‘Grass is a carpet,’ said Mat, yawning as he lent back onto a fence post and content in the belief that he had just discovered something quite profound.
The land was vast in this part of the steppes, fields that swallowed the horizon stretched off in totalic wonder as the enormity of this world became unflatteringly discerned. As if formed through an accident of a creator’s hand, a lone hill dotted the plain, some distance from the fence line, and atop its crest was an ancient oak tree lending its lonely shadow toward the ground as if it were a jar of spilt ink.
The field was nowhere, an unnamed road, too far and far too small to record. It had been cut through this field of grass and in existence was now remembered as the point at which Dana’s car had finally decided to retire from her service.
‘You’ve been drinking?’ muttered Dana as she sat upon her car’s bonnet and glumly thumbed through a vehicle service book: its index failing to mention anything about over-boiled radiators or matters of distance. Placing the book down with a satisfying thud, the welled up feelings of mechanic without tools released themselves as a sigh of the helplessness of the situation became what was now a passable way to spend the afternoon. It wasn’t the end of the world, despite the barren absence of anything else, in fact, Dana imagined it to be something like the middle of the world: a grey place of little note, where dreamers can dream and where poets can be insufferable.
‘Just think,’ Mat continued in his musing kind of way, ‘if you pulled a corner of this field up you would see the ground as floorboards underneath.
‘You would see dirt, Matthew, dirt and some very annoyed worms.’
Driving out to the country was usually pleasant, the openness of valley as you left Obeck seemed to carry you forward. It was a gentle decent into the grasslands below and the tall sun always seemed lay across the horizon for an age when compared to the fleeting afternoons of their mountain home.
The air was nice. Taking another breath Dana felt a peacefulness in this field that she hadn’t known for quite some time. It had been a hard year, every problem would be at its worst and then fall into another. If it wasn’t for Mat’s garage being available while her workshop was being rebuilt, she probably would have had to sell the business; he was so generous, the least she could do was to drive him to Dennison.
Mat was always smiling, Dana’s Father had told her that people who smiled at strangers were without a brain, but her friend was smart, far more than many would give him credit for. He was a botanist–despite his current opinions about grass–and whenever he would walk past a flower or weed in the street, he’d know its name and why it had decided to grow from a crack or in a drainpipe.
There was a flower, a small thing almost broken under the weight of its own petals, that he stopped for so long to draw that Dana thought him mad.
‘A boreal daisy, in Obeck,’ he shouted almost stupefied that something so uncommon could be found growing outside of a library, ‘its seed could have been brought here by a bird but that’s not in any migration patterns I know, and the fact that it could even bloom in this climate is bordering on the surreal-‘
Having enough time to get a coffee from the Library café, Dana felt strangely proud to have a friend that could still get excited over something so simple; that’s why she agreed to take him to a flower show in Dennison, and now, even with the mockery of distance laughing at her broken car, that’s why she didn’t mind being stuck with him.
‘Where’d the tree come from?’ she asked, ready to elbow Mat sharply in the kidney if he said something like “from the ground”.
‘Shepherds used to plant them when there were more wolves on the steppes,’ he said, ‘you could see your whole flock from up on a hill and it was nicer to spend the day in the shade. So, over time they carried sproutlings back from the East when they grazed there in the Winter.’ Standing up and dusting the grass off his pants, Mat gave a light yawn and lifted his notebook from the fence with his free hand.
‘That one would have stood there for over a hundred years or so. Gorgeous, isn’t it?’
Seeing that he had begun to sketch the tree, Dana decided that she had time to have a second attempt at working out what was wrong with her car.
It was usually more reliable than this and the irony of a mechanic’s car breaking down had been too grim an eventuality for her to let it sit idle. When was the last time she had checked the radiator? January? Back when the rains had let the grass grow long and when she didn’t have the time to mow her lawn.
‘Hmmm.’ A realisation had become a dissatisfied sigh and after pulling a clump of dirt and weeds from the hardest to reach section of her air intake, Dana kicked the side of her car and walked down the road to sulk for a while.
‘Carpet in the engine again?’ Mat smiled unhelpfully as he stooped over the offending plant, having just finished examining its roots.
‘It’s bindweed. Pretty flower but horrible to get rid of, glad we didn’t carry it to Dennison.’
Patting his friend on her shoulder, he tried to be as conciliatory as possible, ‘we have to walk don’t we?’
‘Yep.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘Nope.’
‘Did you want a piggy back?’…
With frustrated laughter and distance of an afternoon in front of them, Mat and Dana walked along the unnamed road until field became river and the river eventually held a town. In a tavern too small for misfortune, they both sat upon its porch and waited for a tow truck to return with Dana’s car. The day was long, the two friends were tired, in the parting twilight, everything seemed like it was going to be ok.
After a moment of quiet, Dana relented herself to a wayward thought.
‘If you think about it, grass is kind of like a river.’
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 