Mud

This land is a land of mud. You’d think with so few people living out there, beyond the ring roads and chain link fences, that it would shake out somehow to a patchwork of green fields, a lush and unbruised carpet of grass sealing away the earth, binding it as if by unspoken oath. But whatever pact was made has long since broken, and tales of it pass from memories, existing now only in the warm and fibrous dreams of the dying. The land is a snarling chaos, a frozen thrash of slurry. In places a machine has churned a dripping gash with unfortunate upturned nettles within, those who are quick able to extricate themselves before they rot. In the summer the paths harden into a crackled moonscape, flies darting out like spyplanes from the deepest welts where a faint, chemical moisture still hangs, the green mud of a concrete pipe beneath the bridge.

This is the land. Cowshit and barbed wire. Nettles, dumped gravel, rotten boles scratched up by foxes. You cannot inhabit it, or even approach it. This land exists only to be driven past, to join the brownish blur at the corners of your windshield as you take another hairpin turn down the rutted lane. Walk? For pleasure? You must be mad. Do you spend your free time visiting factories, abattoirs, or bank vaults? No? Then why would you come out here to do the exact same thing?

A hedgerow hides far more secrets than a bank of tenements ever could.