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Welcome back to Agatha’s Barn, a serial novella by Michael Bailey. This is a tie-in to Carpenter’s Farm, the serial novel by Josh Malerman, author of Bird Box, Inspection, Malorie, and others. Created with permission, and free for all to enjoy during this strange time. Featuring illustrations throughout by Glenn Chadbourne.

If you’re new to Agatha’s Barn, be sure to read Part 1, and Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 first. I also I highly recommend catching up on Carpenter’s Farm before continuing. Josh adds new chapters each Monday, Wednesday & Friday.

This may be the end of Agatha’s story, but maybe not …

Not the same barn, Agatha thought, at least at first, but how could that be? The swing doors had not swung open; they weren’t even swing doors at all, not any longer; instead, one large panel violently slid from one side of the front of the barn to the other, as though someone (within) had unlocked the latch, grabbed hold and’d thrown open her jail cell.

The entire barn shook when the suddenly-there sliding door slammed to a stop at the end of its rails. Two barns? For half a hesitation, she wondered if she’d crossed from one farm to another while wandering through the crops. In this part of middle-Michigan, right in the mitt, the land seemed endless, some fields separated by fences, some not. Farmhouses and barns and silos stuck out of the earth like misaligned teeth—far different than the long flat teeth of New York City and Chicago, which were all bright and properly aligned. No, those sticking out of bumfuck-nowhere were all equally old and rotting in their gums.

No one stood in the open maw of the barn, no elongated shadow backlit by the dim light of the farmhouse (yes, same as before). Alone, but not.

Agatha wondered how long ago she’d last been swallowed by the barn (yes, same barn, my barn, Agatha’s Barn, only different now). Time had stretched and’d worn thin these last few days / weeks / however long she’d been away from home. Her mind hot taffy endlessly pulled apart and tossed back into itself, stringy (strong as yarn), her outfit equally holding on by threads. She’d brought a change of clothes or two, probably forgotten somewhere in the barn, or in the woods, but they no longer seemed to matter, were not even close to clean, although she’d showered at some point; and she’d brought another mind, that of her youth, which mattered more than ever now, although she left that in other places sometimes, folded into a labyrinth mind.

Cat’s cradle, little Aggie mused.

Someone had replaced the swing doors at some point, maybe The Farmer, or the new Carpenter who’d brought the farm back to life. The changes were more recent than not. Even the holes in the roof’d been repaired to some extent. New wood over old wood.

“We repaired the roof,” she said, meaning her and Aggie, but couldn’t quite remember anything other than hammering all those shame and pity nails.

“Show me,” she said, meaning whoever’d startled her with the door should step out of the shadows and reveal himself / herself / itself. “What do you want from me?”

With the hammer at her side, Agatha took in her surroundings. She went to the barn, its mouth wide open to night (its mouth wide open tonight, sang her younger self), but no one was right outside the barn. Far across the property, a man stood in the upstairs bathroom window of the farmhouse, watching. Directly under him on the first floor stood another man in the window there. The Farmer and Oliver, or Oliver and The Farmer; they’d see Agatha’s silhouette backlit by the lamp in the barn, but what else would they see? No, she was not alone; she knew this.

Agatha left the barn open behind her, which gave her comfort, the way a prisoner might feel with their cell door left ajar, the option of escape enough not to feel so imprisoned, enough not to want to run screaming out of her cage. The cowardice weighed heavily against her courage, the slug of whiskey finally starting to level things out.

The old Tiffany lamp seemed recently added, or unnoticed earlier, and its stained glass shade offered the cold room a certain fragmented warmth. She took another pull of Blanton’s, let it burn, then pushed the bottle aside past a roll of tape and Sharpies and boxes of lids. The cans of paint had been removed to make room for more canning jars, the walls lined with wooden shelves (there before), and upon them rows and rows of Mason jars (not there before).

All full. All labeled.

There was enough canned crop to last years, what one might expect to find stashed in a bomb shelter, enough to get an entire city through ten years of pandemic. Labeled were jars of “sincerity” and “integrity” and “self-control,” and next to those a horde-supply of “disloyalty” and “abrasiveness” and “pessimism,” and right next to those “optimism” and “tolerance” and “daring.” Enough characteristics to change the world. To last lifetimes. To feed the starving.

The hay was not tossed about as before, but in bales and neatly stacked against the far wall, the old hay thrown out or given back to the dirt. The place tidier. Dusted. Personal belongings, too. Someone had even screwed a bike hook into an exposed two-by-four and from it had hung her Schwinn by its rear tire. Clothes were neatly folded on one of the shelves—not hers—and more jars lined up on others. A few partially emptied, their labels all but worn away. Bottles of water. Make-up and feminine products. A compact mirror. A hairbrush. Tipped-over empty jars. Shards of glass around a spill of red that could be dried tomato sauce or blood.

The loft, little Aggie considered, was it always there?

A wooden ladder led up to what Agatha could only assume was meant for hay. The hole in the ceiling high above could have once held a pulley. She envisioned The Farmer hoisting up bales, with someone above, maybe a wife or partner at one point, guiding them into place and stacking them by way of hay hooks. The loft above seemed emptied, or maybe readied.

The place settled as old places do, old nails pulled through old wood. If the farmhouse could breathe, Agatha figured, so could the barn. She called out after the sound, whispering,

“Hello?”

There was enough room up there for someone to “squat,” as she herself’d squatted in the barn, with room for a single bed, she figured, an end table, a small dresser. A woman could live up there, by the looks of it: the choice of lamp below, the belongings, the folded clothes, the new orderliness of the place. Was the (recently) shattered jar once filled with tidiness?

Someone could be imprisoned here, she thought, thinking of Chris, of “home.”

Agatha couldn’t remember the barn having a loft, though it always must’ve had one, the construct as old as the rest of the place. Oh, what she might mind find if she braved climbing the ladder: a dirty battered woman spread out like the letter X atop a mattress, bruised wrists chained to the headboard, legs belted to the frame, or maybe only half her body bound so she could still do things; a bucket at her side, a bottle of water, empty jars from regular force-feedings.

“I know what you need,” Agatha said, once Chris’s words—he’d feed her with welts and cuts and scrapes and burns, by fist and blade and ash; he’d take from her to fill his needs.

The moon had sometimes flooded the barn with light, stabbing it through the many holes. She’d sheltered in this place herself a few days, in a tent, but often enjoyed her time outside, whether staring up at the stars through the hole in the roof or watching for the owl.

The tent could fit up there, yes, which might explain where her tent’d gone.

Agatha called again, but was met with only silence, more settling, and then another creak from the opposite end of the loft. No one could possibly be up there, she kept telling herself. Rats maybe. A possum nest. The Barn Own (they live in barns, right? Aggie wondered). In the barn, outside the barn. Someone / something inside but also outside. The owl could be stuck, she figured, especially since the hole in the roof’d been repaired. She made her way to the ladder, put one hand on a rung, considering how the barn doors’d—

Breeze hit her neck, soft and warm as breath. She spun (a hard tug at her back, a spinning black yarn, she imagined, unrolling) but no one was there, though she could sense someone there, watching, waiting. Closer than those in the farmhouse.

“Courage,” she said. “We have courage now.”

As she climbed, the fight against gravity augmented, each step twice as heavy as the previous, so that when she made it to the top the entire weight of Carpenter’s Farm pulled her to a stop. She peered over the side, eyes closed. And what could she imagine upon opening them?

The stare of the woman (yes, a woman) tied to a bed or curled over herself in the corner, in rags as thin as her own, eyes blinding white like those of The Farmer, twin suns (or holes for eyes) ready to both shine upon and draw new life in a forever-spiraling dance (let go of the top rung, won’t you, take this woman’s hand and feel the soundless beat of her blackened heart and dance dance dance) and also a hundred glass jars like asteroids in orbit around her, reflecting the white or swallowing the black (and Agatha, little Aggie, too, they’d be a part of that system soon), all those empty / emptied jars force-fed to the woman or self-administered, it didn’t really matter which for their contents (traits) had been consumed, causing a great change, causing the lights in her eyes (or the opposite: imploded stars, black holes for eyes) to shine or not—

Agatha couldn’t open her eyes. An invisible blindfold had been tied too tightly around face, her eyelids heavy gates (barn doors, Aggie mused, swing-swung sealed, slam-slid shut).

“Open your eyes,” she said to the dark, to herself, “open your eyes!” but couldn’t. She hadn’t drunk enough of that courage, could only allow a poem to write itself without any ink.

ever-expanding black,
a great nothing
between celestial objects,
vast insignificance,
the emptiness defining

“It’s not us that justifies the universe,” she said, the words unexpectedly there, perhaps the poem coming alive through her. “We are nothing more than grains of sand, specks of dirt, collected stardust later turned to ash, constantly churned and re-churned into the soil, recycled. And it’s not our world, no, not Mother Earth that makes life so grand yet so insignificant with our passage, or Father Time, not the sun, nor the stars, nor the countless galaxies and comets and other celestial objects floating about, no, it’s the space between, the void. The dark does not make us so inconsequential, but the light. There’s no sense to fear the dark, only ever the light.”

And so Agatha imagined the woman on the bed, or in the corner, not with twin suns for eyes, but with twin black holes spiraling within her face both clockwise and counter- and not pushing her at all down the old wooden stairs, but pulling her up the rungs, the woman’s blind-sight lifting Agatha (and likewise Aggie) like hay by pulley to be led home by willing hands.

“What’s in the barn?” she said, and opened her eyes.

She saw what was in the barn.

“Agatha,” a voice called from below.

In turning, Agatha slipped, the topmost rung of the ladder disintegrating within in her hand from the dry rot from an old leak. She fell ten feet, landing hard, crumpling to the floor in a plume.

Chris stood at the barn door, his head hospital-bandaged: thick gauze held by a bandanna of white medical tape. A dark round spot seeped through like the Japanese flag, only black instead of scarlet in the light, the same shape and size as the head of her hammer.

“You’re not really here,” she said, not believing at first. “You’re—”

“Are you living here?” he said, his voice knives. “Actually living here?”

She thought of the woods, the willows, the fields, the farmhouse, the barn, what she’d found in the loft, all of it. She stood and dusted herself off and made her way to the many shelves of jars. The hammer waited there—what she’d used to maim but not kill him—and a row of jars labeled “vengeful” (or “vengefulness” with the ‘ness’ on the first jar finger-smudged with dirt). She went to the Blanton’s, took a long pull of courage. As she set the bottle down, one of the jars exploded next to her. Two broken jars now, spilled into each other, the tar-crumbs of collected crop falling into the red, whatever that may be. Her mind a flood of past / present / future.

“I asked you a goddamn question,” he said, holding a rock. He tossed it in the air (a small thing, like him) to show her what he was capable of doing, perhaps, that his next rock wouldn’t miss, that she’d better answer his goddamn question. “Are you living here?” he said.

A phone hung on the wall in front of her. A landline. A handprint from someone who’d recently made a call. The cord ran down then along the shelf and disappeared. She could reach out, call someone, but who? She could call the police, report a fire—that would get people here, sure—or report a lunatic on the loose, but she knew if she picked up the handset there’s be no dial-tone, just a person breathing on the other end, the line connected directly to the farmhouse.

She eyed the hammer, the spilled crop, took another swig of whiskey. She couldn’t remember a phone ever being in the barn, but here it was, like the lamp, like the loft, like the hundreds upon hundreds of filled jars.

The shattered glass of the one closest to her meant Chris was here, not a figment of her imagination, not a ghost, not dead. No, he was here, at Carpenter’s Farm, in her barn, Agatha’s Barn. He’d somehow tracked her down. She’d apparently not headstone-tipped his mind to mush after all. He was here, now, to take her back, a man who thought a woman could be owned.

Agatha responded not by answering but by bringing a handful of spilled harvest to her mouth. She didn’t care about the gritty mud-like texture or the horrid coppery tinge. Welcomed it, in fact, smiling. She crunched down on broken glass, which bit her back, and she spat out the shard the way Chris’d sometimes spit at her (once, right in the face), like father’d spit on Mother when she wouldn’t listen. Memories as wild as his voice. One person could not own another, no, one could only poltergeist-press another into believing in possession.

She gathered another handful, careless of the glass, and swallowed the sludge, chased it down with courage. She was done being scared of this monster, of any monster. The jar next to it read “rash” and she unscrewed the lid and took a bite of one of the ugly greenish things inside (dash of rash, sang Aggie). She opened more jars: a pinch of power, stalks of strength.

There was a twinkling in the creature’s eyes preying upon her, pure hatred (Chris’d eaten so much anger in his pathetic life, and indiscretion, and dishonesty, and deceit, much like her father, always hungry, those two), but older Agatha wouldn’t be scared of that glimmer of light in the dark of his eyes, no, not any longer.

“The emptiness defines,” she said, thinking of the there-then-gone poem.

“What’s wrong with you,” Chris said. “Why’re you such a mess?” His words dissolved in the wind, shaky, unstable. “What are you— what are you eating? Stop. Answer me.”

The next rock cracked against her sternum. The pain temporary. Chris wouldn’t’ve cared if it’d hit her face, her eye, or any other part of her because the body healed.

She’d been hit plenty, the pain no longer meaningful, no longer there.

Agatha grabbed the hammer, then, held it close to the lamplight so he’d see its silver clearly, and she turned to him and turned the tool over so he’d see her intention—that she’d headstone-tip that final nail. The bandage on his head served as guide where to strike.

He rubbed the back of his head, as if just remembering what she’d done to him, said, “You nearly killed me,” though his words didn’t matter. He talked to himself as she stepped toward him. As he backpedaled. Full of what, cowardice? The thought made little Aggie laugh inside, imagining her older self a short while ago by chance (or by choice) tasting that crop. But still he spoke, said rage-faced, “You did this to me!” pointing at the wound, “hospitalized me, you— you,” but he couldn’t say bitch because she held the hammer, “and what did I ever do to you other than provide for you, love you?” Still he backpedaled, bumped into the barn door, said, “I gave you the world, Agatha,” but no, he’d made himself her world, and made Agatha his moon; she’d been stuck for years in monotonous rotation (he not monogamous), pulled round and round and unable to break free. Now she wanted nothing more than to explore the—

ever-expanding black,
a great nothing

—void and define herself in that emptiness, that vast insignificance. Here he was, so small, eclipsed by her colossus shadow, barn light behind her, and here she was, his moon pulled too hard by his constant gravity and about to come crashing down. “You did this to me,” he repeated and tripped over his feet, fell, hands crossed in front of him. Agatha advanced at a run, and he let out a rapid ramble, “but I tracked you down ’cause much as you need me, Ag”—the vile nickname he’d “given” her— “you need me,” and she stood over him, tall as ever, hand cocked back and about to tip the ugliest of nails. She swung down as he closed his eyes.

A crater split the ground next to him, burying inches deep and inches from his cower-crumpled face. That was enough to drive him away, she hoped, for he’d pissed himself. Aggie wanted to end him, like father, but Agatha couldn’t bring herself that low.

“How did you find me?” she said. “Open your eyes, tell me.”

Chris told her how as she craned over him, the hammer still in the ground. After she’d struck him the first time back “home” Chris’d managed to pull himself to their living room window before crawling to his cell phone to call an ambulance and “days and days ago, this was,” he said and that he’d seen her riding off on her bike, had seen which direction. The hospital’d kept him overnight, and then two more nights until he could sign himself out. And then he’d stopped at every stop on the route he’d seen her go, asking if anyone’d seen a woman riding a bike, showing her photograph—which he then pulled from his pocket to show Agatha—and had eventually stopped in a general store. “The man in the blue apron there rambled on about Carpenter’s Farm up the road, here.”

“No one answered at the farmhouse when I knocked,” Chris said, pointing behind him, “and the doorbell’s just a hole.” The lights turned out the moment before he glanced over his shoulder, then, as he pointed to show her there was indeed a house hiding in the dark.

Agatha raised the hammer again; she could bring it down, have her taste of freedom, despite her fill of vengefulness, rash, power and strength, already warmed from the courage.

“The light came on in the barn,” he said, “and I heard the door slam open.” He stunk of urine, his breath of beer, his mouth spewing lies. Always incapable of truth, this drunk.

She’d find a six-pack in a cooler in the car, she knew, empty Corona bottles tossed in the backseat—the beer now soaked in his pants and watering the ground beneath him—and cigarette butts crumpled in the ashtray like bent nails. Behind him, all was black. She couldn’t imagine Chris following her all this way, all this time, asking around, knocking on doors in the middle of the night (three or four o’clock in the morning, she figured, the moon below the horizon now). And she especially couldn’t imagine him walking all this way from farmhouse to barn in complete darkness, not with all the shadows, not with so many feet crunching through fields.

“What is that?” he asked, for he heard them too.

“You will leave and never come back,” Agatha said.

“What happened to you? Why are you—?”

She pounded the ground next to him to make him flinch, a soft thud for every phrase; through clenched teeth and with her hair dangling over him she said, “You will leave and never come back,” thud, “and you will not follow me,” thud, “and you will live your life without me in it,” thud, “and you do not need me, as much as I do not need you, do you hear me?”

Agatha drove the hammer as hard as she could into the ground next to him.

“Who is that,” he said, eyes asquint, “out there, making all that noise? Who lives here? What is this place? And what is that?” he said pointing behind her to the barn, the dim light reflected in his eyes shaking and terrified. “What’s in the barn? What’s in the barn?”

She smiled because she knew.

He kicked out, his foot connecting with the side of her knee, and he grabbed the hammer from her as she fell and in that motion swung it sideways against her temple, bringing Agatha the stars. As the darkness around her spun, Chris scrambled backward like a spider, managed to stand even as she grabbed hold of his ankle, and he swung again, connecting with the meat of her shoulder, whether he meant to or not, knocking her back.

Something in him changed, a sudden craze. Agatha’d seen this transformation before, the way Aggie’d seen it in her father countless times in her youth. The man becoming the monster. Blood-lust. If the full moon were out his skin would crack apart and fur would sprout, his face stretching to a snout, teeth elongating to fangs, and he’d howl up at the light before striking.

You open this goddamn door! she expected him to shout, but this was not her father, not her youth, and the barn door had already been flung wide open.

All at once a sickness came out of her. She held both her shoulder and stomach and purged out a mess of black; up came the courage, up came everything but the cowardice, it seemed, and as she wiped her mouth Chris stood tall over her. He wielded the hammer this time. Blood dripped from his bandage and ran down his ear and along his smile. Their roles’d reversed back to how they’d always been: since she’d married him; since long before that, even … just a girl. Chris and her father had that same disease growing inside them.

“What were you going to do?” he said, “hit me like you did afore?”

His last word sounded off, like something her father’d say, as if she’d crushed a more sophisticated part of him that’d rewound what he’d meant to say as something more primitive.

He swung at the air in front of her, whoosh, and she felt its wind. If she hadn’t flinched and slipped and fallen back at that moment he’d’ve crushed in her skull, would’ve shattered her jaw, his swing in symmetric pendulum, she realized, about to whoosh back down again.

Agatha meant to throw a handful of dirt in his face as she rolled away, but managed a wet mass of what’d come out of her instead, a slop of hot-expunged characteristics. The shoulder pained her fierce but she managed to regain her feet and run past him.

“Ag!” he screamed—her butchered name—running right behind her.

The black yarn as strong as steel-braided rope tugged her not toward the barn, where she could slam the door and slide the bolt and shelter inside, and not to the farmhouse to pound on windows or doors, and not to the fence line of willows that lead to the woods where she’d stayed for so many nights giving poems and paper back to the trees, and not even to Chris’s car parked a ways down the road (Chris’d always kept his keys on him, she knew), but to the fields that’d fed her all this time, that had changed  her, that’d fed and changed everyone on Carpenter’s Farm.

He called her name again, like a curse, letting her know she’d gained a lead.

She ran until her lungs burned; even barefoot, she’d put some distance between them. She held her shoulder, held the stab at her side, took a moment to catch a breath.

All we got in us is cowardice, Aggie mused.

She was right. It had to come out. And so Agatha shoved her longest fingers down her throat and gagged, fingers forced in deep and unwanted, and out it came in a fiery rush.

No longer was she afraid of him.

All this time wandering the farmland, Agatha’s eyes’d grown accustomed to the dark, to the waxing and waning of the moon, and she could find her way around even in its absence, which gave her the advantage. She’d learned the land, knew the fields well.

In the distance, Chris stumbled and fell, swore.

She shadow-slipped inside a tall crop and walked with her shoulders askew through wide leaves that each wanted to touch her. A field of grit. She ripped off a piece and chewed (texture matches its name, how nice) as she made her way from one side of the field to the other down a row just wide enough for her to squeeze past, laughing inside as Chris Motherfucker’d his way through, each tall stalk reaching out to slap him, it seemed, to slice him into swearing.

Agatha passed from grit to responsibility, according to the wooden markers. Yes, she had a certain responsibility, especially now, but needed more. She reached down and plucked a few of its fruits (so this is what responsibility tastes like) and ate until her mind told her she’d had enough. She carried on to the next crop and the next as her (ex)husband plodded along far behind her, lost, but still following, maybe squinting down every once in a while to search for footsteps. She took only what she needed, not taking what she needn’t, and finally stopped at an unlabeled patch of dirt. The ground not yet plowed. Another dead field.

“Dead field,” she said, and the girl inside her snickered.

The Farmer stood in the center, face hidden by the brim of his hat. Every last star shined above him, as though someone had pounded every last 16-penny nail on earth into the (infinite) black, into all that great nothingness she still needed (and wanted) to explore.

the emptiness defining
            / divining
            / ever-changing
            / forever-endless

He held his long shovel beside him, which he then planted into the ground, and then he turned away from her, leaving the tool there, having showed her all he needed to show her. He walked away, faded into the next field. There, then gone.

There was The Farmer. The Farmer was there.

“Agatha!” her (ex)husband cried, finally caught up to her. He stumbled into the empty field like a drunkard. He’d driven all this way, drunk-determined to have her, though no person could ever be had. In the open, what little light above created a magical-monochrome effect, everything more illuminated. Black ran freely from his wound, had soaked into his shirt. He’d lost a lot of blood in his pursuit. “Ag,” he said, out of breath, out of just about everything. He fell over, holding the hammer, her hammer, used the end of it to push himself up, then fell again. He crawled to her, one hand outstretched, the other dragging the hammer as if he couldn’t let go.

Never had she seen him so pathetic. Had he been drawn to eat from the fields? The dirt on his face could be from sweat and falling facedown, or from handfuls of earth brought to his mouth to feed an insatiable hunger. He could have filled himself with defeat, helplessness, panic, any number of things. But here he was now. In one of the unlabeled empty field.

In one of the bad crops.

Agatha stood as The Farmer had, thinking, There is Agatha; Agatha is there.

The bandage had fallen off, and so the crater in Chris’s head seeped freely as he soldier-crawled to her, eyes pleading, fingers curling. She went to him, stepped on the hand holding her hammer. She pried it from his fingers, held it over him a moment then brought it down—

(into his head)
(into the earth)
(into her belt loop)

—but no, she hadn’t killed him before, and wouldn’t do so now. He would’ve survived had he not come after her; had he not bled out his horrible traits. He’d done this to himself.

She watched curiously as the last of his blood pooled out of him as dark as oil. She counted one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, all the way to nine-eleven-one-thousand before checking for the pulse no longer there. She used the shovel to cut off his ring finger (severing two others), which curled around the wedding band, and threw both the finger and the ring for the owl. She’d earlier tossed her own band into the creek in the woods where she’d bathed.

Agatha dug for the rest of the night, until the last of the stars winked out and the light of the morning sun brought life and color back to the world. After taking the keys from his pocket, she buried his body in the dead field, which Oliver would someday till and till and till with the other things buried there. “It’s time to go home, Aggie,” she said, “time to get some help.”

She made one last trip past the willows to retrieve her backpack, then returned one last time to the crops to fill her jars with what she’d need going forward. No more than that. In the car, she tore out the last pages of her notebook because one last poem wanted out of her before leaving Carpenter’s Farm, and because sometimes poems write themselves, and because Agatha was beginning to right herself, which would start with a little therapy.

When you can’t see them anymore,
            their outlines permanently flashed:
                        against dirt, once grass
                        against asphalt, and brick
                        against will
            washed clean by endless tears
            they are never gone
            in death they still run:
                        into the earth
                        down drains
                        from thoughts

Blink not to forget
            but to cover individually
            with pleasant-past
                        / blink

When you close your eyes
            their lives inverted silhouettes:
                        hidden in memory
                        hidden from the children
                        hidden inside
            washed away by a sleeve
            they are gone
            in reality you still drive:
                        away from the flames
                        down fiery lanes
                        into smoke

Blink not to remember
            but to let go
            of the loss
                        / blink

When you pick your random non-random moment
            their images temporarily erased:
                        replaced by sandy beaches
                        replaced with smiles
                        replaced recursively
            from the mind over years
            they are forever
            alive and never still:
                        but linger
                        as reminders
                        of compassion

Blink not for closure
            but to overlay
            one atop the other
                        / blink

[ To be continued ? ]

This may be the end, but maybe not. I have another 3,000 words or so that might want out, making this novella a nice round 30,000 . But who knows. Either way, let me know what you think.

I hope you’re enjoying this strange tale so far, as well as Glenn’s illustrations, and every other piece of writing, art, music, poetry inspired by Josh Malerman’s Carpenter’s Farm. Since this pandemic started, I haven’t been able to focus on writing anything other than poetry, so thank you, Josh, for getting me out of this rut!

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Welcome back to “Agatha’s Barn” by Michael Bailey. This is a tie-in to Carpenter’s Farm, the serial novel by Josh Malerman, author of Bird Box, Inspection, Malorie, and others. Created with permission, and free for all to enjoy during this strange time. Featuring illustrations throughout by Glenn Chadbourne.

If you’re new to “Agatha’s Barn,” be sure to read Part 1 and Part 2 first. I also I highly recommend catching up on Carpenter’s Farm (the first sixteen or so chapters) before continuing. Josh adds new chapters each Monday, Wednesday & Friday.

There is The Farmer.

Agatha supposed if there was a “Mother” jar, there would need to be a “Father” jar buried in the earth. Both her parents had been cremated, she figured, her mother eventually after falling from the city sky, her father while passed out drunk on the couch. Her mother’s soul freed, her father’s imprisoned. Perhaps that explained the pull of the place, the need for his burial, ashes or naught. Not behind the barn next to Mother, though; in one of the fields, forever tilled.

The jars in her backpack had emptied, her hunger satiated for now, both hers and Aggie’s, but for how long? The Farmer (never the farmer) had shown her how to fill them, and for a while that had been enough. It was only one crop (a single trait), yet there were many surrounding the farmhouse. Acres upon acres. Some dead, some not. She thought of the empty jar labeled “forgiveness” she’d placed in the likewise empty pantry, wondered which crop yielded that ugly harvest. Some things can never be forgiven, daddy, mused her younger self.

“Show me,” Agatha said into the evening, the first words she’d spoken aloud in quite some time, the syllables slicing like nails out her throat. The trees sighed.

She waited behind the willows a while, until the last of the guests arrived, until the farmhouse glowed its golden warmth. Past the barn, the farmhouse and its occupants settled in for the night. The one who’d brought light and life onto the property—Oliver, his name’s Oliver, she knew—hosted a dinner party of sorts. She trailed a long shadow to the barn, until she and her follower stretched out and disappeared, then made her way to the kitchen window.

They’d eaten from the fields, it seemed. Seven empty plates, but eight sat around the table. She found herself wondering about the meal and the single vacant setting when the host stood. He silently spoke, muted by the window, addressing his laughing guests as they changed (drifted) one by one. He pointed out the window to the fields at one point, at / through her. But at this hour, and with the house alight, the view would be a black reflection of themselves.

Agatha’d let herself into the farmhouse after the new owner’d brought in electricity, and while he slept soundly on the couch one night, she’d flipped on the lights in the kitchen, staring out that same window, at / through the Farmer who both was and wasn’t there, at / through the black reflection of herself.

Like liquid glass, like mama’s eyes before bed, before—

One of the women seemed to sense a shape in the corner of the room, then didn’t, then said something as everyone around her laughed (rather) hysterically; the spectral old man flicker-shifted behind one of the chairs between the woman and the stove. No one paid her reaction to this much notice as an invisible string, a knot of black yarn, pulled Agatha closer to the window. Then the apparition was gone.

The woman who’d seen The Farmer, the only one who’d seen him, or thought she’d seen him, looked out at Agatha, or at herself, then sat. One at a time the guests fell asleep as Oliver continued his story. They slumped in their chairs, fell against plates, while some yawned and went off to bed on their own or were led. Then the host left the room as the old (so very old) man entered the kitchen by way of the living room, hat shielding his eyes, there then not there. His wrinkled chin, did it hide a smile? Could the woman see him too, shimmering in and out of existence? Oliver helped the rest of his guests to their rooms, all but one, and returned holding out a jar to the startled woman.

“Forgiveness,” the label read.

“Show me,” Agatha said again, but she was alone outside the farmhouse. The Farmer inside the house tugged her to follow. The others’d all gone to bed, their bellies full. She waited for hours / forever / for no time at all as the lights winked out and the stars winked in. She slid open the kitchen window as she had before, levered herself inside. The hammer clanked against the sill.

Inside the pantry she found the forgiveness jar, still empty, among several others. The rest were unlabeled, at least half-filled with shades of greens and yellows. Peppers? Lettuces? Grass? Weeds? She twisted off their lids, smelled odorless nothing; tasteless maybe. Below her, within the pantry door, dirty-bare footprints faced the opposite direction like those she’d tracked along the floor—much larger versions of the bare feet she’d stamped with spit on chalkboards as a child, kissed by wet soil instead. She turned, placed her own feet inside these larger two, closed the door, imagined the dinner party from this vantage point as she peered between slats.

Upstairs, a bed creaked from someone’s restless slumber, not from the other kind of creaking, though two here were obviously a pair and shared sheets, sleeping in lieu of slinking sex. Agatha stayed there, listening to the ancient house moan for its occupants. Breathing with new life. A semi-regular drip of water from the kitchen sink. Old mattress springs. Square nails pulled through old wood. Shutters pushed against siding by breeze. The sounds of settling.

She went up the staircase, each step flexing. With every door ajar she easily pushed them open. Old hinges quietly argued. She found the guests atop their sheets, bodies toppled, as if out before any heads ever hit pillows, simply tossed and crumpled there. Agatha ran her sullied fingers through the hair of a younger woman before covering her with a blanket. Her perfume smelled of jasmine. In another room, a man drooled, faintly snoring. His heavy breath reminded her of Chris. Agatha held the hammer over him, clenched the handle. In another, she found a couple not in bed together but on bed together, fully clothed and bodies askew, the woman’s hand across his neck. His arms outstretched and touching the headboard as if dragged there, legs dangling over the bed. The last room, Carpenter’s room, was empty, and in the adjacent bathroom a sliver of dancing yellow light fluttered under the door. Candlelight.

If she opened that door, she knew she’d find him staring into the bathroom mirror, perhaps staring through his reflection and out the window to the barn.

“What’s in the barn?” Agatha whispered.

The Farmer is there; there is The Farmer.

And then she sensed him standing behind her. The last hint of his shadow curved around the corner, and she followed him down the staircase, following the ghost-impressions his toes and heels pressed into the carpet, the stairs pushing back only her footsteps. The front door stood wide open as a few curled leaves fluttered inside. She made out the last of his shadow as he disappeared into the dark.

“Show me,” she said.

The black yarn pulled harder, tugging her along, first toward the barn (yes, show me what’s in / under / around / what secret is there?) where she’d sheltered before the woods, where she’d changed, but he abruptly turned, bringing her to a far field and she could only follow his pull to the (dead field, Aggie mused) tilled field. Light of a waxing half-moon led the way.

Leaves tumbled and rustled delicately under her bare feet. She bent down and inspected one, rubbed the charred thing between fingers, turning them dark. Burnt. Some fell from the sky and landed on her shoulder. Smoke pushed against her as she made her way deep into the field, and she lost track of time, walking for minutes / hours / days / ad infinitum. And then the yarn spooled out of her completely, a sudden slack sending her reeling, almost tumbling over.

In the distance, at the edge, an entire willow torched the sky and crackled laughter. The Farmer stood in front of it, a black silhouette against brightest orange.

This is a dream, little Aggie considered, a vision. Agatha considered as well.

Ash fell from the sky as the ball of light roared, embers flying erratically away from its center as fireflies. The memories came in flame-flashes: Mother’s last call, the dial tone screaming at her father to hang up the damn phone, the sound of glass breaking in the background just before, just before Mom’d— and the planes silently erupting like yeast blooms on the screen, the great and slow falling, one and then the next, an entire city covered in a gray powder, people running, screaming, covering mouths so as not to breathe the dead; others running in to the chaos, perhaps for one last breath. Everyone suddenly the same color.

Then little Aggie blowing Kool ash across her father’s newspaper, catching the bills, the curtains, the couch, the house. Agatha fell to her knees. Hands planted in the ground—

rubble unable to cling to root
and soot attempting to—

All the memories there, all at once.

Thoughts shifted to her childhood home and watching it burn: standing in the middle of the road as it rained, emergency lights flashing red and blue against the wet asphalt like some kind of party or stage or concert, a fireman’s hand heavy on her shoulder, and “The father’s still inside,” one neighbor is saying and “Was your father inside?” asks another in uniform and little Aggie’d nods then, not crying, just nodding all calm like, free from the monster at last, but to be haunted forever thereafter, and finally not-so-little-Aggie says “Yes,” that he was / is in there.

Agatha’d wished for a harder rain to put out the fire then, as she wished for it now to extinguish the tree. Had she fallen to her knees all those years ago, fingernails scraping the road? Part of her remembered the tips of her fingers bleeding and later bandaged, and part of her remembered not being there at all, hearing of her father’s death over the phone instead: There’s been an accident. She ran her fingers through the soil, the field recently ploughed or cultivated or whatever the process was called. Her hands came away ashy. Digging through death.

Bodies, she imagined, countless cremains tilled into the earth. If she dug long enough in the human dust she’d find tiny bones, a tooth, or—

The Farmer kept his back to her as he watched the last of the tree burn.

No, not a tree at all, Agatha realized, wiping her eyes. A bonfire of yard trimmings or other once-living things. Limbs, Aggie mused.

She nourished the ground with her tears, and soon after a light rain fell, and soon after a heavier rain, and soon after the pile smoldered and flattened until gone. Gone like The Farmer. The Farmer is there. There is The Farmer. He’d led her to this place to remember, to watch it all burn (again) and he had left her there …

She couldn’t remember how or when she’d returned to the farmhouse, but found herself once again staring at her reflection the kitchen window before climbing inside. Words wanted out of her, but she hadn’t brought her backpack (left just outside the barn), only the hammer hanging through a belt loop, and so she removed a worn copy of The Andromeda Strain from the bookshelf in the living room and flipped past the last page, snagged a pen from the end table.

If anyone wants to find this one, she figured, they’ll have to read to the end.

All the lights were off upstairs, and so she sat on the couch where she’d watched the new owner of the farm sleep not so long ago. She let the new poem write itself, frantically, one that apparently wanted out of her called “Loosed Earth,” though she kept the title to herself.

A burning world
prays yearning for rain
during a pained drought
no doubt which comes
too late for some
to extinguish last hotspots
brought upon past soft plots
sending a simmering ground
glimmering with ash-mud
to slip-slide the sides
in scare-rides
not meant for women
nor men or children
caught mixed in the crud
in fraught games of chance
to play in avalanches of unstable
rubble unable to cling to root
and soot attempting to
hold a cold and crumbling
foundation together
and will this never end
or go on forever
as the terrible
treble-tremble sings
a sad ensemble
of oversaturated help
to sated gods
devoid of love
bringing new horrors
for hours or forever
as those coerced
to flee are freed
then forced to plea
on frayed knees
praying for heat
in dry pouts      
as they cry out
for fires to mask the floods …

He’s here, Aggie told her.

The old man sat across from her in a chair. Suddenly there, as if listening to her thoughts and the unspoken poem. Agatha let her eyes adjust as she closed the book, taking in general shapes and outlines. Blacks becoming grays. He stared at the floor or at his boots, the brim of his hat pulled down to cover all but his insufferably wrinkled chin. He rocked gently, or so the sparse light revealed. Three of his fingers pattered against the cushion, thah-ta-tat, thah-ta-tat, thah-ta-tat, like an unsteady heartbeat, which soon matched her own, then he switched to two fingers creating a softer, slower forty-beats-per-minute. Leather hands pruned and liver-spotted.

Primeval: a hundred years old or a thousand. Definitely dressed for the part in this strange play. She imagined a stalk of wheat sticking out of his mouth, toothless but gnawing at the end of it, or putting a match to a corn pipe to light up the rest of his face. He’d worked this land countless seasons, had tended countless crops. An old gunslinger without any guns. He’s making the sound of a steady soft pattering rain, she realized.

“Who are you?” she asked.

He either sighed or took in and soundlessly released a breath; otherwise, his shape didn’t move. Maybe he wasn’t there at all. Maybe she wasn’t there at all. Maybe they both—

“Well, I’m Agatha,” she said. “But you know that already, don’t you?”

The old man didn’t say anything, simply sat there.

“I stayed in your barn a few days,” she said, “tried to repair it after the last storm, but the barn doesn’t seem to want to be repaired. Wants to stay worn and weathered, maybe.”

Agatha stood, returned the book to its proper shelf, not afraid to turn around, but not willing to either, and when she did he was gone, or the thought of him there had passed. The beat he’d made on the arms of the chair remained as a prattle against the windows.

“What’s in the barn?” she asked the room.

The room didn’t respond.

Again, she was alone.

No, not alone.

She sat in the living room a long while, waiting for him to return. She even sat in his chair, watching for him on the couch where she’d sat talking to him … or talking to no one.

The sky lightened a shade of gray before she decided to leave. But first she ripped out a blank page from some mystery novel, one of the end pages. She transcribed Mother’s poem from memory—rising up from the ashes and all that—then she slipped the paper in the forgiveness jar in the pantry and made her way to the barn to visit that empty grave.

“I forgive you,” Agatha told the headstone. ‘Mother’ the rock read when she flipped it over. She used the claw end of the hammer to loosen the already loosened earth beneath it. She’s not there, Aggie insisted, just like last time, but her older self dug anyway. Careful not to break any glass (not there, not there), she tossed the hammer aside, used her fingers to scrape the (asphalt) dirt.

“She’s not here,” Agatha said aloud. “And he’s not here, either.”

The Farmer was elsewhere, tending to his crops.

“But I forgive you, Mother,” she said, “for leaving me behind, for leaving me with the man who did this,” she said, attempting to imply her entire being, “and for all the things you let him do to me in your absence. I forgive you for dying. I forgive you for your cartwheels out the window. I forgive you for calling me to say goodbye to me first, then asking for him. What did you need to say to him? Why did you have to go in to work at all that day? Was it mandatory, or did you climb up your tower to get away from—” (daddy, chimed in Aggie) “—the man who was supposed to be my father, from the man who beat you? I saw the bruises makeup couldn’t hide. I saw the fear in your eyes when he’d say your name. But I forgive you (, mama).”

She’s not anywhere, not now, she’s everywhere; ashes caught in the wind.

Agatha kept digging, eager to find her mother’s empty jar, but when her fingers passed through the soft plot—

to extinguish last hotspots
brought upon past soft plots

—her fingers grated across rusty metal. She pushed away the dirt, dug around the dented cylinder: an old red coffee tin, Folgers, buried a good foot below the place where Mother’s jar should be. She knew what she’d find inside this one and unearthed the container. It had once held coffee grounds, sure, then later a secret Mason jar labeled “freedom” in Sharpie over a tear of duct tape, which she’d stashed in the garage (hidden in plain sight, right there in the open), and inside that jar the cash she’d used to leave Chris. Not a lot, but enough.

And somehow she found it buried in this spot (a hundred years ago, a thousand) based on its condition, the ground around it hard as cement. Once again Agatha swung the claw end of the hammer, chipped away at the rocks and pried them out like the decapitated heads of nails. It took much effort, but she managed to pull out the coffee tin without damaging it much. A heavy thing. Five or six pounds, an impossible weight for what should be inside: four hundred thirty-two dollars in collected small bills: mostly ones and fives, a few tens and twenties, a couple dollar coins. She’d already spent about half that amount. The plastic lid had all but disintegrated.

Before tipping out the contents, she searched her backpack next to the barn. The small zipper pouch held a wad the cash and some change, all accounted for, making her question, “the fuck?” out of her discovery. She ran her filthy fingers through her hair (the woman in the house, Aggie imagined). She stared at the Folgers tin, kicked it over. A soft rattle as it rolled. She stared at the barn doors, went in, closed herself inside.

Moonlight striped the interior with bars of light, as it had before (a cell, Agatha imagined, she its prisoner but now able to let herself out). The roof unrepaired. The swing doors not reinforced with salvaged wood. No pity nails nor any others holding everything in place. The latch was there, however, which she shot into place like the rifle bolt, the sound comforting—similar to the sound of the blunt end of the hammer headstone-tipping a skull—

sending a simmering ground
glimmering with ash-mud

—and someone had taken her tent, her sleeping bag, and everything else she’d left behind before going into the woods (or had put them away, brought inside the farmhouse, perhaps), but she’d known that, and that was alright, but whoever’d done so hadn’t taken the Blanton’s. The bottle waited for her next to the paint cans, covered and nearly unrecognizable by anything other than its unique shape by a thick layer of farm dust. The whiskey tempted her like some kind of midlevel and oversized tincture or potion. She rubbed away the grime with her shirt, expecting her own name to be handwritten on its label. She pulled off the horse stopper (running away, running away), took a whiff, then took a long swig. What her father’d called a long ‘pull.’

“Some things never spoil,” she said to the burn. “Others spoil quickly.”

A demon swiveled its head on the ground, then, an elongated shadow nearly her own height with two horns and hunched shoulders. Agatha spun around, only to find an owl perched atop the largest gap in the ceiling, admiring her. A Barn Owl, she figured. Both the owl and its shadow stretched out a wide set of wings, which ruffled, then settled.

Below the creature lay a pile of round pellets a little larger than the size of ping-pong balls. As a child, little Aggie’d look for them in the woods under trees, excited every time she’d find one. She’d pry open their tight woven-basket-like structures, pulling out the white skulls of mice and gophers or whatever the owl’d not digested and’d spat back out. Owls swallowed their meals whole, she’d read, which’d always fascinated her, for she’d also learned the hard truth that life could sometimes do that to you—could swallow you whole and spit you out.

This particular owl craned its head curiously as Aggie made her way below it. She knelt next to the pellet pyramid, a reflected glint of silver catching her eye. She pried open one the size of a walnut, a tiny spherical ribcage (could be, Aggie, she told her younger self), and tore at that chest until it snapped apart. In the center, among partial jaws and teeth and claws of rodents, Agatha found the bones of a coiled finger barely held together by cartilage. Metatarsals of a ring finger. And loosely around it, a cheap silver band much like her father’s wedding ring.

“This can’t be his,” she said and the owl fluttered off, “he’s—”Mine, the engraving read.

and will this never end
or go on forever

—as the barn doors rattled, but only because of the wind. She convinced herself of that anyway, warding off the thought of her father’s charbroiled hands (nine of his ten fingers, at least) pushing against the wood from the other side, trying not to worry (for there’s no jar for that) that they wanted to wrap around her neck and squeeze.

                                                / flash

“Is there anything you want to keep of his?” a uniformed woman’d asked her, pointing at the plastic Ziploc baggie. Inside: a blackened pocket watch, an untarnished silver ring. She’d imagined then, only a fifteen-year-old midway through her sophomore year of high school and on her own, how the coroner’d had to’ve cut off that finger to get to the ring prior to her father’s second cremation. His ashes would weigh five or six pounds, she’d read, the average weight of a man’s cremains. And little Aggie’d pointed to the ring, then, which’d either been cleaned or had gone unscathed. Not to keep as a remembrance of who he was (and what he’d done, both to her, and to Mother), but as a reminder of what he’d become: dead. The thought of the coroner clipping off his finger with pruning shears had brought upon her plenty of nightmares—

                                                / flash

Open this goddamn door, Aggie! Only in her head. Only in our head, Aggie.

She left the ring there, in the pile of bones, and took another long swig (pull) of the Blanton’s. A shadow moved from one side of the gap under the door to the other, the sound of footsteps over soil. The shadow moved from the front to the side of the barn as holes (once-tough knots) in the wood blocked the flashlight-like beams of moonlight by the smooth motion.

Agatha slid the bolt, another round expelled, and ran after whoever or whatever waited out in the dark for her to follow. She screamed, “What do you want with me!” as she threw open the doors, not as a question but as a command. “Show me!”

The rock above the grave had been kicked over to its unpainted side, the coffee can now upright. Someone had flipped over the rock. Someone had righted the tin. Bare footprints led the way, then disappeared as though whoever’d made them had floated off into the heavens.

Agatha fell to her knees. She scraped what she could out of the old coffee tin, and let the jar slide into her hand, chilled, heavy as a river rock. This one labeled “freedom,” the same jar from her garage but not. And not empty. More than money inside. Another kind of freedom.

She unscrewed the lid, stuck her finger in cremains—

rubble unable to cling to root
and soot attempting to
hold a cold and crumbling
foundation together   

—and knew what to do with her father. The last of the bare footprints pressed into the loosed earth around her resembled those in the kitchen pantry. She stood and placed her own feet within them, making footprints within footprints. They pointed the way: toward the crops. She imagined her younger self doing the same, stepping into them as she stepped away, three sets of layered footprints left behind. And she imagined little Aggie and Agatha and The Farmer all walking to the fields as one, holding a freedom jar full of ashes.

Perhaps someone might find their triple set of footprints, then using the back of their hand create a fourth (baby feet, left behind in the world like baby teeth) and push holes into the dirt with a finger to create toes. Perhaps someone thirsty would find the last of the Blanton’s.

Agatha kicked over Mother’s headstone. Instead of ‘Mother’ painted like dried blood against the rock, someone had painted over the word with a single fat stroke of black. The new white lettering over it spelled ‘father.’

A light in the farmhouse flicked to life.

There was something more in the barn, but not Agatha’s turn for that revelation, for the pull of the place had once again changed. She knew where to go, as if led by lead rope. With the handle of the hammer slid into her belt loop, she made her way past the farmhouse and to the field where she’d had the dream or vision of the burn. No smoke this time, and no leaves tumbling by way of the wind, and no fireflies buzzing about, but she found the field easy enough. No raging fire, either. Just an empty dirt lot recently tilled and carved into neat rows.

The Farmer waited in the middle, suddenly there, his shadow long.

Most of his ancient face hid under the brim of his hat.

“Show me,” Agatha said.

And he did.

He dragged behind him a long-handled shovel as he walked, splitting the earth, and she followed him through the field, but on her hands and knees. She dug her own paths next to him with the claw end of her hammer. After making a few trenches he’d circle back, reach into the leather seed bag at his side and bend down to drop in a few, then use the side of his foot to bury them, and Agatha’d circle back, reach into the jar of ashes (a jar of bones, really), then use her hand to do the same, wondering What will grow here? and wondering How have I grown?

The night drew infinitely long, the half-moon frozen above them as massive battleship storm clouds gathered in the obsidian sea, readying for war. Some fired warning-shot thunder, strobing the night in foamy-frothy waves. Some leaked their invisible wounds.

“What comes next,” she asked when her jar emptied.

Agatha stood directly in front of him, and he directly in front of her, a foot apart. She could reach out and touch his ever-brittle body, could possibly push her finger right through. And if he reached out to her, what would he feel? How brittle was she now, having been out here on her own for days / for weeks / for however-long?

She thought of the owl swallowing the finger then later spitting out its pellet. She thought of the ring, the engraving. She thought of the barn, and what might be hidden there. She thought of the farmhouse, of the dinner party, and wondered what they ate, and how that’d changed them. And she wondered likewise what she’d eaten these last few days from her jars, and how she’d changed. So many labels. So many—

Mother and her forgiveness jar; father and his freedom jar.

The later had also gotten Agatha out of her bind with Chris, filled with money, though, not with ash, and oh how the two of them were so alike both in life and in death, how one had taught her how to take care of the next, the 16-penny nails sometimes taking five or six swings to bury flush into the wood, but without the nails and without the wood a single swing’s all it took, a perfect-round little splash. Good, Aggie, like that; like that, Agatha, good.

She’d asked The Farmer to show her, and he’d shown her proper, but now what?

Agatha stared into her empty glass jar; without saying anything, The Farmer (never the farmer) stared into his empty leather satchel the same. A hundred years old or a thousand, he lifted her chin with his wrinkled old hand, soft as tissue—lift your head up, the gentle gesture implied—and he smiled beneath the brim of his hat, all crooked-like.

The blinding white of his starlight eyes pulled her in deep.

There is The Farmer.

Agatha’s story continues here:

I hope you enjoyed this strange tale, Glenn’s illustrations, and every other piece of writing, art, music, poetry, or what-have-you inspired by Josh Malerman’s Carpenter’s Farm currently (and soon-to-be) popping up around the Internet. Since this pandemic started, I haven’t been able to focus on writing anything other than poetry, so thank you, Josh, for getting me out of this rut! After reading the first four chapters of his novel-in-progress, and Shane Douglas Keene’s chapter-by-chapter corresponding poems, (seriously, read them), I reached out, asked if Josh would mind if I wrote a tie-in short story, he said to go for it, and so I hashed out Part 1 in a single day; I started writing at around noon on a Saturday and multiple drafts / edits by midnight. The next weekend I wrote Part 2, and the following weekend Part 3.

This story is now over 16,500 words, with a part 4 in consideration. This story seems to be growing into a novella. Anyway, I hope you’re having as much fun as I am … making the best of things.

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