In Sackcloth

Ron Koppelberger

In Sackcloth

The headlong pursuit of celebrated, even admired, fruits in ferment, lingered in the vapory mists. The bedlam measured equal portions of sorrow and misery in her cauldron of cause. “Sweets for the Sweetie.” she chuckled to herself. The laborers had diligently fenced in the property of her neighboring lot. She had never talked to or even seen her neighbor, nevertheless she whispered, “sweets for the sweatie.”
After two days labor the fence was nearly complete and the dark skinned laborers remained unscathed as they talked, joked and dug post holes. She thrust the jape jawbone dust and rooster scrap into the charcoal colored pot. “Sweets for the sweetie.” she hummed.
On the third day one of the laborers knocked on her door. In a pallor of panic she answered the door, a great thunder and roaring like the screams of an injured tiger betrayed the timid knocking sound. Running to the smudged begrimed window glass, she starred at her neighbors property in horror. A giant plume of darkness stretched from the ground to the sky blotting out the sun and swallowing up the workers. The giant cloud moved in her direction and she mumbled a curse, acknowledging her error. Maybe it had been the rooster bones she thought as the tempest devoured her.