The Barn
A 6S Challenge Edited by Bill Lapham
The Barn: A 6S Challenge
Contributors: The Writers of Six Sentences Photgraphs: Google Images under the search: “Old Barns”
From the Editor: I freely admit I stole this exercise from The Art of Fiction by John Gardner (Vintage Books, 1983, pg. 37). These are his words: "Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war, or death. Do not mention the man who does the seeing." I turned this exercise into a challenge on the website called Six Sentences created and administered by Robert McEvily. Entries, as is the custom at Six Sentences, were limited to six sentences. The authors of these pieces reserve the copyrights to their work. They appear in the order in which they were received at 6S. The value of this pamphlet is priceless; therefore it is not for sale. However, anyone willing to pay the price please contact the editor at the 6S website. I have chosen and matched the photos with the prose. Credit for the quality of the match belongs solely to the authors whose vivid descriptions made matching easy. Blame for errors or inconsistencies, blatant or otherwise, is mine alone. All the contributors have won for themselves the admiration of starving artists everywhere.
Ron. Lavalette I saw a barn like this once. It was in one of those grainy old newsreels. Horrible things happened in it. People tried, unsuccessfully, to hide there but they were discovered. There was a fire. This seems like one of those.
Gita Smith Herr Zimmer came up the road again today, and would I sell him my goats and would I sell him the barn? This is the third time since August he has come with that vulture's smile, hoping to profit from our misfortune. Gertie says I should sell the goats because I no longer keep up with the milking and the birthing, no longer go to town or shave or gladhand fellow burghers. She left this morning to visit our daughter in Bremen, and I am left alone to make my scrutiny of this relic of a barn that used to ring with stamping hooves and bright, delighted laughter. Inside, I've found a high and sturdy beam, the lumber milled from walnut trees before the Fuehrer decreed that wood could only be used for rifle stocks and hospitals, and I have a sturdy length of rope, as well, that once was used for a child's swing. As I loop and knot it, a young goat nuzzles me and wants to eat the noose, but I say, "Sorry, buddy, it's a bit too late for that."
Teresa Cortez The barn still needs painting, like it did six weeks ago when the paint was bought at Steven's Colors in town and it felt like a good idea. The unopened buckets are still beside the creaky barn door, red dirt kicked on the tops. Steven brushed a reminder of red on the top of each can, bright blood against the pale of the barn, tiny and vivid against large and vague. The structure looks worse now than it did six weeks ago, drained and abandoned; painting won't make it what it was. If it could talk, the barn would say it doesn't care to be painted now, that it would rather waste beside buckets full of what can't fade if never opened. The barn knows more red dirt will settle on the tops, that debris will collect all around until the reminders are forgotten.
Deborah Jovan Reed Open the doors and be surrounded by nothing. The fresh air is stagnant. The summer sun peaks over the loft -- cold to the touch. The cow moos as its calf nurses, the horse neighs to quiet its foal, the chickens cluck as they round up their chicks -- but there is no sound. As it has these last twenty-three years, the tire swing hangs by its rope on one of the center rafters, now covered in particles of hay, dander, and dust -- crying for want of use. While the scythe in the corner stands tall with pride because it has a purpose today - be it simply one gentle slice.
Sandra Davies November crows in the line of trees behind, nests overcrowded by the loss of one felled prematurely, crashing, crushing through the roof, rendering it beyond repair. Monochrome, except black with red not white ... the red near brown the colour of dried ... no do not go there. One end still standing, corner struts supporting despite the sagging centre where the shelter is no more, reduced to emptiness, no longer able to provide its once-essential role. Corrugated ridged and dotted tracer lines of blacker circled holes where nails had once held things together, now shown to have begun the breakdown, caused the sapping of inherent strength, allowed the red-edged crumbling to begin. Aching jagged gaping where violent rust has torn away what once was bright and new, unmarked, was whole and made to last far longer than just nineteen years and twenty-seven days. Thirty-seven weeks before those nineteen years and twenty-seven days a sweeter-smelling place new hay and striped inside with dust mote beams, shadow-interrupted by the nesting swallows, darker corners sought and found and stifled laughter, the future mirage-bright.
Peter McNiff Leafless stands the tree beside the barn. Empty are the stalls where the dog was born and named, a family pet. How cold the concrete, how bare the stalls and now the barn is stooped. Its back is broken by neglect. Rampant termites have done their worst. Too late to knock it down and start again.
Paul de Denus The barn sits on a pastoral setting, the structure nicely framed and whitewashed. A smudge of purple plums hug the horizon behind, the sun white and low in the sky casting long foreboding shadows across the open barn door. Spiked yellowed grass point eastward onto empty plains revealing nothing as if the world stopped. There’s a fence on the south side that needs completion; the barn needs a color. Someone with steadier hands should finish it. Miriam says to leave it alone, leave it on the easel, for what’s done is done.
Original Painting by Toni Grote
Long Baker The barn rose out the its soil, brown and proud pushing to the sky with green moss clinging to its body and tufts of grass around its feet like children around a mother with treats in her hand. Creosote free panels had cracked, split and fallen allowing chards of light cut into the despair of the dark interior. It's old door swung, loose and decaying; allowed all manner of wind, breeze and air to pass though unhindered, unfettered into the empty void inside creating a musty, damp, dank breathe that was as solid as the walls that enclosed it. The low winter sun woozily glowed across the barn’s rooftop in faint mocking light, blushing itself like a soft powered paint brush across the canvas of rough wooden slats. Now untended the barn had lost much of its meaning and purpose, as had the farm in which it had stood for the last fifty years, while generations had been borne, born, grown, and moved on to pastures new. Until someone could care for this land and harboured the vision and desire to grow life again the farm and the barn would stay in its eternal winter.
Cath Barton That damn door needs oiling, mending, painting, has needed those things for a long time, too long, 'cos nothing ain't going to bring back the days of good harvests when the bales of hay were stacked high in the bar and it wasn't just birds that roosted in there. Push the door harder and you'll catch an echo of the laughter. The motes of dust will be dancing phantoms, the smell will drag you back to the glory days and for a moment your heart will lift and you'll stretch out your hands, but you'll stumble, you won't be able to stop yourself. Hold onto the door though and you won't fall. Breathe in the good memories and feel the world turning. Then turn around, walk away from the barn and from across the yard turn to look and notice that, in spite of everything, it is still standing, and you are proud of it.
It Breathes Like a Midwife By Cita It still breathes, humming and sighing and shifting and smelling like a million-ingredient soup. It is still full of work, half-finished projects, that old bicycle leaning against the wall, the fresh shavings beneath the tool bench, that small puddle of oil that needs to be absorbed by some cat litter and swept away, stalls fragrant with manure, restless animals with tight bags and empty bellies that don't know the latest news, the day's headlines. It is still a place where hours slip by while the needs of others are met, chores done both by routine and necessity, cloaking the day in duty and obligation in a way that somehow transcends both. The rafters still soar and the birds still build nests in them, the boards around the stanchions still softly rot and fall away, year after year, and there is always one grain sack minus a corner so that the mice can find the trickle. There is always something to keep busy with. The old barn wraps its warm arms around everything that breathes, all the dust motes that float, all of the tools with baraka in their handles, all of the things that were and the things that must keep coming, and through it all, like a midwife, it breathes with them.
The Doors Are Ever Open by Kristine_ES Mamas coo the pretty words and point to pretty pictures so babies can grow up knowing what things are, but why don’t they tell us what red is and what it means? We grow up wandering fields looking for the highway to get as far away from empty barns as we humanly can because anywhere’s gotta be better than this. We pick up and run far and free and as fast as we can on thighs that could crush the world, wind in our hair, cool air supercharging our lungs, free and so godawful happy to be away from that stupid farm. Sometimes we stumble into moonlight streams and shiver all night because the clothes on our back is all we got, then break our legs that got caught down man-eating chuck-holes. We call out alone and we crawl out to the highway to look for some help from an angel--a demon—whatever it takes to get these cold clothes off and make the bent stick of ourselves right again. Some old guy will come and scrape us off the side of the road, pour us into the car and take us back to his big white barn (or maybe a mansion) where he’s got a little medicine cabinet to fix us right up.
Stephen Buss In amongst the strands of golden straw and sticky sweet scent of decay, lay the crushed carapace of a stag beetle. Rare and beautiful even in death, it shone in the delicate rays of sunlight pouring in through the busted roof of the barn. High in the rafters, as if the beetle’s soul had already moved on, the gleam white cream of a barn owl’s wing fluttered and two lamp like eyes shone amber in the gloom. Between the two creatures an eternity of dusty distance expanded; worlds apart – light and dark, life and death. The barn owl lifted its soft and silent shape into the dying evening light and headed out into the verdant, life-laden paradise beyond the rotting doors. On the floor, the shimmering carapace bore the marks of the boot that had crushed it.
Bill Lapham The low angle gave the barn a look far larger than its actual size, more imposing, less unnecessary. Whatever it sheltered at one time had been removed, sold at auction, or rusted into dust. Boards hanging by the thinnest of margins were weather-beaten, sun-baked, stripped naked by the blowing dust from infertile and idle fields nearby. The barn bore its pain quietly: gaping wounds in its sides where the setting sun bled waning light through its bare bones, holes that accommodated swallows seeking nesting sites. Echoes of work loitered in the dark spaces under haylofts rotted through with age. The edifice leaned at an unsustainable angle, waiting stoically for the next prairie gale.