The Farmstead

by Ed Ahern

Years ago, hunting deer in a forest, I stumbled onto an abandoned farmstead. There were no traces of roads or pathways into the site, no wood or glass or iron. Just the stone cairn of a chimney, and tumbled rock fences, strewn by trees. Connecticut is stoney soil, the clearing and stacking would have been the labor of years.

A chill, soft rain was falling, birds and animals were silent and still. The smell was of sodden leaves and the mold of rotted trees. As I moved cemetery-slowly through the grounds, I wanted to put a name to the ruined labor—the someone or other house, the something or other farm. But there were only age scattered rocks.

And there, where I thought a sitting room might have been, was a neatly stacked cairn, three feet high, that weathering could not have accomplished. A body perhaps, or a keepsake interred at the home it belonged to.

I propped my rifle against a sapling and lifted off the cap stone, intending to burrow down to discovery. And hesitated. And put it back. Undisturbed. What I imagined was more than I could discover, more than I could unearth.
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I moved on, the farmstead undisturbed and unrecorded. And have long since forgotten its location.

* * *

Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had about 500 stories and poems published so far, and ten books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories where he manages a posse of seven review editors, and as lead editor at Scribes Micro.

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