Who's Gonna Feed Them Hogs?

Another of Frank's ducks had dropped dead.

Third one this week, Frank heard his narrator voice saying, though he immediately became suspicious as to whether he’d actually spoken aloud, or if the words had simply died loudly on the vine of his brain.

I have a confession to make, you guys…surely, something must be done, Frank said, this time with doe-eyes, and again searching the exposed rafters of the attic room for the ghost of his own voice.

“Don’t call me Shirley,” Frank definitely said, out loud, laughing to himself.

Frank stood to look out his editing room’s single window. He pulled back the blackout curtains and watched, in the raw first light of the morning, as his eight month old Maremma pup Wendy nosed the limp toy of the duck’s body across the dank and soggy bird yard. She was uninspired in her play and so was Frank.

Wendy was filthy. Frank could see her fur was starting to mat, that her tail was full of burrs, and that her paws were going black with crusted pig slop. Frank figured Wendy would eat the damn bird if she were that hungry. He closed the curtains and cracked another Monster, drank two fingers worth, then filled the negative space with sponsored mezcal and got back to editing his drone video.

…Weighed down with an abundance of earthly pleasures, man’s imagination yearns to float…

The flyover shot of the farm he’d recorded the day prior felt predestined for verbal beauty and seemed to be narrating itself. All Frank had left to accomplish was to build up the Apocalypse Now undertones of the panning.

Outside, the New Hampshire dawn faded in on the baby-green spring leaves growing on Frank's property. Never had spring come to pass with the farm so unkempt, or with Frank having such a long to-do list. He’d never had so many unpaid bills, or ignored so many hungry mouths, or drank so much free sponsor liquor, or felt such a cinch in the straitjacket of his loneliness. Yet the suffering was invisible from two-hundred feet.

Frank let perfection pour forth. The hedgerows and fence lines of his property, as seen from above, made veins that he traced with his drone, that he flowed through with the melody of his singing soul.

Since he was in high school, Frank hadn’t written a poem, let alone read one, but the moans he’d made in the night must have sounded like flirtation to one of the more gothic muses. A poem began resonating from Frank's throat, with words I gave to him without his knowing, words I inspired in him, of a poet that I hated, who wanted to be hated himself, whose poetry of hate I thought Frank could use in the moment. It was a delicate gift for his microphone, a perfect dubbing for my angry puppet:

…You guys…every day should be a miracle instead of a machination. You guys…in my hand rests the last bluebird. You guys…the shades roar like lions and the walls rattle, dance around my head. You guys…then her eyes look at me, love breaks my bones and…you guys… I laugh…

The video would be his last and so Frank was not concerned with its algorithmic foundations or that it omitted his most popular formulas. There would be no releasing of the geese. There would be no plucking of the ducks. There would be no brushing out the bangs of his highland cattle. There would be no pig-cam or Wendy-cam or assisted hatching of the chicken chicks. Frank's last video would not be monetized. As such, it could be a masterpiece. Or better, a masterclass in explanation.

Fully charged, his drone chimed and so Frank began to rush. The sun would be up in an hour and his wife’s circadian routine, ceaseless and timed to the season, would thus be beginning with it.

The world loved Frank's wife, though she shied from its gaze. Her evasion from Frank's videos only made the world want her more. On the few occasions she had succumbed to Frank's begging and graced the farm’s channel with her presence, it resulted in so many views—and thus so much auxiliary income—that Frank was quick to buy her luxurious gifts as payment for services rendered. There was her trip to Miami to see her sister. There was the vintage Rolex Lady-Datejust she never wore. And there were her community college night classes so she could retrain to become an ER nurse, an unexpected second blooming in his wife’s late thirties that Frank felt spoke directly to her leafy samaritanism and inherent love for humanity, even if it kept her from home, later and later, more and more often.

Frank wanted to catch his wife’s rising from above, like she was the sun—his sun—and the flutter of her eyelids would be the light returning to Frank’s horizon. He would shoot the scene epicly, down through her habitually unblinded bedroom windows, panning backwards into the wide angle. In his last video, absolute last, like his wife had been demanding for years, she would be heaven-lit and in her natural element. She deserved as much.

But before he could shoot his wife, Frank wanted to record his introduction from the pasture, with the pink mist still woven through the pear orchard like something from that Antonioni movie she loved. Or was it Fellini? With his drone under one arm and the tripoded Go-Pro in the other, Frank used his foot to open and delicately close the screen-door, so as not to disturb the birds. The lilac had sent shoots that were just blooming, purpley, but that blocked the door. Frank had to push through them, getting their sweet, lactic scent of creation on his clothes.

Frank scanned the farm out of habit. The Highlands cows, Undertaker and Steve Austin, were to their bellies in muck from where the stream had backed up and flooded the drainage pond beside the cattle pen. The door to the poultry shed was ajar and a few of the ducks stumbled from it, looking like the last drunks escaping a wrung out bar, crashing into one another, falling over and fighting to right themselves. Frank loved the slapping-tickle their palmate feet made. They were, in order of their drunkenness; Bart Simpson, Paulie Walnuts, Aunt Jemima, Betty Davis, Willie Mays, and The Satch. The new goslings, spread around the yard and not strong enough to walk, had not been christened yet.

Frank opened and closed the pasture gate to where Wendy lay. He reached down for a pat but his dog shied away. Frank licked his pointer finger and put it to the hot wire on the electric fence to see if the thing still had juice. And it did. Probably around eight thousand volts of juice. Better than any mezcal-Monster cocktail.

Live free or die, Frank said, laughing, though maybe not out loud.

Crossing the front pasture, Frank could see that the poultry had cleared nearly all the grass, the blades bitten down to their quick, and the roots destroyed. It had only taken them ten days without their normal feeding. Frank opened and closed the red wrought-iron gate to the back pasture and set up his camera in the swale, at the base of the sloping orchard. He looked over at his wife’s kitchen garden, which was ample and near to bursting. Her kale was shrub size and her late squash had rotted. Only the baby tomato plants had died from lack of mothering.

There was still plenty of fog floating through the orchard and the way it hung from the low, fruit-heavy branches made Frank giddy. Frank switched on the Go-Pro, pressed record and stepped back, collecting his thoughts, staring into the headlights of his final decisions speeding at him through earth’s condensations.

…So, as you guys could probably tell, something’s not quite right on our farm…

Frank paused. He could feel the world watching. Little, unspoiled children, peeping and whispering behind each of his peach trees.

…So, some of you guys have been asking in the comments why you haven’t seen…

He couldn’t bring himself to say her name. Frank could feel the sun rising on his back. He could fix it in the edits.

…You know, you guys, sometimes I look around me on the farm and I’m reminded that I live a dream life. I live a life of dreams. But dreams are owed a sleeper. And if you aren’t the one paying off your dreams with sleep, then someone else is living your nightmare…

“Bullshit!” Frank definitely screamed, which set off a stampede of oinking from where the pigs had stied in the treeline.

The pigs, Carmella Soprano, Betty Draper, and Skylar White were thin and ravenous. They scrambled across the rocky swale, their trotters slipping and picking up, sending the suidae-triptych clattering violently towards Frank. In their chaos, the pigs knocked over the camera. Frank tried to set it back but the pigs knocked it flat again and began biting at its rubber casing and gnawing on its plastic lens. He kicked Betty Draper hard in the gullet, which sent the pack away squealing.

Frank looked down at the little camera, its lens cracked and the red recording light flickering on and off. The sun was now fully visible above the hilltop and the blue of the morning was so brightened by it that the sky had an inside-out quality. Frank had to hurry.

The drone navigation app on Frank's phone took a moment to load. He held the drone aloft. Its propellers fluttered and for a second it hung on his hand, half in flight, the way Frank imagined a nursed dove might reenter the world, or exit heaven. First he flew the drone vertically, the free New Hampshire earth spreading out in his phone’s viewfinder.

He flew the drone over his orchard, past his upper pasture, across his property line. The thick mix of pine and fresh-leaved beech made a nappy canopy that Frank's vision hugged. The unimaginable universe had made itself a paradisiac crotch in the folds of the White Mountain bases. He whipped around the colonial spire on the edge of town and sent the drone flying a mile further, where a field backed onto the side of another farm house not altogether different from his own. Frank steadied the drone and brought it down level with the back windows, where the curtains sat open to the house’s master bedroom.

He’d flown an unnoticed test flight a week earlier. Frank knew where they slept.

Through the window Frank could see his wife. She was naked, save her underpants, and she was doing her morning sun salutations. The time and distance, so diminished by the drone, between Frank's eyes and his wife’s figure, triggered a deep sadness that became tangible in his Adam's apple. He swallowed and the anger tasted like blood. Without trying, a black bar rose up across his wife’s breasts, in Frank's mind. I did not look, out of respect to Frank.

His wife noticed the drone. First, she squinted, then she began a silent screaming that Frank could clearly hear, seared into his memory.

I gave him another line, from above, to take the edge off, poor guy:

…I have no ideas of what would be

of interest to you

but I doubt that you would be of

interest to me, so don't get

superior.

in fact, come to think of it, you can

“Kiss my ass,” Frank said, his throat possessed, the words of a poem drone-delivered to him, from me, from out of the sky.

The window to the bedroom was suddenly thrown open and there appeared Burt, pumping down the action on his shotgun, squeezing one off at the drone. The faint echo whispered across town and down over the peach orchard. Frank banked the drone and the recording blurred far too artistically. Frank could feel in his hands that the drone had been hit by the way the rotors fought him.

Through the now flickering image, Frank saw Burt appear a floor lower, pressing out his back patio door, pumping through a second shell. Frank sent the drone banking vertically and Burt’s second shot appeared to miss. But the damage to the drone had been done. In the last cutting of the image, Frank watched as Burt stalked off at a pace toward the road, in the direction of Frank's house, just like Frank had planned it in the film’s script.

Frank's telephone rang.

“You son of a bitch!” his wife screamed, her voice so little in the microphone.

“It’s the last one,” Frank said calmly.

“What?”

“It’s the last video. Like I promised.”

“I can’t take this shit anymore, Frank.”

“I know and I want to apologize. I want to apologize for everything.”

Frank's wife had already hung up the phone.

It took twenty minutes for Burt to arrive on foot to Frank's front gate. Frank was waiting. Burt had left the shotgun at home.

Two ham sandwiches were laid across from one another on a plastic picnic table. Frank filled one of the two opposing plastic folding chairs.

“What the hell is all this?” Burt started.

“Morning, Burt. Breakfast?” Frank asked, gesturing to the empty chair and the unclaimed sandwich.

Burt scanned the yard, then the house.

“Where are all the cameras?” Burt asked.

“No cameras Burt. Not for this.”

“Bullshit, no cameras.”

“No cameras Burt, I already promised my wife.”

“She isn’t your wife anymore.”

Frank only smiled.

“This shit needs to stop. You fly another drone onto my property, you know what I’ll do.”

“I know it, Burt. Now, have a seat.”

Burt launched a thin rope of saliva onto Frank's calf-high lawn, then stalked off.

Frank sighed.

Then he swapped his sandwich with Burt’s and took a large, very hungry bite.