I slam the shot of whiskey down. Glass shatters. Drinking customers leap to their feet. The man whose flask I’ve broken lets out a string of obscenities. I look at the miserable group of intoxicated fools surrounding me who had once been honorable, hardworking young men, husbands, and fathers. Men I had looked up to. Men who my father had admired. It never should have been this way.
Yet, if we have the pleasure of indulging should-haves, I never should have even been here. I should have been out on a farm in the middle of Virginia, with rolling green hills, bubbling creeks, and a kitchen that smelled like apple pie. With endless summer days that rolled into the next, so softly that no one paid mind to the fact that the sun had long sunk into the hungry valleys of the distant mountains. The mountains near, and yet as if in a dream—the constant fog making the craigs of the rock indistinguishable. I should have been there.
Should have still had a sister that I swore I hated in scuffles, yet loved more fiercely than any other. The one that would lay with me in the tall Johnson grass staring at the stars for hours on end. The one who would be my company at the edge of the pond and listen to the croaking frogs, dreaming of busy city streets, women with purses as large as tractor tires, and men in suits that resided in swivel chairs and bustling luxury. We would imagine.
But never would we imagine that one night our peaceful country would be infiltrated by buttloads of grasshoppers. Not the number that softly chirps at night, composing a lullaby that calms you to sleep, but a host of hungry monsters. A multitude of merciless creatures that destroy everything and anything in their sweeping path. The size of your little finger, yet together the danger of a wildfire.
The day they came shattered my life. That day is crystal clear, yet disconnected from everything else, in such a way that every breath I breathe is to fight for justice to the evil of it all, yet not a soul in this room could comprehend the horror of what I saw. Crystal-clear memories of a shattered dream.
Clear and shattered. Like the remains of the shot glass that lie in my hand. A testament to the anger and pure frustration of this entire endeavor. Ah, yes, anger. The anger that now seems to have relocated from the action taken upon the broken vessel in my hand to the bartender’s balding head, which has taken on the exact likeness of tomato juice. He is raging at the peace that, according to him, I have disturbed.
If only he knew—the peace was a lie. The horror of the locustal natural disaster—merely a facade.
Every drunk man in this room attempting to drown their sorrows, if even for a scant few hours, knows about that day. Knows about them. The devouring locusts.
Only I know about them.
The wicked men behind the plot.
Good read!