The Seed Cap

He spends his idle afternoons sitting on a chair on the sidewalk in the shade of the awning hanging over the front of the Mercantile in town, keeping an eye on all the things that keep never happening, over and over. The younger folks call this shop the Five-N-Dime - in fact, a sign hanging in the shop's window says "Five-N-Dime" right on it, while the word "mercantile" is nowhere to be found - but the old farmer persists. It isn't necessarily because he's never read the sign, or that no one's ever bothered to tell him otherwise; most likely, he simply sees fit to call a thing whatever best suits what he wants from it - whether or not the thing's actually what he's chosen to call it. He appears to believe fully and completely in the rightness and righteousness of his abject decisions, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Hot, dry, and itchy under an unreasonably heavy-handed Autumn sun, he sits today - a Wednesday - in front of the mercantile in his faded bib overalls and dusty seed cap (his favorite). The visceral ghost of the tangible shadow of his closest and dearest casual acquaintance in all the world sits beside him, and they exchange occasional fits of rudimentary clicks and grunts devoid of any meaning or emotion. They spew bursts of guttural vocalizations in turn, and in turn do they not listen to each other responding in kind as their scrappling subconsciousnesses work independently to interpret the noises into something that can be loosely construed as anything more than what it is.

In the midst of this hopelessly and gently desperate subdued fracas, a car pulls smoothly to the curb in front of the mercantile. It's a blue car. It's a car so intensely and deeply blue that every color which happens to be near it is sucked in and made blue: a blue hole. The car becomes more blue, and more deeply so, with every color that it absorbs; as a result, a wavering band of colorlessness envelopes the car, a startling thing to see.

Always alert to anything out of the ordinary, the old farmer and his companion keep sharp eyes on the car. They're not subtle in doing so, nor would they likely possess the ability to be surreptitious in any of their activities should we choose to attempt to make them so.

Widely elliptically orbiting comets enjoy a greater frequency of occurance than does anything out of the ordinary in the lives of the old farmer and his companion. In fact, so utterly and interminably vapid are the lengths and breadths of their stories that they, too, are frequently compelled to make things up simply to maintain consciousness - although they aren't ashamed to doze frequently and publicly.

Leaning forward in their chairs, gaping blatantly, they watch as a shrouded figure in a flowing black robe - holding a scythe fully as tall as death itself - emerges gracefully from the car. ("Amish," the old farmer's companion knowingly mutters.) So deftly executed is this stranger's maneuver that the car's upholstery isn't even creased by the razor-sharp implement. The hooded stranger stands, straightens, stretches, and suddenly stiffens, eyeing the pair squinting at him in front of the Five-N-Dime.

A shimmering tension (a miniature version of the type which precedes every high-noon Main Street shootout) seeps into the psyches of our heroes. High-cheekboned women in bonnets drop their parasols, and their long cotton skirts billow behind them as their laced-booted toes whisk them into shop-doors, where lesser men with handlebar moustaches and Burnsides already peer anxiously through curtained windows with their stovepipe hats in nervous hands. The boisterous chattering detuned piano saloon-racket stops on cue, and the clock behind the bar begins to chime. The wind is illustrated by puffs of dust and a rolling tumbleweed. An uneasily neighing horse, shuffling and pawing the ground, is heard off-camera.

The bad guy is wearing black.

Suddenly, unexpectedly - a sinister dark blur - the reaper (surprisingly agile for such a grim fellow) dashes up and snatches the dusty seed cap right off the old farmer's head. Not fully cognizant that his hat's been snatched - even though he sees it clutched in the robe-folds of the fast-retreating black-hooded Mennonite - the old farmer absently lifts his left hand to his head even as his right hand is rising to protest the theft which he isn't quite sure has actually happened.

Like a statue of man hailing a cab to go buy some toupee tape, the old farmer watches as Death careens around the corner in the blue blue car with his favorite dusty seed cap.