With chest beating, I gain on the fast escaping letter; tented, folded pale yellow parchment skidding end over end. Each row of the spines of the harvested wheat, cut like the scalp of a blonde adolescent, catches the letter like a backstop, tossed vertically like a tumbleweed. Dense tubular stubble with frayed edges, gray sodden earth pockmarked dry. I nearly twist my ankle on a discarded pile of satyr-sieved gravel. A stubble-spine sword shaft collides, eager to meet my fast-descending knee. ‘Ah!’ I exclaim, then emit an involuntary whisper.
Once more, plodding, two; I stoop and snatch it, hips spinning wide until I’m nearly sat back again on this cold earth. The forest trees loom in their columns just by. The family are dotted again in the distance, standing gathered at the barren field’s edge.
Kneeling, breath readjoining to an unquickened state; I unfold the parchment.
To Mr. Quartoro,
We regret to inform you that our fears of the implications of the length of scale whereby The Office Of Surveyor uses in the country of Miania becoming shortened by one fiftieth to its previous established length has, as we’ve all feared, resulted in some dramatic border changes regarding the bounds of public, federated lands, and those allotted to the landholding class, the Evís. In this case, the Evís House of Faner, which heretofore under the broader strokes of border measurement interval length of half a mile did not under that paradigm lay claim to your unincorporated estate on federated grounds, we regret to inform you that, with the new official Miania interval of one fiftieth of the former half a mile, an otherwise as yet unmeasurable elongated shelf of territe shale that extends from the estate of the House of Faner sits, in fact, directly under the extent of your property. Where before, due to the surrounding geography, on approach to your property we were required to turn inwards, as it were, back towards the direction the House of Faner main estate grounds, and then broadly skirt the bounds of your property to the north west, now, because we are universally redrawing boundary lines in accord with this significantly smaller interval of geographic measurement, these smaller units allow us to follow the geometry of the land with greater fidelity in all of its unique twists and turns. This, we regret to inform you has allowed us to correct our former passing over of your land due to the incompatibility of the official length of measurement with the shape of the total Faner border. We have now, for the first time, properly followed the contours of the underlying geographic feature owned by the House of Faner that your own property indisputably, in its entirety, sits upon.
We understand that this will mean many changes for you and your household. We send our deepest condolences. This concludes the extent of our legally required notice to you. You may expect further correspondence from both the federal and Faner magistrates in probably short order.
Of course, do keep us in mind for all of your future surveying needs. We take pride in our work and strive to be impeccable.
Kindly,
Momagh Surveyor & Company
The wind kicks. Quickly, there they are again, those puffs of chaff flown airborne. Toasted rice tossed in fanning sheets. They must be pieces of me, I’m convinced, dry, cold ashes, dead sparks emitting from the dwindling fire of my dying soul. Everything lost. Slavery. A letter condemning us to the fetters of the House of Faner’s perpetual bondage.
I take the one pleasure knowing my family is out earshot across the windswept range; their staccato dots and long stab marks waving, squinted through the rising midday early-summer heat. With secluded comfort, I wail in despair.
Why plant the oak
We may never promised see?
Am I the chaff of wheat?
Or the gardener of
The creeping forests’ trees?