Well Fair Disabled

It is not quite light.

In the dusk of the wire fence pairs of eyes patrol. Wary heads turn at human sounds, but mutter their own low tongued conversations.

She thinks she has been feeding the feral black and white cat that lives in the culvert, looses her litter to high water every spring when the rain turns heavy. But the coyotes know differently.

She sits heavy in the 70's kitchen chair, its orange plastic bruised and rubbed, cracked and mended with the silver of duct tape. Rust lines her hands when she uses the metal as a lever to stand. Her back bone is fractured with hairline cracks that medication and a food stamp diet have added to her weight.

Blue eyes seem to reflect sparks from the fence, as a train crosses the boggy land at the other side of the pasture. The expected rumble disturbs neither the cat hunting coyotes nor the blue eyes hunting ease.

She sits and watches as though the land were the television she will turn on when she returns inside. On her lap sits a pan of greasy yellow macaroni topped with buttery fake cheese. A clear plastic fork lifts and falls with an intense uniformity that the coyotes and the cat envy.

"It's the Ambien," she says. "It makes me eat."

In early summer the smells are still sweet. Honeysuckle fragrance drifts and the partially blocked sewage system is not yet blooming in the summer heat to come.

"It's all the fault of the liberal bastards." she says. "Them that kills unborn babies and commit same sex adultery."

Her church reassures her. No matter what happens. It isn't her fault.