Flash: Chords in the Field

The kind of night made for interruptions.

It was Sunday night.
The kind of night made for interruptions.

The goats screamed.
They always made noise. Petty quarrels, the clatter of horns, bleating of hunger.

But this was different.
This sound was a cry sharpened by fear, carrying the weight of a wolf or something worse.

He was already awake when it came.
His wife lay beside him, snoring. He nudged her, but the cry had already entered him. There are moments when you do not move by choice. You are moved.

He rose, barefoot, into the dark.

Flaco lay stiff on his back, legs jutting upward like snapped branches.
Ashen on his side, the glaze of death in his open eye.
Wisp gone.
Pancho gone.
Lark. The pregnant one missing.
Only Ivy, the smallest, stood at the pen trembling at the open gate, waiting for restoration of order.

He shouted and something vast waved past.
A fox, a wolf, a dog, or the shape that hunger takes when it wears a pelt.
The night closed in around him. The field, the pen, the trees all the invisible threads that held them together.

The darkness became so complete only the eyes of animals could be seen, shining like distant stars.

Later he would remember details as if they were clues.

Flaco, suddenly rising, bloodied. Wisp bounding back as if nothing had happened. Ashen, throat torn, lay frozen until suddenly, impossibly, he staggered up, as if life had reconsidered its departure.

Four goats, four wounds, four survivals.

He thought of the scripture: the sheep saved and goats condemned. But hadn’t Christ meant the opposite? That the solitary, ungovernable goat was the true disciple?

Now looking at his own herd, annoying, stubborn, alive only in clusters, he wasn’t so sure.

He often thought and spoke of the field.
Not just the pasture, but the invisible order beneath it: that web deciding who shows up, who falls silent.

The field beyond form and emptiness, where all possibilities wait.
The wolves were part of the field. The scream of the goats, too.The night itself had been the field, announcing presence: not as warning but invitation.

His wife asked later if he felt guilty.
He didn’t.
Responsibility was enough he told her.
Guilt is useless, like locking the gate after the night had passed. The freedom they enjoyed not worth false security.

If the pen had been closed, the wolves might not have come. The goats would have slept, the night would have passed quietly. They would have gone on in ignorance.

But now they knew.
And knowing seemed worth something.

Perhaps the best of outcomes.

In the days that followed, Ashen lay beneath the shade tree, barely breathing. The man brought honey water, dribbling it onto his lips.

At first, nothing, then slow flickers of life, a swallow.
The frozen body thawed into trembling and slowly, almost reluctantly, Ashen came back.
And in that return, the man felt something shift himself too.

He remembered telling his sister once: “if you separate the sheep from the goats, I want to be with the goats.” Now he wasn’t sure.

Watching Ashen rest, he thought of his old guitar, untouched for weeks.
He picked it up again, clumsily.
The strings were out of tune, his fingers stiff.
The first notes awkward, broken, but alive with mistakes.
But soon he felt it: a tingling, a trembling aliveness.
The music wasn’t good, but it was true.
To do something badly can be more valuable than to do it well. Failure strips away authority.
The cup must be emptied before it can be filled.

He wondered if enjoyment was the only measure that mattered. Not pleasure, but the sudden trembling aliveness that seizes the heart when the world cracks open.

The goats had screamed.
The wolves had answered, and life had broken its still surface.

For a moment, nothing was taken for granted.
For a moment, the field had spoken.
And for a moment, it was enough.

// Zero Strike