California Vineyard by: Taresa Cardon, Oil on canvas, 2012.
Andy
by: Luis CHavez, Jr.
Andy tells me that in a couple of days he is going to have more than thirty years working in this place. He says your nose learns to get used to the foul odor after repeated number of dives into an ocean of flies, that your eyes grow protective layers to keep your sanity in and the deranged thoughts out. The sun’s heat will mess with your head like that. And your hands, well they develop thick calluses, tough, permanent, necessary. I’ve been a pig farmer for a little over five weeks now, and I assumed my spirit would be made up of more durable materials. I remember at the end of a hard days work, Andy and I would go down to the end of the lake and observe people skipping rocks towards an exhausted sunset. But Andy, Andy saw dignity in those rocks. He envisioned honesty; he experienced poetry in the beautiful fact that when pushed, they briefly moved forward. Andy will gather tons of swine manure and fill up as many barrels as he possibly could, and for some reason he constantly moved twice as fast as the rest of us; he was always the farmer’s favorite. Andy gives me a thumb up. Most depressing expression I’ve ever seen. Sometimes when I come across that lonely thumb, I imagine the reason to why we were placed on this earth was to carry the wings for lazy angels who take others for granted. That we were exclusively chosen to polish the devil’s filthy boots using our hearts to scrub away the grime that refuses to wash off. Andy tells me there is integrity in this, a good day’s work for an honest man, that there is wondrous music waiting to be heard that all you had to do was just listen. But what kind of song plays from the mounds of shovels from the demon’s abominating shit? The liquid stench of terror, the mist that consumes every inch of my sanity that has me shoveling up my virtues from my soul! That has me paralyzed from the very breaths I take from fear of what I might conceive next. Even after being surrounded by a beautiful ocean of red roses, the mere thought of inhaling the slightest molecule of air is enough to revive my nightmare. Is there really glory in this? Or is that what they tell us skidding rocks so we can chisel our hearts out and continue skipping on with our lives. Andy says he can’t picture it like that, he says that if it wasn’t for people like us, than the whole world wouldn’t be able to spin in its pristine direction. That we are one of the selected few who chose to rise above all when it was just simpler to give up and run, and it might not be a real elegant living but it’s important to have someone step up, and yeah maybe he’s right. Maybe I am just an ignorant working class American who cheated his way into college. Perhaps now I am too good to be a part of the millions of people who struggle everyday to prepare a grand feast for their life’s, who will always be picky. So I take a deep breath and put my ego aside, return back to work. And on a hot boiling day, before a merciless sun, I make a kind note to help Andy fill up the last remaining barrels and I say, “I’ve had this thought for a while now man, maybe the reason why skidding rocks can’t skip backwards is because if they could, they’d obliterate the ones who threw them in an instant.” Instead we’re obligated to leap forward over a distant ocean hoping we can make it to the other side and once again become proud boulders ourselves but most likely drown on the way there, suffer for a common cause and never look back, we can’t even come close to comprehend, is this! Is this really worth it man? Andy gives me a thump up, most depressing expression I’ve ever see. Fades quietly into his work.