Tares

     You push your way out of the bus's back door and lower yourself down onto a windswept sidewalk. For you, the day has effectively concluded, even though the hands of your watch can scarcely conspire to agree on 1 p.m. You are barely even human, mentally, due to a deficit of sleep and a general feeling of hollowness, but you decide to dismiss the realization - to do otherwise would be to evaporate where you stand. So depleted is your consciousness that you cannot even recall where you have come from. You are also unsure of your intended point of arrival. And so you have been rendered homeless by a momentary daylight idiocy. 

     The sidewalk extends before you, running parallel to the street, which is unusually congested with commuters for this time of day. The traffic is so hindered by a gamut of road construction barriers, steamrollers, and excavators that you are progressing more quickly with your ambling gait than the vehicles. As you pass them, you allow yourself to inspect the people behind the steering wheels, along with any passengers accompanying them. Some people seem just as hollow as you, their eyes interrupted by the slanting lens of the windshield, unable to penetrate it with their tepid will to see. Others are enthralled by their phone screens, gaping with an inchoate rage at something so confusing and pacifying that they have evidently forgotten that they are. Then there are lone drivers with sour smirks on their faces, bouncing slightly in their seats and oscillating their gaze around at the interior surfaces of their vessel, discovering their own immediate lives in a sudden hermetic container, separated from anything that might identify them with 'the human race.' 

     As you survey this halt train of vital expenditure - this involuntary potlach of gasoline combustion - a thought occurs to you. You are impressed that it's yours.

     They're like a field of wheat.

     You are struck by such an intuitive double-image, unaccustomed to seeing things as something more than they are. It reminds you of those scenes in cartoons when, under the duress of famine, an animate, living character transforms into an oven-roasted ham. This latter thought reminds you that you hunger, and that a plain glazed donut from the gas station around the corner would make a fine afternoon snack.

     When you arrive at the pumping plaza, you find the environment to be uncharacteristically still. Almost all of the pumps are occupied by sedans and SUVs, but none of the owners are present. The only sound you hear is produced by a string of faded plastic pendants flapping in a current of hot air blowing from an exhaust fan in the roof of the gas station's main building. You head toward the bluish double doors of the 'Quik Mart,' stepping over a series of hatches leading to massive fuel tanks embedded below the pavement. Several of them are open, which is also an unexpected detail. 

     Inside, the store seems to have been abandoned. No one is behind the register. The only thing keeping this place from imploding upon its own obscurity and departing from existence is the buzz of the condensers beneath the refrigerated beverage shelves which line the far wall. You accept this scene, making little note of it and, lacking the energy to feel any misgivings, turn to leave. 

     Sometimes, there's just nothing there, you think. The thought gives you a vague admiration for yourself.

     But, just as you reach for the door handle, someone speaks at your back. 

     "Tares..."

     This voice fills the room. There is something reverberant about it, like a brass tube that has been struck with a mallet. It has gotten your attention enough to make you turn around. Standing in the gloomy door frame of the men's bathroom is a gleaming person, clothed in a spotless white robe. He holds a pair of golden, oar-like blades which you have never seen in your life; they are each roughly ten feet long, soiled with coagulated blood, and wrapped with nerves, ligaments, and clinging bands of pulverized human fat. 

     "...Huh?" you ask him, smiling for no identifiable reason.

     "Tares. An enemy planted them in the night. When the first buds sprang up in the midst of the precious wheat, it was too late to eliminate them. Their roots had mingled inextricably with those of the infant crop. We have waited a season, and have suffered the foul to thicken and mature amid the pure."

     "I've never heard of tares..." 

     "Few have. Fewer and fewer, these days. The sower planted them a long time ago. He's long gone, but his tares have abounded. Now the field is choked with them."

     "The field..." you murmur, smile brightening and eyes dilating, drifting in separate directions.

     "You're one of them," he says, showing his hundred teeth.