Everyday Canvas

The Barn

Prompt: John Gardner's The Art of Fiction has an interesting third person limited POV exercise. Let's give it a try-
"Try describing a barn from the point of view of a man who just learned that his son has died. Don't tell us anything about the son or even that his son has died...just describe the barn as he sees it." Have fun.


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He stood like a solemn totem pole in the middle of the cornfield in his ancestral land, now of grass and weed, and shifted his eyes toward the old empty barn, toward where the gray and white sparrows flew, toward the rusting tin roof like that of an Orthodox Cathedral on which the rain had beaten down during the night before. At the window frame, a broken glass pane had become a portal for the pigeons, swallows, and mice.

The barn’s broken-down walls with their peeled-off bold shade of red paint and their cracked plaster echoed of the past, whispering stories of times gone by, of wheat and corn swaying in the gentle winds and of pigs, the wild sow, and their troughs.

They talked of the water well, still there, still bearing its existence in the cold and rain, its pump now rusty and absurd, unable to turn of its own weight.

They talked of the sweet meadow hay stacked in bales, old cowbells, and the pitter-patter of little feet, now ethereal, and the hayloft’s rafters smelling of rot, where love once played hide-and-seek.

He stood there like a solemn totem-pole, remembering, looking, taking in the devastation of the barn and his own tattered and torn insides.