Wheat

A field of wheat sprouted on Beak Street, right below the elevated train tracks.
Its stalks were tall and just about grazed the metal of the tracks, casting a shadow of wheat over the pavement.
I liked the way the stalks stood, the look of them leaning against the wind.
So I invited the field indoors, away from the roar of the trains. The field lifted its surface layer and dragged its root system from the anchors in the ground and followed me home.
It said it couldn’t stay long but was glad for the invitation. It curved itself along the staircase, up three flights, leaving trails of wheats and grasses behind. It peeked a bit of itself through the doorway and bent itself just enough to fit under the roof.
The field said it had never been anywhere like this before. I showed it around the apartment. I showed it the hollow air conditioner where mourning doves had laid their eggs, and the portrait I’d drawn of a roadside pond, and the rock with a blue waist I kept in a box, and the book I’d found on ancient horses.
“There’s history to the horses,” I said. “They were much smaller back then.
About the size of dogs.”
The field flipped through the pages of the book and said the horses looked haunted and would have never let anyone approach them. It had had horses gallop through its stalks before, their hooves drifting across like a dream. I asked it then if it had any horse bones stored away. It said it didn’t but had the skull of a barn owl somewhere in its layer of topsoil. The barn owl had been something else, it said, her wings inaudible in flight.

Read more from Issue 23.1.