Standing out like a lone figure on a boundless and barren chessboard, a single wooden shack sat in the painful quiet. It stood half again the height of any soul and fifteen feet square at the base. A solemn door gave meager definition to the dusty brown face of the ragged shanty. From the shambled rooftop rose a slim rusted stovepipe; black length bent in comical way, a greasy tendril of gray smoke eddying its way up through the still air.

Set east of the lonely guard was the cornfield— a graveyard of dried out and skeletal stalks of aged and browned corn; time’s watchmen. The flat and acrid color of this place gave those spindly fingers a deathly quality. The square was not much wider than the home itself, but stretched back twice again its length. Between the shed and the long willowy shadows of the watchmen were dried and cracking bobbles, a ball with faint and chipped paint of blue and red and a wooden duck with no paint left at all, a frayed cut of roping wrapped urgently around its sun bleached neck.