Universal Harvester

by John Darnielle

A farmhouse has a way of feeling both timeless and impermanent without ever committing to either side.

You don’t think about how you really have your whole life planned out until a part of it goes missing suddenly one day. You’ll panic then.

But there was a need to act in this moment before it passed. The defining characteristic of moments, he knew, is that they pass.

you grow up and it gets harder to meet people, but there are shrinking places in the world where the people you meet growing up are the people you know later on. These places seem less nice when you feel trapped in them, but once you get free they seem sweet.

In a small grass lot on the other side of the silos were several abandoned cars. I have always wondered how a thing as big as a car comes to be abandoned: Does somebody drive it to its destination, knowing this will be the end of the line? Does a driver one day say, that’s it, this car has broken down on the road one time too many, I can’t stand it any more, no one will ever want this car, I’m just going to leave it here? Do junkyards tow cars too stripped to be of value to distant fields and unhook them in the middle of the night?

Curiosity had always felt, to him, like something you ought to be ashamed of, an accusing finger pointing out that there’s something you don’t know yet.