Billy Marlow

Billy Marlow was a seventh-generation North Carolinian.  He stood on his porch on a sunny morning, smelling the odor of ice and wood chips.  It had snowed a bit the night before, and everything had frozen solid by morning.  The water pipes that kept his chickens and rabbits hydrated had stopped up with ice, despite his various inventions meant to keep them dripping.  He had been up for two hours already, tending to that situation, and was ready for breakfast.

Funny thing about wood chips is that they stay warm.  A pile of them at the edge of his yard was constantly breaking down, composting, a process of any biological substance.  Even though the night had done its best to turn the world into a Popsicle, that pile just kept steaming and melting it away.  As any accumulated ice thawed and the water seeped into the middle of the pile, it just fed the process of breakdown.  One of Billy's cats, the orange one, was laying curled into a divot in the pile.

Billy was known by many to be a sweet fellow, and a practical farmer.  He had managed to turn his family's hilly land, with its mediocre soil, into a productive farm.  Every acre was packed with fruit and nut trees, berries, small crops, and animals.  The goats had been slaughtered for the winter, filling his freezers and providing a good chunk of winter income, but not before he used them to trim his raspberry canes.  Most of the rabbits were still in the barn, getting fatter every day, and his two dozen chickens were just layers.  He figured that everyone and their mule was selling chicken meat these days, but rabbits and goats were harder to come by. 

Billy turned forty-five that day.  His wife was probably just waking up, and he was sure that she was all set to make him some surprise cake.  She had made a different kind for him every year since they were married.

His niece was coming back to town that day as well.  She had been visiting her brother, the money one, up in Seattle for a couple of weeks.  Billy wasn't sure what had happened to that boy; all the other kids in the Marlow family were...well...practical.  But that one was a hundred thousand dollars in debt for an education that allowed him to get a desk job that allowed him to spend the next ten years paying off his debt.  When he fell from the tree, he must have rolled down a hill and been picked up by a racoon.

The sky was pink and a sliver of silver sun began to fill the gap in front of him.

"Hey, buddy," came the voice of Sharla from inside.  He turned and saw that the windows were steamed up; she must have been up for awhile already with the stove heated up.  He realized that his fingers were completely numb and he had rabbit droppings all over his shoes.  His long hair was a tangled mess.

He responded, "I must look like a truckload of manure right now."

She drew a heart in the condensation on the front door window and stepped back into the shadow of the house. 

Billy sucked in one more breath of woody air and smiled at the valley that lay before him.  The orange cat stretched its four limbs out into the world and snuggled deeper into the warm pile.