AJ Padron

Across the darkened horizon sparks the light of buildings too innumerable to count. Between her and the fireflies of blurred and muddled light, there stretches a vast and silken field of gathered, bending wheat. The color has been seeped out of the golden stalks by the night and as they fall one over the other in waves reaching towards the infinite edge of the horizon they’re colored a silver-white and dark gray in the cast of the moon. Where she stands, still, the rippling wheat emits the sweet smell of hay, and the ground under her bare feet is still warm and dry from the day’s harsh heat.

A wind blows across the infinitely expansive stretch of grain and the whole field seems to breath with the fresh night air, rippling moonlight like crashing waves all around where she stands, occasionally flicking bits of silver debris like sparks into the air. Against her skin, the summer night air feels fresh, but lacks the comfort it would if she was familiar with its naturalness. It whips hairs into her face, hums against her ear and cools the day’s sweat, but something about the scents it carries- the mildest mildew smell of wheat further away that has begun to rot, the smell of dirt, the hint of something almondy in an intoxicating way which carries on a wind that only graces the nose on occasion- unnerves her in this vast, no-walled, open space.

Her eyes are stuck to the distant lights of buildings that glow yellow like sickly fire, and the black shapes of the buildings against the dark of the sky. Looking at it now, she thinks the sky has to be one of the least dark things to ever be labeled as such. It contains color that true darkness doesn’t, purples and blue-greys and the occasional pinkish hue, and compared to a space where no surface reflects light and your eyes don’t ever adjust to the dark, the starry sky seems less and less like a vast void of darkness. More like an endless space where light bounces so incredibly quickly and back and forth from so many planets and stars and suns that it could never truly get dark, illuminated by infinite, impossible-to-see lights far off in space. In its newness to her, it feels strangely comforting compared to the unnerving nature of the night air and she wants to fall off the surface of this dry crumbling earth and find herself in the cold sanitary space of sky instead, surrounded wholly by entities of light.

If she looks to the west, at the horizon stretching out like a tired cat, the silver of the wheat continues there, dwindling into merely meaningless patterns until they kiss the sky, with no mountains or hills rising into the distance to interfere with their concurrence. The east is much the same, but distantly a stocky ridge lifts into the air, bringing the wheat to a rough furry crest silhouetted against the starry sky.

Ahead lies the impossible city, painting pale gold sparks, dark buildings, and a discolored smudge of light onto the sky around it, like a rancid halo. She can’t see where the wheat ends and the city begins from here: it rises minuscule straight out of the wheat as far as she can tell, perched there on the horizon. To the south, behind her, she doesn’t turn her head to look. Doesn’t dare to cast her eyes at the endless wheat behind her, at the now unseeable but hauntingly there object that rests far beyond the silver horizon. She knows just how the place looks, just how the shed rests in the middle of a wheat field, can visualize how it looks like the smear of a dead bug against the gold wheat and the white-blue sky of day- the only time she had seen it up close before she turned tail and ran as far as she could get.