A Tragedy in Wheat

    I I couldn’t tarry, so I wandered the dusty road for work. My destination loomed ahead—yet my thoughts remained captivated with the wheat, but I stopped at the tall and charcoal gates that imprisoned the City on the Mount.

Behind the walls a horn blew tumbling thunder. The dreadful sound bellowed earthquakes in rupture, the horn’s tone split—gales pulverizing woods, whistling and moaning, a darkening came on storm clouds. An anguishing timbre engulfed the fields in waves, and in the streets rose cheering at the drum resounding, each mallet thrash yelling, “Come.” The people lifted their hands each pound they crashed fists on cymbals, palms on the City’s walls. “Come” were four thumps, the people stomped their feet. The four seals unlatched the gates: the Four Horsemen stayed in line, shoulder to shoulder, beast to beast.

    II Plague rode on a white horse. A wooden bow raised in hand, he trotted over to newly planted fields where the seeds had not yet sunk. He strung mottled, fetid tips against his cheek, and loosed his grip. The workers scattered at the arrows’ flight, the flock silent—needles dropping. Their sting pierced the soil and sickened the wheat. The peoples’ flesh corroded with rashes over their skin resurfaced in boiling pus. They writhed in the scourging, trembled on weak knees. Curled heaps, raw skin ripping, peeling in strips. The field became intermingled of wheat and weeds, scorched blood and screaming.

    III Then charged War on a bright red horse. His sword slid against the steed’s metal barding, the scraping rattled the sound of his arrival. The horse’s dash dug into the earth, flinging sprays of dirt, uprooted seeds, its twisting displaced the rows. The city dwellers and enemies of the field welcomed War, their champion, and he slaughtered them in stride on the edge of his steel. The farmhands rushed to the dying, but War chased them away, hunted them down, and slashed his great sword—a greatbutchering. They fell against the hoe, the sickle, and the shovel. The seed bags strapped over their chests spilled with collapsing, four-limbed frames. The iron hooves of the red horse clattered cavorting in four thuds, from corpse to corpse on blood-dipped legs.

    IV On a black horse appeared Famine. He walked between houses in the field, gazed through windows onto cowering people. His sight demanded and consumed. With wretched pebbles he tipped the golden scales in his hands. Under his surveying, a grin curled along his jaw that every farmhand and every city dweller starved. Each field the people gleaned thrice, until they tread mud, threshing on the field, but the price of bread weighted their tools, heavy, hard to lift, even on a day’s wage they stumbled, and their feet caught on the broken plowed and worn-out rows. Their rib cages popped, their arms thinned, their sweat the irrigation. They thirsted for the aroma of citrus in the market, they hungered for righteousness which came from manual labor. They worked into emaciation for what isn’t food, and they toiled for dry, flat loaves, hard to swallow, stifled of taste.

    V A siege—a siege upon the field! I reeled in horror, I ached in disgust when I caught some chance glimpse. The farmhands whom the Four Horsemen had slain had been carried away beneath a stone altar in the field, locked away behind the fifth seal blanketed with echoes mourning forth from the altar’s carved door. They cried over their blood. They called out for the Farmer. He comforted them “Rest a little longer, until your number is complete.” The slain adorned white clothes folded in the altar, they slipped on the linens, waiting for the Farmer. “Do not fear the pale horse.” At his words I heard the horn of the City and the pounding of its people. “I have overcome the grave.” The fourth came on a pale horse, and the Farmer’s blood stained the walls and pooled there beside the altar.