Au Pâturage

 The coffee maker au pâturage

Beyond the landfill twins were playing in the grass. Just in front of the tall pines. Where Mr Barker their father told them they couldn’t go.
Mr Barker had a huge amount of trash to clear from the bed of his truck.
So he said the twins could go down to the meadow beside the landfill.
Mr Barker knew they would need to use up some of their energy otherwise they’d easily get themselves into some trouble around the unsafe waste. He had just cut himself picking up some of the trash so he could get his truck in.
The twins could see the truck from where they were, but they couldn’t see their father.
Their giggling was constant and rose and fell like birdcalls.
In the middle of the small meadow there was a saw horse and on it sat a french coffee machine.
The coffee machine was working but both of the twins could see it wasn’t plugged in.
They slowly walked closer and closer until their giggling fell into silence.
They looked under the saw horse, a bald patch of earth surrounded by the over abundant super green grass surrounding it, hiding it almost.
The coffee machine gurgled, the smell of coffee became obvious.
Adernaid the boy said to his sister Sarah jar. “Sarah lets get back to the truck, this is weird.”
Sarah Jar looked at Adernaid, they both started walking back, feeling that void inside their throats and chest where their own giggling had been stolen by the strange discovery of the working coffee machine.

Sarah Jar pulled on Adernaid’s hand. And pointed up into the pines. A crow sat up in one of the branches barely visible, but Sarah caught it.
She was unsettled by being observed by the thing.
“No don’t.” Sarah said as Adernaid position himself to hurl a stone. He listened to her and dropped it. Perhaps if they hadn’t been twins, he could have thrown it. But the twin dynamic gave them both a kind of internal overlap of respect from one another.

Adernaid pulled Sarah Jar along, but took a rapid glance back at the coffee plunger bubbling away in the machine.
The crow crowed like a lunchbreak bell at a factory.
The kids walked faster.
They got to the truck and their father Old Mister Barker was brooming off the last of the dust fragments from the truck bed. He lifted the twins onto the back of the truck. Pointing out to the mountains and mountains of trash.
“Hey Dad we found a..” Adernaid was cut off by his sister.
“A crow” Sarah Jar said. In a tone that was both awkward and comic to their father.
He turned to both of them.
“Yes there are a lot of crows here. They also like to scavenge.”
He lifted each of them down and told them to get into the cab.
He jumped down, put the sides up and clicked them into place.
Got into the driver’s seat, turned on the radio and the ignition. Barely aware of the twin’s silence on the way home. Their chatter and giggling that would go on for days, was now completely silent. They just watched the road as if they were able to control the vehicle with their thoughts.
Every few minutes they would whisper to each other.
Mr Barker noticed that. Not the whispering, but how they did it. As if the information was dangerous.
He told himself it was jus another one of their games. As they had many and some did bamboozle him.
Something scratched the top of the windscreen on Mr barker’s side of the wind shield.
He looked in the rearview.
“There’s your crow!” Mr Barker said, bringing back a smile to his face.
On the twin’s side a streak of brown liquid resembling coffee leaked down.
Adernaid wanted to express it all, just about blurting it out. Sarah Jar put her forefinger to her lips in a gesture.
And all might have been forgotten, had Mister Barker not seen that gesture.