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Toward Home

from Utburd by Michael Bell

/

lyrics

It had rained, and the track through the fields was a slog of sticky mud that pulled at my boots. It was a dark night, moonless and starless. Completely still. I would certainly have lost my way if not for the dying flashlight which cast a dim orange glow down the path through wheat stubble ahead of me. I gripped my tools and kept moving.

I was peering ahead, expecting to see the lights of home, when I heard the rattling cough of a tractor behind me. I turned. There was no light, but it coalesced from the darkness and heaved through the mud. It was a hulking, rusting thing. It stank of smoke, and shit, and rot. It maintained a steady slow speed. I stepped off the track.

The driver slumped over the steering wheel, a wide-brimmed hat low over his face. He did not acknowledge me. The machine passed, churning mud, and I saw then what it pulled. A low cart, piled with something that twitched and groaned, a suffering mass, broken limbs, staring eyes, and in every clotted mouth my name, my wife’s name, my child’s name.

I dropped out of myself, falling back into the wet earth. The driver and his cargo passed on, and dissolved again into the night, like a thinning smoke, and where he had been, the distant lights of my home.

credits

from Utburd, released October 29, 2023

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Michael Bell Bellingham, Washington

A Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too.

Some of this is music for video games. The rest is a fairly raw document of my ongoing attempt to find something new among the blinking lights in my studio at home.

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