The Scouring of the Third Acre

Fiction

The smell hit us before we reached the fence line: a cloying mix of overripe peaches and hot copper. It was the kind of scent that didn't just sit in your nose; it coated your throat. Old Man Miller was already there, standing at the edge of the Third Acre with his boots sunk deep in the muck. He didn't look awestruck. He looked like a man who had just found a dead calf in his watering hole. The thing that had fallen from the sky was about the size of a draft horse, though its geometry didn't quite make sense. It was a shimmering, iridescent mass of translucent flesh and gold-threaded veins, currently melting into the loam. "Don't touch the fluid," Miller warned, pointing a calloused finger at the iridescent pool spreading toward the drainage ditch. "It ate right through my leather soles in ten minutes. It's caustic." We spent the first four hours just neutralizing the site. The town council had sent over three pallets of industrial grade lime, and we spent the morning hauling it by the bucketload. We didn't use prayers or incense; we used heavy duty rubber waders and wide-mouthed shovels. Every time a clump of the divine ichor hissed against the lime, it released a puff of iridescent vapor that made your eyes water and your teeth ache. Getting the actual carcass out was the worst part. The deity of harvest, as the scholars in the city would probably call it, was surprisingly heavy. It had a density that defied its soft, gelatinous appearance. We had to rig up a winch and a heavy canvas tarp to drag it toward the disposal pit. As we pulled, the thing began to slough off in iridescent sheets. It didn't bleed so much as it leaked a thick, shimmering syrup that smelled like a perfume factory on fire. "Ridiculous," Elias muttered, wiping a smear of gold slime off his forearm with a rag. "They call this a god of the harvest, yet it lands right in the middle of my prime soil and poisons the whole acre. I'll be lucky if I can grow a weed here by next spring." We didn't treat it with reverence. We treated it like a chemical spill. When a piece of the creature's ribcage, which looked like spun glass, snapped off and sliced through one of the tarps, we didn't see a holy relic. We saw a safety hazard. We swept the shards into a galvanized bucket with a stiff broom and dumped them into the lime pit along with the rest of the shimmering offal. By sunset, the Third Acre was a scarred wasteland of white powder and burnt earth. The iridescent glow was gone, replaced by the dull, honest grey of neutralized soil. We walked back to the trucks in silence, our clothes smelling of sulfur and rotting fruit, thinking only about the paperwork required to claim the crop insurance for a divine act of negligence.