In The Ink Of The Stalks| Ch.1

Instructions

The trick to living in a two bedroom trailer with three people is learning how to read the silence. If it was quiet at six in the morning, it meant Valen was already gone. It meant the heavy steel toes of his work boots were quieted by the thick layers of dust on the porch as he headed out for an early shift at the grain elevator. If it was quiet at midnight, it meant Rune was awake. He’d be sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor with his back against the rusted radiator, drawing by the warm glow of a lamp so he wouldn't wake the rest of us. I learned to map out the creaks in the floorboards. I knew exactly which spot near the refrigerator groaned, and which corner of the living room could hold my weight without a sound. But at five o’clock on a hot Tuesday afternoon in July, the trailer wasn't silent at all. The air inside was heavy and sticky, thick with the suffocating humidity of an Illinois summer. It smelled of cheap coffee that had been burning on the stove too long, toasted white bread, and the sharp chemical scent of the orange soap I’d been using to scrub engine grease off my skin since Sunday. The aluminum walls of the trailer seemed to sweat under the intense sun, groaning as the heat baked the metal. A mile away, a freight train rolled past. Its low vibration trembled through the floorboards, making the silverware rattle faintly in the drying rack. "Your truck sounds sick, Cas," Rune said from the small kitchen table. He didn't look up from his sketchpad. His charcoal pencil made a soft scratch-scratch-scratch against the rough paper. I’d grown so used to that sound over the past year that it felt like a second heartbeat in the room. He was light on his wrists, moving his fingers with a precision that didn't make sense for a kid who grew up around heavy machinery and broken gravel. I leaned over the cracked counter, taking a big gulp of black coffee that tasted mostly like old pipes. "It’s not sick, Rune. It’s just got a broken part in the engine. The fuel is flooding the engine instead of turning into vapor, which drowns the spark plug before it can even light the gas. And unless your brother lets me borrow five bucks from the grocery jar, it’s gonna keep coughing all the way down to the auto shop." Rune smiled, a small, quiet thing that barely touched his eyes. At fourteen, he looked like a gust of wind could blow him right over the county line. He wore an old, oversized denim jacket that used to belong to their dad. The heavy sleeves were rolled up twice at the cuffs so his hands could actually peek out to hold his pencils. His dark hair was always a little too long, falling into his eyes whenever he leaned over his drawings, so he constantly had to toss his head back to clear his vision. "Valen won't let you touch the grocery jar," Rune murmured, using his thumb to smudge a dark gray line into a soft shadow on the page. "He said if we lose the deposit money this month, the electric company is going to shut off our power. He had to count out pennies just to pay the water bill yesterday." I walked over, leaning over his shoulder to look at the page. He’d been sketching the old, rusted water tower that stood on the edge of the property, right where our dirt lot met the endless rows of corn. He’d caught the exact way the late afternoon sun hit the flaking silver paint, making it look almost like a broken crown sitting on top of the endless, flat ocean of eight-foot-tall cornfields surrounding us. Rune had this way of looking at our dying little town and finding something beautiful in the bones of it. He saw things the rest of us just stepped over. "He might if I ask nice," I muttered, shaking my head at the drawing. "Where’d you learn to do that shading anyway? They don't teach that in the eighth grade." "I just watch the light," Rune said softly, his pencil hovering over the paper. "If you look at the corn long enough when the sun goes down, it isn't green anymore. It turns purple. And the shadows under the leaves are completely black. "Like ink"((Copyright) lol) "It’s just corn to me, kid. Corn and mud." I tapped the edge of his table. "But your drawing's good. Real good. Don't let Valen see you using the good drawing paper for scrap though." "This is the scrap paper," Rune whispered. But I knew he’d carefully torn it from the back of an old ledger book he’d found in an abandoned barn down the road. Valen Calder didn't do /nice/ when it came to money, and we all knew it. He couldn't afford to. Ever since their parents cleared out two years ago—leaving behind nothing but past-due bills, a refrigerator that ran entirely on hope, and a trailer that leaked every time it rained—Valen had been the only wall keeping Rune out of the foster care system. Valen was only nineteen, but he carried himself like an old man. His shoulders were permanently tight from hauling heavy iron parts at his railroad job, his back bending under the invisible weight of keeping this family alive.