evaporated-milk

[Excerpt]

"Anna, walking upward through the field. She skirts the edge of the wide semi-circular plot, following the line of electric fencing. To her left, the next field drops down and around the hill, clumps of thick grass and caves of deformed metal. She has seen an animal far off in the bottom corner but today it isn’t in view, the far edges of the field out of sight. She presumes it is for this animal that the electric fence is here, running its line around the edge of the land, creating an island. She walks outside of it, having stepped instead with her eyes closed through the spines in the hedgerow at the bottom of the hill. Her field contains a squat crop, dark grey-green and dense. She has been living near here for some months, and this is her third time walking this way, her trainers in the furrow where the machinery has last tracked – the repeating compression of the tyres unchanged each time, except for the softening of intermittent rain. Showers over the hills, light and diffuse. In the distance, there is the sound of a dog barking. The sky wide and grey and a squint in her eyes. She runs her hand along the top of the field crop, feeling it in rhythmic nudges, miniature hits to her skin making it pink.

Her car had broken down on the side of the road three weeks back, and since she has not moved it. She considers the time that needs to have passed for this to be called an abandonment. Since she’d moved here, those months before, her desire to drive had dwindled. She has taken instead to this cutting into the hillside, walking for hours, often, against the sky. Speed slowing, distance dropping a pin into her. The first time, she had been drawn to the top of the hill by the flash of the sun against something fluttering. A tiny crystalline sail flying in the breeze. Closer, she had found the rotting remains of fresh cut flowers in their plastic wrapping, patterns of pink and purple and white. Brown and green dripping as she’d lifted a bouquet of rotten roses from the pile. Most were strapped to the fence post. Ribbons and cable ties. So much promise. So much lost. So much missed, baby. How a girl had been found. Anna had pulled one stalk out from its plastic casing, and as she sat there on her knees had stripped the gloopy rot of the flower apart.
Today, her walk over the hill takes her above the run of the road, and from up here where she now stands, she can see how there is mulch collecting behind the tyres of her car, gathering of road edging and dust, dampening with the coming and going of the rain. She stands for a minute, looking down, not needing it. Two other cars pass, then turn around the hill and out of sight.
At the top of the hill she sees across into further valleys which intersect and complicate the hillside, trees and wilder land interrupting the grid of the fields. She does not cut, this time, down into the close valley to meet the road at the base of the hill, but instead is drawn into the copse of trees and along the ridge into the next hillside, over which she thinks she might drop to the edge of town, avoiding the walk along the roadside. Town is small, underpopulated, distant from many places. Anna likes its smallness, its sparseness, its distance. People there speaking in low voices, passing each other, small nods. Going about their business. In town she works a small job, while she thinks about staying, while she thinks about not staying.

As Anna walks, she is thinking about the way this field does and does not resemble fields she has walked in before - the route she has to take, the way the lines intersect and digress. The shade and nature of the growths. She is disappearing and appearing again with each step, returning and distending. Invisible now, from the road. She is taking, this time, the route into the trees and then out again the other side, hoping for something, like a clearing of her way."