A mob of stalks. They bash against each other. Shove. Kick. Slap. Hot bodies mash, feet trample, and parcels are lost. Everyone screeches, and my voice is just one particle of an explosion. It’s a cacophony that rises like the black smoke leftover from a battle. It spells one message: Defiance.
Who are we to be beaten down, snapped and lying in pieces upon the road, expected to dry and blow away? Who are the others, to think themselves the sun, the wind; light and strength; hot and cold?
No. We will not be broken. We refuse. We have other plans in mind, and today will be time. Today, the sun will be blown out like a pink party candle, not by the wind, but by the breaths of a million stalks which together carry the potency and ice to extinguish any light of the world. This afternoon, the wind will be captured by a mass of sails. Each a five-fingered mast, stretched high, flared wide. With every thump of a heart our sails will fill plump and round with the throats of the wind, and each hand will clench the wind in its palm and squeeze. Until the wind lies blue and asphyxiated on the ground.
The sun shall be extinguished and the wind shall be suffocated, and for this the scorch and warmth will ever remain on the breaths of men, and the breath of life will ever remain in their palms. Of these men, plain as stalks of wheat, withering in the summer’s heat.