Sky changed before them; summer harvest scene, cimarron sky—dried and burnt—over tan stubble of fresh-run wheat.
What in beginning of day held with potential for bounty ended empty. The harvest was reaped, its yield known; and, in the after, field and world held quiet as land and life adjusted to the change.
It was the end of something—a season and a hope brought to conclusion of ending knowledge of what it had become—and after the reaping, only straw and chaff remained.
Season and cycle were ended. There was nothing more on which to hope.
Quiet, like world around, they rested on flatbed of truck gazing vague over barren field and burnt sky.
“I’m sorry,” she told.
“There’s no reason to be,” he answered. “Things change.”
“You aren’t made?”
“Why should I be mad at what I cannot, nor wish to, control?”
They were quiet once again. Resting on bed, viewing out and over scene—present in body but detached in spirit—he thought back to a hope in season’s spring, to a book and line he read when the ending was not known:
“…there is always in the sky a tiny scrap of blue at the service of happiness, which lovers see, even when the rest of creation is under an umbrella.”
Sky was changed. He no longer saw the blue. There was no reason for umbrella.
The field was empty and bare; season’s yield reaped, ran, and hauled away.
Blue in sky was gone, no refuge or hold for hope; only cimarron rust and shadow—burnt out and tired—and when night fell, even the stars seemed in loss of luster.
Only Venus retained her glow, bright and burning—illuminated in reflection of sun—as she shone in shifted and ever-changing place beside sliver, shadowed moon.
