fell onto his back. After this he did not move again. The magician, having redeemed himself, turned to his audience. He stifled a belch and asked, “Impressed?”

[name] was fourteen then. He was the serf-son-of-a-serf-son-of-a-serf who had not yet had any thoughts of revolt. For five years already he had walked in the rows of men who followed the rows of stalks and watered and tilled and harvested and ducked blows from iron gloves. The overseers followed the rows of men along the rows of stalks on horseback, wearing metal shirts and plated helmets. This uniform, mandated by rank and tradition, left then uncomfortably hot during the spring and summer planting, uncomfortably cold during the fall harvest, and intolerably irritable during all seasons. So they berated and beat the men as they worked. Abuse was relief from an improper wardrobe and inclimate weather. A boot to the intestines was cold water and a prolonged three man beatdown was hot tea. And, imagining themselves knights, the overseers also insisted upon the title “sir.” This “sir” could appear before their name, as in “Sir [different name],” or at the end of a statement, as in “Please do not strike me again, sir,” but it was not to be neglected. [name] did not consider either the title or the abuse unjust, only uncomfortable. They were birth defects. He had known nothing else and imagined that any hope for change had been passed along with his placenta.

It was only his vision of the fertilizer-man that made [name] question his fatalism. It was not that this glimpse of maybe-magic had expanded his consciousness or presented him with fantastic new possibilities. He had never thought to question the potential for a corpse to walk and thus had no reason to be in awe of it when he saw it. It was not the newness of the experience that shook him, but rather its similarity. He saw his ancestral history and his own future fully reenacted in two shuffles and a shaft of wheat. He saw, in pantomime, the cost of the fertilizer-man’s fatalism, of his family’s, of his own. While three unsteady men with shovels, singing a tavern song that was equal parts chivalry and adultery, reburied the fertilizer-man, [name] left the fields, thinking that he might not return to them, that he might leave and go to that indistinct somewhere-else that must exist beyond the crops and cattle and shacks and manor house. He did go there, and he returned to the fields the following morning without protest or delay, but the possibility of difference remained.

[Blake]

"left then uncomfortably hot"

Left them uncomfortably hot.

Otherwise, less commas, more new sentences please; it might require a bit of restructuring.

I found the general theme and quality of the ideas being expressed interesting (just hard to get into with the sentences being a bit too long sometimes- I do the same thing, of course).

I would also suggest some compression- some details you shared were less than strictly necessary and could have been shortened (things about clothes, etc).


Hopefully some of that is helpful.
_________________
I never disallow civil discussion, and I don't even have the authority to if I wanted to (which I don't want to). If discussion were made impossible just because of a contrary stance, nobody would ever discuss anything. Don't let my disagreement, however strong, stop you from speaking your minds.

[Nugan]

[bloodb4roses]

[Cerne]

My critique that I typed last night. I was going to delete it after I saw you got some replies but doing that sounded like a waste. And you were looking for something more concept-related, so...

[Fetus Commander]

Don't have time to write a thorough response, but a few very brief responses to Cerne:

1. The opening setting is an ice storm. You're right. I should say that somewhere in the first couple sentences, since I think a lot of what you're struggling with comes from my not being clear enough about that.

2. I think you may be taking some of my phrases--"the row of wheat that murdered him" for example--more literally than I intended them.

3. When I say "thought that beauty was I preservative," I mean literally that they thought that the definition of beautiful was "something that has been preserved (i.e., frozen)."


But, yes, I can understand your points and definitely appreciate the critique. Will respond in greater length later.

(Oh and I saw Bb4R's post to and want to respond to that eventually also.)
_________________

“Learning would forever spoil the best slave in the world…it would forever unfit him to be a slave." -Hugh Auld

[Nugan]

That previous post was mine. I logged out of Fetus' account, but his computer apparently decided otherwise.

[jseamus]

I liked it.

[Cerne]

[bloodb4roses]

[Nugan]

Sorry, another quick post. Will try to post more tomorrow when I return home from Fetus' house.

[Cerne]

[Ramses]

I rarely log on to a forum to comment, but I find myself compelled to do so. This work of yours, even in this fractured and incomplete form, is beautiful, thought-provoking, and genius. If you were selling this piece, even as it is, alone, I would actually think of buying it. That is the level this passage is at.

You mentioned you had planned it for a book. Was the book also scrapped, or are you writing it still?

Also, why did you abandon this passage? Why were you unsatisfied with it?
_________________
"It was not the sadness of one about to commit suicide but the melancholy of one that has been rejected."
- From a Dream

[Nugan]

Thank you Ramses. While I don't deserve the praise, I certainly do appreciate it.

[jseamus]

[Blake]

[Nugan]

I have resumed work on this and hope to have another draft by Monday or Tuesday. Someone must hold me to this.

Also, this is not the horrific mess that I had imagined it to be. None of the sentences are flat-out unreadable, just bloated. I've read through and corrected many of them, but the second sentence seems warped beyond easy repair. Mostly I just had to replace commas with periods and fresh starts. I'm not digging all of my language, but I'm fixing what I can.

The real trick is going to be rediscovering the emotional state that I was in when I began this so that the second half flows smoothly from the first.

But, yeah, update coming, hopefully. Once again, someone please hold me to this.

[Blake]

[Nugan]

[Nugan]

Update: I've been making steady progress on this today. Not a huge amount yet, but I am finally writing again. I have to take a break now to work on something for a local political campaign, but I hope to return to the story tonight and make some additional progress.

Also, can someone move this to the Creative Writing forum?

Edit: Story has grown by 50% today. Can I make it to 100%? Probably not.
_________________

[Nugan]

I wanted to finish this before I posted more, but I have been crazy busy lately. I promised a few of you an update, so here is a revised draft. It is still unfinished, but it is about twice the length of the original and contains corrections.

Enjoy (if possible):


The Fertilizer Man

[name] could not appreciate the ice. He had been told that ice storms create landscapes of extraordinary beauty, that it was as if the trees were glass or crystalline and the earth had become a freshly polished parquet floor. He suspected that those who spoke this way thought beauty was a preservative. They were mostly the older female servants who had spent enough time in the master’s house to see someone point at an object that had been framed or secured within a glass box and call that object beautiful For them, he thought, the trees might as well be encased in the dried sugar of hardened maple syrup. As long as they seemed to have a protective barrier, as long as something seemed to shield them from age or movement or change, they would have been beautiful.

For [name], as he watched a frozen maple sapling assume a willow’s posture from where he sat in the doorway of a one room, bent-roofed, rotten-walled squatter’s hovel, the ice only embodied the destructive potential of stasis. In his imagination it was the force of unfulfilled potential, of energy forced into motionlessness, that bowed the sapling and anchored the limbs of the adult trees, not the simple weight of frozen rain water. He felt this static pressure too. Even though he had discarded the once wet, now frozen chain smock, made from discarded planter’s stilts and fencing wire, and the equally frozen workman’s overalls that he wore beneath it, he still felt weighted, bowed by the insistent frost of possibilities denied.

It was not even his squatter’s hovel. He had found it, complete with its squatter, shortly after the rain had become hail and the mud had begun to feel slick under his boots. The squatter lay behind him now on a cot constructed from three pairs of ragged pants. The pants were bound together with bailing twine and the cot was supported by the poles of four rusted pitchforks. It sat very near a cracked and sauced-stained cast iron cook stove. The squatter was dead. During the night, before [name] arrived, an oak bough, already weakened by parasitic fungi and burrowing beetles, had frozen and collapsed. It fell on the shack’s frail tin chimney, which had been no wider than a drinking glass and half-clogged with accumulated ash. With the chimney compressed, the stove was incapable of venting the fumes created by the twigs, leaves and flammable trash being burned within. With nowhere else to retreat, the smoke filled the stove, then the hovel and then the lungs of the squatter.

When [name] looked at the squatter’s corpse, he imagined that the body, like the trees and himself, might only be paralyzed by frozen potential energy, that if he could force himself to overcome his own inertia, he might be able to rise and shove the man out of his cot, giving him enough force to create the vigor needed to roll by himself and eventually to stand and to walk and, perhaps eventually, to make demands of life again.

[name] had only seen a corpse stand or walk once. An amateur folk magician, intoxicated and recently insulted, had reproved his detractors by retrieving the corpse of an elderly serf who had suffered heat stroke in the field. The serf had been allowed to die by the medical ignorance and apathy of his overseers, and had been left in the field, half tilled into the soil, to compost the row of wheat that murdered him. [name] watched, sober and separated from the rest of the observers by stalks of adolescent corn, as the magician squatted beside the corpse. He lifted the fertilizer-man by his armpits, and forced the dead man to stand upright as best he could, a task that alcohol had made difficult for the magician himself to achieve. He embraced the remains with mock tenderness, and he released them. Once freed, the fertilizer-man took two steps forward, walking awkwardly on the sides of his feet as if afflicted by gout, unearthed a shaft of wheat with his right fist, stared uncomprehendingly at what he had just harvested and fell onto his back. After this he did not move again. The magician, having redeemed himself, turned to his audience. He stifled a belch and asked, “Impressed?”

[name] was fourteen then. He was the serf-son-of-a-serf-son-of-a-serf who had not yet had any thoughts of revolt. For five years already he had walked in the rows of men who followed the rows of stalks. He had watered and tilled and harvested and ducked blows from iron gloves. The overseers followed the rows of men along the rows of stalks on horseback, wearing metal shirts and plated helmets. This uniform, mandated by rank and tradition, left them uncomfortably hot during the spring and summer planting, uncomfortably cold during the fall harvest, and intolerably irritable during all seasons. So they berated and beat the men as they worked. Abuse was relief from an improper wardrobe and inclimate weather. A boot to the intestines was cold water and a prolonged three man beatdown was hot tea. Imagining themselves knights, the overseers also insisted upon the title “sir.” This “sir” could appear before their name, as in “Sir [different name],” or at the end of a statement, as in “Please do not strike me again, sir,” but it was not to be neglected. [name] did not consider either the title or the abuse unjust, only uncomfortable. They were birth defects. He had known nothing else and imagined that any hope for change had been passed along with his placenta.

It was only his vision of the fertilizer-man that made [name] question his fatalism. It was not that this glimpse of maybe-magic had expanded his consciousness or presented him with fantastic new possibilities. He had never thought to question the potential for a corpse to walk and thus had no reason to be in awe when he saw it. It was not the newness of the experience that shook him, but rather its similarity. He saw his ancestral history and his own future fully reenacted in two shuffles and a shaft of wheat. He saw, in pantomime, the cost of the fertilizer-man’s fatalism, of his family’s, of his own. While three unsteady men with shovels, singing a tavern song that was equal parts chivalry and adultery, reburied the fertilizer-man, [name] left the fields. He thought that he might not return to them. He imagined leaving for that indistinct somewhere-else that must exist beyond the crops and cattle, beyond the shacks and the manor house. He did not go there. He went to his shack, his parent’s shack, and he slept. He returned to the fields the following morning without protest or delay, but the possibility of difference remained.

That possibility was frozen now, held in stasis with the ice beyond the doorway. [name] watched the narrow path that lead to the overturned whiskey keg that functioned as the squatter’s doorstep. The path was covered with a crisp film of frost, disturbed only by his footprints. He did not know if he would be pursued. During his flight, he had anticipated being intercepted, listening for the sound of horses or men behind, waiting to hear a reprimanding voice yell his name. He had heard nothing, and now he wondered if they would come for him at all, if they knew his name.
He hoped they would come and that they would catch him. He hoped they would bind him and drag him, barefoot and stumbling, over the frozen ground as they rode. He hoped they would stop to push him and goad him and step on his frost-bitten toes. He hoped they would put him in stocks and set him on display so that the other serfs could laugh, spit, and kick at him, so his skin could absorb the mucous, liquor, mud and urine of those he had failed. He hoped to be drawn and quartered, to feel the hemp knots chafe his wrists and ankles, to hear the horses called, to watch as his limbs were dislocated and his body dismembered. He hoped they would collect his pieces, his arms and legs and intestines, and scatter them over the fields. But nothing moved beyond the doorway.

[name] could not clearly remember how his adolescent impulse to flee had matured into revolution. His memory of those years was fractured, fragmentary. It did not seem possible to him now that a rebellion had happened at all, let alone that he had caused it, or at least nurtured it. He remembered the books, smuggled to him by the women, mostly his mother’s friends, who worked in the manor house and the homes of the overseers. He did not want to attribute much to those books. Possibly they had influenced him. There had been ideas—political theories, philosophical arguments, treatises on warfare—that had inspired him, but still those ideas had not been his. They were the ideas of aristocrats or of parasitic traveling bards and intellectuals who manipulated themselves into the courtly homes that the serfs maintained, ate bread made from wheat that the serfs had grown and milled, and fed corncobs to their dogs that dead serfs had fertilized. Whatever they had given him had been unintentional, stolen like the books themselves.

He preferred to credit the conversation. They would usually begin with questions. A bent man laboring beside him would pause while wiping the drying dirt and blood from his chapped palms, and ask himself why the hell the work had to hurt so much. [name] would overhear and reply that he did think it had to be, but that he hated that it was. Little else was said in the fields, where the overseers listened for dissent, but [name] would seek out the man later, at his home or at one of the unvarnished, moss-colonized sheds where the serfs would accumulate at night to sit on feed crates and homemade stools and drink homebrewed intoxicants. He would speak to the man, encourage him to vent, to ramble, to explode. He knew he could not sermonize or solicit. He knew that he could not argue with them. The men hated condescension. They were emotionally calloused, but also extraordinarily brittle, becoming immediately defensive with only slight provocation. A word of reprimand or a moment of assumed superiority was enough to transform a friend into an overseer. But once a man had found release, once he had ranted, cried or screamed and broken a cup or crate, then he could be spoken to. [name] could empathize with the man, and he could explain. He could tell him how unjust he thought their lives where and how desperate he was for change, and they would listen. They did not accept it all immediately, just as he had not left forever the night he saw the fertilizer-man, but they listened and they replied, speaking of their own frustration, their own outrage, and their own hope.

Once these conversations had permeated the community and each man had been given his chance to yell, spit, and vandalize, it was not long before the serfs began to realize that they were surrounded by potential weapons. The accumulated detritus of agriculture provided a substantial hypothetical armory. A wooden planting stake, trimmed, sharpened and sanded was an ideal shiv. A blade from a discarded plow needed only to be mounted on a handle and set to a whetstone to become a sword. Shovels, sickles and scythes were lethal already. Any large shaft of wood or iron was a club, and any club could be improved with brambles and nails. The serfs began to enter the fields armed, working with the weapons tucked under belts, hidden in boots, and concealed wherever else opportunity allowed. This intrigue was only bravado then, covert one-upmanship between the men, who would brag to each other later about how close they had come to being discovered and what they would have done to the overseer had they been caught. But [name] knew that fantasies of retribution could only satisfy temporarily, that each new embellishment in the serfs’ boasts made conflict more certain.

The path outside the hovel remained empty. It was late morning and the clouds that had brought the last night’s rain had retreated north, taking with them the low, heavy current of cold air that had frozen the rain. The ice had begun to melt and [name]’s footprints had begun to dissolve, leaving indistinct slushy depressions.
_________________

[jseamus]

The second part, the part you added, is excellent. It answers just about all the questions or objections I had earlier. I really like how it is gradually setting up for a conflict. Even though its all a sort of flashback, it is still intriguing. Good job!

The switches between the present and the past are good so far, but they might get old, especially since nothing is happening in the present, but other than that I think all is very well indeed.
_________________
This is the world.

[Nugan]

Thank you, sir.

[Nugan]

And here is another update. The next one will be a complete draft, promise:

[name] could not appreciate the ice. He had been told that ice storms create landscapes of extraordinary beauty, that it was as if the trees were glass or crystalline and the earth had become a freshly polished parquet floor. He suspected that those who spoke this way thought beauty was a preservative. They were mostly the older female servants who had spent enough time in the master’s house to see someone point at an object that had been framed or secured within a glass box and call that object beautiful. For them, he thought, the trees might as well be encased in the dried sugar of hardened maple syrup. As long as they seemed to have a protective barrier, as long as something seemed to shield them from age or movement or change, they would have been beautiful.

For [name], as he watched a frozen maple sapling assume a willow’s posture from where he sat in the doorway of a one room, bent-roofed, rotten-walled squatter’s hovel, the ice only embodied the destructive potential of stasis. In his imagination it was the force of unfulfilled potential, of energy forced into motionlessness, that bowed the sapling and anchored the limbs of the adult trees, not the simple weight of frozen rain water. He felt this static pressure too. Even though he had discarded the once wet, now frozen chain smock, made from discarded planter’s stilts and fencing wire, and the equally frozen workman’s overalls that he wore beneath it, he still felt weighted, bowed by the insistent frost of possibilities denied.

It was not even his squatter’s hovel. He had found it, complete with its squatter, shortly after the rain had become hail and the mud had begun to feel slick under his boots. The squatter lay behind him now on a cot constructed from three pairs of ragged pants. The pants were bound together with bailing twine and the cot was supported by the poles of four rusted pitchforks. It sat very near a cracked and sauced-stained cast iron cook stove. The squatter was dead. During the night, before [name] arrived, an oak bough, already weakened by parasitic fungi and burrowing beetles, had frozen and collapsed. It fell on the shack’s frail tin chimney, which had been no wider than a drinking glass and half-clogged with accumulated ash. With the chimney compressed, the stove was incapable of venting the fumes created by the twigs, leaves and flammable trash being burned within. With nowhere else to retreat, the smoke filled the stove, then the hovel and then the lungs of the squatter.

When [name] looked at the squatter’s corpse, he imagined that the body, like the trees and himself, might only be paralyzed by frozen potential energy, that if he could force himself to overcome his own inertia, he might be able to rise and shove the man out of his cot, giving him enough force to create the vigor needed to roll by himself and eventually to stand and to walk and, perhaps eventually, to make demands of life again.
[name] had only seen a corpse stand or walk once. An amateur folk magician, intoxicated and recently insulted, had reproved his detractors by retrieving the corpse of an elderly serf who had suffered heat stroke in the field. The serf had been allowed to die by the medical ignorance and apathy of his overseers, and had been left in the field, half tilled into the soil, to compost the row of wheat that murdered him. [name] watched, sober and separated from the rest of the observers by stalks of adolescent corn, as the magician squatted beside the corpse. He lifted the fertilizer-man by his armpits, and forced the dead man to stand upright as best he could, a task that alcohol had made difficult for the magician himself to achieve. He embraced the remains with mock tenderness, and he released them. Once freed, the fertilizer-man took two steps forward, walking awkwardly on the sides of his feet as if afflicted by gout, unearthed a shaft of wheat with his right fist, stared uncomprehendingly at what he had just harvested and fell onto his back. After this he did not move again. The magician, having redeemed himself, turned to his audience. He stifled a belch and asked, “Impressed?”

[name] was fourteen then. He was the serf-son-of-a-serf-son-of-a-serf who had not yet had any thoughts of revolt. For five years already he had walked in the rows of men who followed the rows of stalks. He had watered and tilled and harvested and ducked blows from iron gloves. The overseers followed the rows of men along the rows of stalks on horseback, wearing metal shirts and plated helmets. This uniform, mandated by rank and tradition, left them uncomfortably hot during the spring and summer planting, uncomfortably cold during the fall harvest, and intolerably irritable during all seasons. So they berated and beat the men as they worked. Abuse was relief from an improper wardrobe and inclimate weather. A boot to the intestines was cold water and a prolonged three man beatdown was hot tea. Imagining themselves knights, the overseers also insisted upon the title “sir.” This title could appear before their name or at the end of a statement, “Sir” or “sir,” but it was not to be neglected. [name] did not consider either the title or the abuse unjust, only uncomfortable. They were birth defects. He had known nothing else and imagined that any hope for change had been passed along with his placenta.

It was only his vision of the fertilizer-man that made [name] question his fatalism. It was not that this glimpse of maybe-magic had expanded his consciousness or presented him with fantastic new possibilities. He had never thought to question the potential for a corpse to walk and thus had no reason to be in awe when he saw it. It was not the newness of the experience that shook him, but rather its similarity. He saw his ancestral history and his own future fully reenacted in two shuffles and a shaft of wheat. He saw, in pantomime, the cost of the fertilizer-man’s fatalism, of his family’s, of his own.

While three unsteady men with shovels, singing a tavern song that was equal parts chivalry and adultery, reburied the fertilizer-man, [name] left the fields. He thought that he might not return to them. He imagined leaving for that indistinct somewhere-else that must exist beyond the crops and cattle, beyond the shacks and the manor house. He did not go there. He went to his shack, his parent’s shack, and he slept. He returned to the fields the following morning without protest or delay, but the possibility of difference remained.

That possibility was frozen now, held in stasis with the ice beyond the doorway. [name] watched the narrow path that lead to the overturned whiskey keg that functioned as the squatter’s doorstep. The path was covered with a crisp film of frost, disturbed only by his footprints. He did not know if he would be pursued. During his flight, he had anticipated being intercepted, listening for the sound of horses or men behind, waiting to hear a reprimanding voice yell his name. He had heard nothing, and now he wondered if they would come for him at all, if they knew his name.

He hoped they would come and that they would catch him. He hoped they would bind him and drag him, barefoot and stumbling, over the frozen ground as they rode. He hoped they would stop to push him and goad him and step on his frost-bitten toes. He hoped they would put him in stocks and set him on display so that the other serfs could laugh, spit, and kick at him, so his skin could absorb the mucous, liquor, mud and urine of those he had failed. He hoped to be drawn and quartered, to feel the hemp knots chafe his wrists and ankles, to hear the horses called, to watch as his limbs were dislocated and his body dismembered. He hoped they would collect his pieces, his arms and legs and intestines, and scatter them over the fields. But nothing moved beyond the doorway.

[name] could not clearly remember how his adolescent impulse to flee had matured into revolution. His memory of those years was fractured, fragmentary. It did not seem possible to him now that a rebellion had happened at all, let alone that he had caused it, or at least nurtured it. He remembered the books, smuggled to him by the women, mostly his mother’s friends, who worked in the manor house and the homes of the overseers. He did not want to attribute much to those books. Possibly they had influenced him. There had been ideas—political theories, philosophical arguments, treatises on warfare—that had inspired him, but still those ideas had not been his. They were the ideas of aristocrats or of parasitic traveling bards and intellectuals who manipulated themselves into the courtly homes that the serfs maintained, ate bread made from wheat that the serfs had grown and milled, and fed corncobs to their dogs that dead serfs had fertilized. Whatever they had given him had been unintentional, stolen like the books themselves.

He preferred to credit the conversation. They would usually begin with questions. A bent man laboring beside him would pause while wiping the drying dirt and blood from his chapped palms, and ask himself why the hell the work had to hurt so much. [name] would overhear and reply that he did think it had to be, but that he hated that it was. Little else was said in the fields, where the overseers listened for dissent, but [name] would seek out the man later, at his home or at one of the unvarnished, moss-colonized sheds where the serfs would accumulate at night to sit on feed crates and homemade stools and drink homebrewed intoxicants. He would speak to the man, encourage him to vent, to ramble, to explode. He knew he could not sermonize or solicit. He knew that he could not argue with them. The men hated condescension. They were emotionally calloused, but also extraordinarily brittle, becoming immediately defensive with only slight provocation. A word of reprimand or a moment of assumed superiority was enough to transform a friend into an overseer. But once a man had found release, once he had ranted, cried or screamed and broken a cup or crate, then he could be spoken to.
[name] could empathize with the man, and he could explain. He could tell him how unjust he thought their lives where and how desperate he was for change, and they would listen. They did not accept it all immediately, just as he had not left forever the night he saw the fertilizer-man, but they listened and they replied, speaking of their own frustration, their own outrage, and their own hope.

Once these conversations had permeated the community and each man had been given his chance to yell, spit, and vandalize, it was not long before the serfs began to realize that they were surrounded by potential weapons. The accumulated detritus of agriculture provided a substantial hypothetical armory. A wooden planting stake, trimmed, sharpened and sanded was an ideal shiv. A blade from a discarded plow needed only to be mounted on a handle and set to a whetstone to become a sword. Shovels, sickles and scythes were lethal already. Any large shaft of wood or iron was a club, and any club could be improved with brambles and nails. The serfs began to enter the fields armed, working with the weapons tucked under belts, hidden in boots, and concealed wherever else opportunity allowed. This intrigue was only bravado then, covert one-upmanship between the men, who would brag to each other later about how close they had come to being discovered and what they would have done to the overseer had they been caught. But [name] knew that fantasies of retribution could only satisfy temporarily, that each new embellishment in the serfs’ boasts made conflict more certain.

The path outside the hovel remained empty. It was late morning and the clouds that had brought the last night’s rain had retreated north, taking with them the low, heavy current of cold air that had frozen the rain. The ice had begun to melt and [name]’s footprints had begun to dissolve, leaving indistinct slushy depressions. He felt an increasing restless energy, a tremulous heat in his abdomen. He felt confident that they were coming for him, confident that he was too important to neglect, and he no longer wanted to be arrested. He wanted to fight them. He wanted to twist out of their gauntlets and bite their wrists, teething through their flesh at the thin bone under their metal casing. He would force them down, under his feet, to kick them wherever their breastplates did not cover. Then he would kill them and he would run again. How didn’t matter. Where was irrelevant. He would stumble to another plantation, find receptive serfs and begin the insurgency again. But he could not do that unarmed. He could not remember where he had left his long knife. It was a curved scimitar-length blade scavenged from a decrepit chaff cutter, simple to swing but cumbersome to transport. It had been too large to fit inside the legs of his overalls and too awkward to carry across his shoulders. He had tried to run with it in his hand, but found that it would collide with his hip, bruising him. It had dropped it as he had fled the fields, before the rain and the ice. He imagined that it was now caked in thawing mud and that the blade had frozen and cracked. He needed a new weapon.

He turned towards the squatter. The man had lived tenuously as an invasive parasite, eating what he did not plant and living where he was not wanted. [name] did not think he could have done so without fighting. He must have kept a homemade sling, a stolen shepherd’s crook, or a whip made from foraged cords. The squatter had not left his hammock of pants and pitchforks. He wore an open robe of yellowed, undyed wool, made from inferior castoff spools, mostly from yearling lambs. He was all filth, stink and hair, but his skin was soft and unblemished, only the soles of his feet were calloused. His only weapon was a fisherman’s knife, blunter than his fingernails. He was harmless. [name]’s confidence emptied. He became aware of the clammy weight of his defrosting sleeveless shirt. His flesh was puckering beneath his damp underclothes. He had also been obliviously sweating, and his scalp itched with encrusted perspiration. He wanted to undress and bathe, but he did not move. His impulses and desires had disconnected from his muscles, joints and tendons. The connective tissue, will, had decayed and dissolved. He stood and stared at the squatter’s corpse.

He remembered when they had killed the overseer. A late summer frost had arrived unpredicted, withering uncovered crops overnight, days before the beginning of the harvest. The serfs had been separated from their cots before dawn and driven into the rows to rifle for grain and vegetables that could be rescued among the lifeless and terminal stalks. They remained in the fields past noon, and while the morning had begun bitter and the serfs had been miserably underdressed, it warmed precipitously after sunrise and the overseers, now overdressed, became agitated and then abusive. They swore at the serfs, blaming their laziness for the destruction of the crops, and promising them shorter meals and longer days for the rest of the harvest and decreased allotments for the winter. They rode behind the slower men, slapping their shoulder blades with metal palms as they bent forward and seizing their loose hair as they stood up.

One forethinking overseer had brought a cattle goad, which he would stick between the ribs of bending serfs. He had discovered a lanky adolescent serf with tight skin and a hand-me-down shirt that was irresistibly short and had begun to prod him compulsively, waiting for the boy to discover an unblemished tomato or edible peapod and then thrusting the goad quickly, so that he dropped whatever he had found and was forced to kneel and grope to find it again. This continued until, instead of retrieving a bruised cucumber that had had dropped seven times, the boy withdrew a planting stake shiv from within his boot and drove it into the overseer’s ankle. The overseer felt the pain before he understood it. He released the cattle goad and shifted awkwardly on his horse, trying to pulp the biting fly or beetle that his instinct held responsible. The boy seized the arm of the unsteadied overseer and jerked, unseating him from his horse. Three nearby serfs discarded their harvesting baskets and joined the boy. They did not immediately remember the weapons that they perceived more as accessories than arms, but they understood the significance of the opportunity. They began to kick the fallen overseer, swinging their legs erratically. They were more interested in the tactile satisfaction of feeling their feet connect with writhing, desperate life than in the specifics of the harm that they were inflicting.

[name] was on a separate detail when the overseer fell. He was walking between rows of maturing corn, watering their recently frozen leaves to prevent them from being damaged by the heat from the sun. He heard the yells first, distantly. The overseer beside him turned in the direction of the shouts and saw from horseback something that [name] could not see through the corn. He rode immediately towards the uproar, leaving [name] temporarily emancipated. [name] did not know how to respond. He gazed at the shriveled leaves of a browning corn stalk, hoping the dying plant would explain what had happened. Before the stalk had an opportunity to answer it was crushed, trampled by the retreating horse of an overseer who was being pursued by stones, sticks and obscenities. Three other horses followed, and [name] tumbled into a shallow drainage ditch to avoid the corn stalk’s fate. When he extracted himself from the ditch, he found the fields nearly empty of overseers. Only one remained, and he was dead, encircled by beating, kicking, spitting serfs. One of the serfs was speaking to the corpse as he kicked it, saying, “Sir, sir, sir.”

Three days passed before any overseer returned to the fields. The men did not harvest, and their wives and daughters did not go to the manor house. They did not know what would happen next, and they did not know if they had the capacity to decide. Most could not imagine a future in which they were free, or alive. They had never believed that they were the overseers’ equals or that they could kill one without exchanging their own lives. They had said as much, but it had been hopeless catharsis, like a terminal sufferer threatening a wasting god. They felt helpless, so they displayed overconfidence. They swore the overseers were cowards. Why would they come back? Did they want to have their asses offered to them again? Were they looking for their teeth, or their testicles? No, they were gone. They were scared. They were chicken shit. The overseers would not return.

On the morning of the third day, the overseers returned. They had added heavy visors to their helmets and carried tower shields. They had painted over their personal insignias on the shields. Without face or symbol, they were without identity. No serf would know which had beat or abused him in the past; any violence would be impersonal. They rode through the fields cautiously, resisting noise and avoiding further damage to the plants that were still intact. Once they arrived at the small unmowed commons between the fields and the shacks they dismounted, releasing their horses and shooing them back in the direction that they came. They set their shields forward and formed a snug line, facing the shacks, leaving little space between shields. They were unarmed and they did not advance.
_________________

[Nugan]

Here is a full draft. It is not a finished or complete draft, because it still needs lots of editing, but it tells the story from start to finish. Have fun:

The Fertilizer Man

Jurey could not appreciate the ice. He had been told that ice storms create landscapes of extraordinary beauty, that it was as if the trees were glass or crystalline and the earth had become a freshly polished parquet floor. He suspected that those who spoke this way thought beauty was a preservative. They were mostly the older female servants who had spent enough time in the master’s house to see someone point at an object that had been framed or secured within a glass box and call that object beautiful. For them, he thought, the trees might as well be encased in the dried sugar of hardened maple syrup. As long as they seemed to have a protective barrier, as long as something seemed to shield them from age or movement or change, they would have been beautiful.

For Jurey, as he watched a frozen maple sapling assume a willow’s posture from where he sat in the doorway of a one room, bent-roofed, rotten-walled squatter’s hovel, the ice only embodied the destructive potential of stasis. In his imagination it was the force of unfulfilled potential, of energy forced into motionlessness, that bowed the sapling and anchored the limbs of the adult trees, not the simple weight of frozen rain water. He felt this static pressure too. Even though he had discarded the once wet, now frozen chain smock, made from discarded planter’s stilts and fencing wire, and the equally frozen workman’s overalls that he wore beneath it, he still felt weighted, bowed by the insistent frost of possibilities denied.

It was not even his squatter’s hovel. He had found it, complete with its squatter, shortly after the rain had become hail and the mud had begun to feel slick under his boots. The squatter lay behind him now on a cot constructed from three pairs of ragged pants. The pants were bound together with bailing twine and the cot was supported by the poles of four rusted pitchforks. It sat very near a cracked and sauced-stained cast iron cook stove. The squatter was dead. During the night, before Jurey arrived, an oak bough, already weakened by parasitic fungi and burrowing beetles, had frozen and collapsed. It fell on the shack’s frail tin chimney, which had been no wider than a drinking glass and half-clogged with accumulated ash. With the chimney compressed, the stove was incapable of venting the fumes created by the twigs, leaves and flammable trash being burned within. With nowhere else to retreat, the smoke filled the stove, then the hovel and then the lungs of the squatter.

When Jurey looked at the squatter’s corpse, he imagined that the body, like the trees and himself, might only be paralyzed by frozen potential energy, that if he could force himself to overcome his own inertia, he might be able to rise and shove the man out of his cot, giving him enough force to create the vigor needed to roll by himself and eventually to stand and to walk and, perhaps eventually, to make demands of life again.
Jurey had only seen a corpse stand or walk once. An amateur folk magician, intoxicated and recently insulted, had reproved his detractors by retrieving the corpse of an elderly serf who had suffered heat stroke in the field. The serf had been allowed to die by the medical ignorance and apathy of his overseers, and had been left in the field, half tilled into the soil, to compost the row of wheat that murdered him. Jurey watched, sober and separated from the rest of the observers by stalks of adolescent corn, as the magician squatted beside the corpse. He lifted the fertilizer-man by his armpits, and forced the dead man to stand upright as best he could, a task that alcohol had made difficult for the magician himself to achieve. He embraced the remains with mock tenderness, and he released them. Once freed, the fertilizer-man took two steps forward, walking awkwardly on the sides of his feet as if afflicted by gout, unearthed a shaft of wheat with his right fist, stared uncomprehendingly at what he had just harvested and fell onto his back. After this he did not move again. The magician, having redeemed himself, turned to his audience. He stifled a belch and asked, “Impressed?”

Jurey was fourteen then. He was the serf-son-of-a-serf-son-of-a-serf who had not yet had any thoughts of revolt. For five years already he had walked in the rows of men who followed the rows of stalks. He had watered and tilled and harvested and ducked blows from iron gloves. The overseers followed the rows of men along the rows of stalks on horseback, wearing metal shirts and plated helmets. This uniform, mandated by rank and tradition, left them uncomfortably hot during the spring and summer planting, uncomfortably cold during the fall harvest, and intolerably irritable during all seasons. So they berated and beat the men as they worked. Abuse was relief from an improper wardrobe and inclimate weather. A boot to the intestines was cold water and a prolonged three man beatdown was hot tea. Imagining themselves knights, the overseers also insisted upon the title “sir.” This title could appear before their name or at the end of a statement, “Sir” or “sir,” but it was not to be neglected. Jurey did not consider either the title or the abuse unjust, only uncomfortable. They were birth defects. He had known nothing else and imagined that any hope for change had been passed along with his placenta.

It was only his vision of the fertilizer-man that made Jurey question his fatalism. It was not that this glimpse of maybe-magic had expanded his consciousness or presented him with fantastic new possibilities. He had never thought to question the potential for a corpse to walk and thus had no reason to be in awe when he saw it. It was not the newness of the experience that shook him, but rather its similarity. He saw his ancestral history and his own future fully reenacted in two shuffles and a shaft of wheat. He saw, in pantomime, the cost of the fertilizer-man’s fatalism, of his family’s, of his own.

While three unsteady men with shovels, singing a tavern song that was equal parts chivalry and adultery, reburied the fertilizer-man, Jurey left the fields. He thought that he might not return to them. He imagined leaving for that indistinct somewhere-else that must exist beyond the crops and cattle, beyond the shacks and the manor house. He did not go there. He went to his shack, his parent’s shack, and he slept. He returned to the fields the following morning without protest or delay, but the possibility of difference remained.

That possibility was frozen now, held in stasis with the ice beyond the doorway. Jurey watched the narrow path that lead to the overturned whiskey keg that functioned as the squatter’s doorstep. The path was covered with a crisp film of frost, disturbed only by his footprints. He did not know if he would be pursued. During his flight, he had anticipated being intercepted, listening for the sound of horses or men behind, waiting to hear a reprimanding voice yell his name. He had heard nothing, and now he wondered if they would come for him at all, if they knew his name.

He hoped they would come and that they would catch him. He hoped they would bind him and drag him, barefoot and stumbling, over the frozen ground as they rode. He hoped they would stop to push him and goad him and step on his frost-bitten toes. He hoped they would put him in stocks and set him on display so that the other serfs could laugh, spit, and kick at him, so his skin could absorb the mucous, liquor, mud and urine of those he had failed. He hoped to be drawn and quartered, to feel the hemp knots chafe his wrists and ankles, to hear the horses called, to watch as his limbs were dislocated and his body dismembered. He hoped they would collect his pieces, his arms and legs and intestines, and scatter them over the fields. But nothing moved beyond the doorway.

Jurey could not clearly remember how his adolescent impulse to flee had matured into revolution. His memory of those years was fractured, fragmentary. It did not seem possible to him now that a rebellion had happened at all, let alone that he had caused it, or at least nurtured it. He remembered the books, smuggled to him by the women, mostly his mother’s friends, who worked in the manor house and the homes of the overseers. He did not want to attribute much to those books. Possibly they had influenced him. There had been ideas—political theories, philosophical arguments, treatises on warfare—that had inspired him, but still those ideas had not been his. They were the ideas of aristocrats or of parasitic traveling bards and intellectuals who manipulated themselves into the courtly homes that the serfs maintained, ate bread made from wheat that the serfs had grown and milled, and fed corncobs to their dogs that dead serfs had fertilized. Whatever they had given him had been unintentional, stolen like the books themselves.

He preferred to credit the conversation. They would usually begin with questions. A bent man laboring beside him would pause while wiping the drying dirt and blood from his chapped palms, and ask himself why the hell the work had to hurt so much. Jurey would overhear and reply that he did think it had to be, but that he hated that it was. Little else was said in the fields, where the overseers listened for dissent, but Jurey would seek out the man later, at his home or at one of the unvarnished, moss-colonized sheds where the serfs would accumulate at night to sit on feed crates and homemade stools and drink homebrewed intoxicants. He would speak to the man, encourage him to vent, to ramble, to explode. He knew he could not sermonize or solicit. He knew that he could not argue with them. The men hated condescension. They were emotionally calloused, but also extraordinarily brittle, becoming immediately defensive with only slight provocation. A word of reprimand or a moment of assumed superiority was enough to transform a friend into an overseer. But once a man had found release, once he had ranted, cried or screamed and broken a cup or crate, then he could be spoken to. Jurey could empathize with the man, and he could explain. He could tell him how unjust he thought their lives where and how desperate he was for change, and they would listen. They did not accept it all immediately, just as he had not left forever the night he saw the fertilizer-man, but they listened and they replied, speaking of their own frustration, their own outrage, and their own hope.

Once these conversations had permeated the community and each man had been given his chance to yell, spit, and vandalize, it was not long before the serfs began to realize that they were surrounded by potential weapons. The accumulated detritus of agriculture provided a substantial hypothetical armory. A wooden planting stake, trimmed, sharpened and sanded was an ideal shiv. A blade from a discarded plow needed only to be mounted on a handle and set to a whetstone to become a sword. Shovels, sickles and scythes were lethal already. Any large shaft of wood or iron was a club, and any club could be improved with brambles and nails. The serfs began to enter the fields armed, working with the weapons tucked under belts, hidden in boots, and concealed wherever else opportunity allowed. This intrigue was only bravado then, covert one-upmanship between the men, who would brag to each other later about how close they had come to being discovered and what they would have done to the overseer had they been caught. But Jurey knew that fantasies of retribution could only satisfy temporarily, that each new embellishment in the serfs’ boasts made conflict more certain.

The path outside the hovel remained empty. It was late morning and the clouds that had brought the last night’s rain had retreated north, taking with them the low, heavy current of cold air that had frozen the rain. The ice had begun to melt and Jurey’s footprints had begun to dissolve, leaving indistinct slushy depressions. He felt an increasing restless energy, a tremulous heat in his abdomen. He felt confident that they were coming for him, confident that he was too important to neglect, and he no longer wanted to be arrested. He wanted to fight them. He wanted to twist out of their gauntlets and bite their wrists, teething through their flesh at the thin bone under their metal casing. He would force them down, under his feet, to kick them wherever their breastplates did not cover. Then he would kill them and he would run again. How didn’t matter. Where was irrelevant. He would stumble to another plantation, find receptive serfs and begin the insurgency again. But he could not do that unarmed. He could not remember where he had left his long knife. It was a curved scimitar-length blade scavenged from a decrepit chaff cutter, simple to swing but cumbersome to transport. It had been too large to fit inside the legs of his overalls and too awkward to carry across his shoulders. He had tried to run with it in his hand, but found that it would collide with his hip, bruising him. It had dropped it as he had fled the fields, before the rain and the ice. He imagined that it was now caked in thawing mud and that the blade had frozen and cracked. He needed a new weapon.

He turned towards the squatter. The man had lived tenuously as an invasive parasite, eating what he did not plant and living where he was not wanted. Jurey did not think he could have done so without fighting. He must have kept a homemade sling, a stolen shepherd’s crook, or a whip made from foraged cords. The squatter had not left his hammock of pants and pitchforks. He wore an open robe of yellowed, undyed wool, made from inferior castoff spools, mostly from yearling lambs. He was all filth, stink and hair, but his skin was soft and unblemished, only the soles of his feet were calloused. His only weapon was a fisherman’s knife, blunter than his fingernails. He was harmless. Jurey’s confidence emptied. He became aware of the clammy weight of his defrosting sleeveless shirt. His flesh was puckering beneath his damp underclothes. He had also been obliviously sweating, and his scalp itched with encrusted perspiration. He wanted to undress and bathe, but he did not move. His impulses and desires had disconnected from his muscles, joints and tendons. The connective tissue, will, had decayed and dissolved. He stood and stared at the squatter’s corpse.

He remembered when they had killed the overseer. A late summer frost had arrived unpredicted, withering uncovered crops overnight, days before the beginning of the harvest. The serfs had been separated from their cots before dawn and driven into the rows to rifle for grain and vegetables that could be rescued among the lifeless and terminal stalks. They remained in the fields past noon, and while the morning had begun bitter and the serfs had been miserably underdressed, it warmed precipitously after sunrise and the overseers, now overdressed, became agitated and then abusive. They swore at the serfs, blaming their laziness for the destruction of the crops, and promising them shorter meals and longer days for the rest of the harvest and decreased allotments for the winter. They rode behind the slower men, slapping their shoulder blades with metal palms as they bent forward and seizing their loose hair as they stood up.

One forethinking overseer had brought a cattle goad, which he would stick between the ribs of bending serfs. He had discovered a lanky adolescent serf with tight skin and a hand-me-down shirt that was irresistibly short and had begun to prod him compulsively, waiting for the boy to discover an unblemished tomato or edible peapod and then thrusting the goad quickly, so that he dropped whatever he had found and was forced to kneel and grope to find it again. This continued until, instead of retrieving a bruised cucumber that had had dropped seven times, the boy withdrew a planting stake shiv from within his boot and drove it into the overseer’s ankle. The overseer felt the pain before he understood it. He released the cattle goad and shifted awkwardly on his horse, trying to pulp the biting fly or beetle that his instinct held responsible. The boy seized the arm of the unsteadied overseer and jerked, unseating him from his horse. Three nearby serfs discarded their harvesting baskets and joined the boy. They did not immediately remember the weapons that they perceived more as accessories than arms, but they understood the significance of the opportunity. They began to kick the fallen overseer, swinging their legs erratically. They were more interested in the tactile satisfaction of feeling their feet connect with writhing, desperate life than in the specifics of the harm that they were inflicting.

Jurey was on a separate detail when the overseer fell. He was walking between rows of maturing corn, watering their recently frozen leaves to prevent them from being damaged by the heat from the sun. He heard the yells first, distantly. The overseer beside him turned in the direction of the shouts and saw from horseback something that Jurey could not see through the corn. He rode immediately towards the uproar, leaving Jurey temporarily emancipated. Jurey did not know how to respond. He gazed at the shriveled leaves of a browning corn stalk, hoping the dying plant would explain what had happened. Before the stalk had an opportunity to answer it was crushed, trampled by the retreating horse of an overseer who was being pursued by stones, sticks and obscenities. Three other horses followed, and Jurey tumbled into a shallow drainage ditch to avoid the corn stalk’s fate. When he extracted himself from the ditch, he found the fields nearly empty of overseers. Only one remained, and he was dead, encircled by beating, kicking, spitting serfs. One of the serfs was speaking to the corpse as he kicked it, saying, “Sir, sir, sir.”

Three days passed before any overseer returned to the fields. The men did not harvest, and their wives and daughters did not go to the manor house. They did not know what would happen next, and they did not know if they had the capacity to decide. Most could not imagine a future in which they were free, or alive. They had never believed that they were the overseers’ equals or that they could kill one without exchanging their own lives. They had said as much, but it had been hopeless relief, like a terminal sufferer with a wasting disease threatening a disinterested god. They felt helpless, so they displayed overconfidence. They swore the overseers were cowards. Why would they come back? Did they want to have their asses offered to them again? Were they looking for their teeth, or their testicles? No, they were gone. They were scared. They were chicken shit. The overseers would not return.

On the morning of the third day, the overseers returned. They had added heavy visors to their helmets and carried tower shields. They had painted over their personal insignias on the shields. Without face or symbol, they were without identity. No serf would know which had beat or abused him in the past; any violence would be impersonal. They rode through the fields cautiously, resisting noise and avoiding further damage to the plants that were still intact. Once they arrived at the small unmowed commons between the fields and the shacks they dismounted, releasing their horses and shooing them back in the direction that they came. They set their shields forward and formed a snug line, facing the shacks, leaving little space between shields. They were unarmed and they did not advance.

Jurey was sleeping when the overseers came. He had fallen asleep outside, avoiding the noise of the self-affirming, self-medicating celebrations that were now a nightly occurrence near the shacks. He walked out to the edge of the commons and began an inattentive patrol, fidgeting with the handle of his chaff cutter. He was nervous. He could not comprehend why the overseers had retreated, why they had not immediately retaliated. He did not believe they were afraid; that was wishful fantasy. So why then? He could not understand, so he paced himself to sleep.

He slept through the arrival of the overseers. It was the serfs who awakened him. He heard them yelling, wordless, all whoops and hoots and barks. He opened his eyes to a boot sole, cracked, stuck with dirt, grass, and manure, passing over his face. He caught the scent of the manure, and, still groggy, imagined that he had missed the battle, and that he had smelled the bodies of the overseers, stacked, rotting, ready for the mass grave. He stood, and, instead of the aftermath of a massacre, saw a line of overseers, standing motionless and undisturbed, and an amoebic mass of serfs pulsating chaotically towards them. His reaction was immediate. He found the chaff cutter, which had been trampled into the soft dirt, took it by its hilt awkwardly, and ran to join the others.

He did not reach them before the quivering forward edge of serfs intersected the line of overseers. The leading serf ran with a sharpened spade that he had set under an arm to imitate a pike. As he reached an overseer he thrust the spade outward with an uneven jerk. The overseer leaned left, allowing the head of the spade to pass, and drove his shield right. The shield caught the spade by its shaft, causing it to reverberate out of the serf’s hands. The overseer then pushed the shield forward once, precisely and without spite, shoving the serf back. Each of the advance serfs were met with the same response as they encountered the barrier of overseers. They were disarmed and dispassionately pushed away. If the repelled serf fell, he was not kicked, whipped or taunted. No residue of past abuse was detectible in the overseers’ stance or actions. No serf pierced a shield or penetrated the line.

The remaining serfs who had not yet touched the shield of an overseer pushed forward eagerly. Some stepped on the arms, limbs, necks and faces of the serfs who had fallen, unable to tell life from dirt. Since they began their charge they had felt the ground convulsing and retreating under their tremulous legs, and they felt no difference now. Others were struck by the stumbling men in front of them and pushed back, shoving serfs into the shields of overseers, who inevitably volleyed them into the crowd again. Frustrated, disoriented and disarmed, the men at the front began to swing their arms and legs haphazardly. They were desperate to inflict pain and be relieved of the bewildering ambiguity of a battle with an invulnerable opponent disinterested in fighting.

They began to hit and kick each other. The blows were accidental at first, but they quickly became intentional. They satisfied in ways that striking the shields of the overseers did not. The pain was immediately recognizable and reciprocal. A swollen eye could be answered with a broken jaw. A kick to the crotch was roughly equivalent to a thumb in the eye. A punch to the neck might drop a serf immediately, but the fall only put him in a better position to chew on his assailant’s ankle. Justice became uncomplicated.

The serf militia had defected to mutual abuse by the time that Jurey reached them. He tried to pass behind a fist fight and was backhanded once, in the larynx, ending his advance towards the overseers. He retreated, swallowing and choking, out of the brawl and crouched on the edge of the commons, snorting on burning phlegm that had flushed into his nostrils. He saw several of the less passionate serfs, no longer interested in brutalizing each other, discard their weapons and leave the battle. The overseers made no attempt to pursue. They maintained their line, moving only to lightly deflect the few serfs who still fought their original enemy. Jurey realized that nothing would change. The serfs would beat each other into catharsis, and go back to their shacks.

Tomorrow the overseers would come and take those that could walk into the fields to harvest. There would walk along the rows of plants, following the irrigation trenches, and followed by the overseers. Some of them would die in the fields, and they would be tilled into the rows to fertilize the crops. He looked across the commons, over the diminishing quarrel, and at one of the overseers. He could not tell if he had known him. He could not see his face and he was too distant to hear his voice, but he imagined the overseer was asking, “Impressed?” He turned away and ran from the commons, leaving the fields behind.

Jurey stared at the squatter, remembering how he had ran. He felt vacant. The emotional flux he felt earlier had receded from his mind and settled on his skin. It solidified around his pores and clung, sticky and malodorous, like afterbirth on a stillborn calf. He wanted to believe that it was afterbirth. He wanted to believe that the oppressive, oily dissatisfaction was inherited and universal, that all serfs were born frustrated and desperate. He could not believe it any longer. He understood that he was alone. He realized that no one was searching for him, that no serf was seeking a liberator and no overseer was looking for a prisoner. He could live outside the fields for the rest of his life, like the squatter. He could steal, scrape and scavenge everything essential to remain alive. He could accumulate soil and odors, and only have blisters on the soles of his feet. He could build a hammock from rags and die on it. He imaged that this was the only possible liberty.

He felt that he should bury the squatter. The body was light from malnourishment and had a diminutive frame. He was confident that he could move it, even in his present weakness. He grasped the squatter by his bare arms. They felt warm against his wet, puckered fingertips. Jurey did not question the warmth. It seemed natural that the squatter’s body should not be cold or rigid, like the serfs who died in the field. He moved his hands to the corpse’s shoulders and pulled its torso upright. He felt the muscles in the shoulders shift and tighten. He saw the squatter’s arms rise, and he imagined they would embrace him. The arms pushed him away.

“Go! Get out! Leave!”

Jurey felt the push before he understood it. He did not know how a dead man could shove him aside. He imagined that even death had rejected him. He looked pleadingly at the squatter’s cot, hoping for an explanation. The cot was empty. No body lay on the ragged pants. The squatter stood besides the cot. His arms were raised, defensively. The yellowed wool robe, which was too large for him, hung off his shoulder. His bare feet were blushing pink against the splintered floorboards. He did not move closer to Jurey. He was shouting.

“Go! Get out! Leave!”

Jurey did not respond. The squatter’s resuscitation was senseless. He could not reconcile it with his life. He could not see how the gout-afflicted shuffle of the fertilizer-man and the blushing feet of the squatter could coexist. He felt taunted by the blood returning to the squatter’s toes, derided by hopeful possibilities. He had nothing to say, so he listened to the squatter’s commands and he left.

By early evening, Jurey had returned to the fields. He hesitated at their edge. He had thought about nothing but his surrender during the return trip, fitfully evading thoughts of his moments with the squatter. He had not thought of the ice storm, or anticipated the condition of the crops. He was unprepared for what he saw. The stalks of wheat were broken, bent by the weight of the ice clinging to their heads. Frozen fruit and vegetables lay were they had fallen from their plants, blotched and discolored, with cracked skins and pods. Even the weeds, left untended during the brief revolt, had been killed by the frost. The fields were dead. He saw no surviving plant and no crop that could be salvaged by the harvest. He knelt and retrieved a defrosting tomato from the dirt. Its insides were homogenous slush and outside it had begun to brown. He realized there would be no harvest. No men would return to the fields today, or the next day, or any day this autumn. They had not yet harvested enough crops. They had enough to subsist normally for weeks, maybe, but not for months. The serfs would go hungry, and so would the overseers. The traditional routine could not be sustained. There had been nothing static about the ice. Survival would be impossible without change. Nothing was changeless, outside of fearful obsession and hopeful fantasies. He thought of the dead squatter standing, with his pink toes, and the fertilizer man falling, heavy and lifeless, into a freshly tilled row with a shaft of wheat in his fist. He let the frozen tomato fall, and stepped into the field.
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[jseamus]

All in all, I liked this story so far. The draft as it now stands is a bit dense, and some of the component sections may be over-detailed, but it is rather good. It was a bit hard to get through some parts (mainly due to the length of the paragraphs, I think). However, the whole thing was engaging and not boring in the least. I enjoyed it, but it still needs some work. There are no problems here that could not be fixed with editing.

Some general suggestions:

*Possibly break up the sections into more readable paragraphs.

*Possibly explain (or at least justify) the squatters revival; give the revival some context or clarify it some.

*Possibly flesh out some characters (e.g. some serfs or an overseer) in the sections set in the past.

*Possibly tighten up the long descriptions a little; no need to get rid of the descriptions, just pace them a little or intersperse action.

*Possibly add some more dialogue, though you might be planning this for later (or you might not want the story to have much dialogue).
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This is the world.

[Nugan]

Thanks! I definitely appreciate the critique.

[jseamus]

[Nugan]