Micah had never seen the cornfields, stalks arranged in long rows, so green, so yellow, so rich like the acrylic pens he had stolen from the market stall at age eight. It was vivid, and not any less than the solid steel buildings that he had lived around, turned black by soot, which scraped off onto your fingers when touched. That was the familiar that he called home, the place that he had grown up in, had never left, because his father had said that it was their birthing and resting place, their lot in life.
No one, except cowards, left their lot in life.
Micah didn’t want to be a coward and so, he never left, only able to see the green and the yellows on the bright TV screen in his father’s boss’ office, peeping outside from the window in, where he hoped he wouldn’t be seen, a coward and yet not, to be or not to be.
But in the end, he fell. And he fell hard.
All it had taken was for his father to fall sick and never recover, body still warm deep in the bare fields that he had almost nothing paid for. Micah found himself on a train the next day to the other part of town, where the people there had grown up with TVs and they didn’t scrape the bottom of the pot for dinner. He wanted to see the green and the yellows, the ones that they saw as often as the sun.
He wanted to be able to touch the tip of their stalks, to feel the sun shining on his back, to be anywhere where soot wasn’t. In the end, he was a coward, and he didn’t know if his father would forgive him, but he was able to forgive himself, because he could finally see the green and the yellows.
