Autumn Falls Round And Robust ((link)) [ Full ]

On the last night of October, after the last guest had gone home and the last leaf had let go, Elias sat on his porch. The moon was a perfect, heavy circle. The fields were bare now, the pumpkins carved into grinning skulls, the apples reduced to cores in a compost heap.

Elias Thorne had spent seventy years believing that autumn was a lie.

As a young man, he’d read the poets—Keats, Hopkins, the usual wistful souls—and they all spoke of autumn as a sigh: a thin, golden weeping of leaves, a melancholy maiden with wind-tangled hair. It was the season of lovely decay. Of endings. autumn falls round and robust

Elias nodded.

The juice ran down his chin. It was sharp, sweet, tannic, alive. It tasted like the rain. It tasted like the drought that came before it. It tasted like everything the tree had stored up in its dark, patient roots. On the last night of October, after the

This year, the summer had been brutal. A drought had cracked the soil into puzzle pieces. The corn had come in short and bitter. Elias had spent July and August fighting off a kind of exhaustion that lived in his bones, the kind you get when you’ve been a widower for twelve years and the house is too quiet and the tractor keeps breaking down.

He should have felt the melancholy then. The ending. Elias Thorne had spent seventy years believing that

Then, around the second week of September, the rain came. Not a drizzle—a robust, rolling thunderstorm that lasted three days. The kind of rain that makes the gutters sing and the frogs go mad with joy.