The first face surfaced on a Wednesday morning, sepia with oncoming storm. Or at least, that was when he first noticed it, carrying his coffee with him into the yard, with a mind to check whether the tomatoes were finally starting to show.
He didn’t quite drop the coffee. His fingers slipped loose around the mug, and a few scalding drops ran down the side of his hand, but something in him was still trussed up tight enough to good sense to not spill coffee on the damn thing or scream.
The ground hadn’t been bald there just the evening before, had it? He’d been out checking the tomatoes, it was a twice-a-day thing lately, any day now, and the grass around the garden had been thin and struggling, yellow with drought, but it hadn’t been gone in patches as it was now. Ugly oval sores dappling the hard dirt of his yard, and in one of them, the largest of them, that face.
As if someone had sculpted it up gently from the earth. With closed eyes and smooth, narrow cheekbones, and a hushed purse of lips. Someone must have, but-
Well, there was no one who would do such a thing. He crouched down beside it in his robe for a better look, reached out, even, to touch it, but his hand hovered, smarter than he was, an inch from its still, grey cheek.
Or just more frightened, trembling faintly in the fingertips. Just think- it was a damned foolish thought, but just think, what if he touched it and its eyes opened?
What if it looked at him?
He pushed himself back up with a groan and shotgun crack of his knees. The face didn’t look, of course – no ears. He took care not to step on it on his way to the garden.
He bent to check empty vines as he had the evening before. What else could he do, really? He was still wearing his robe and slippers, carrying coffee, he’d still come out there for a reason, and the face, when he glanced over his shoulder, was still made of nothing more than dirt.
And his yard was bare in at least a half-dozen more patches. Small and flat, but a little moan still wanted to squirm through his lips at the sight of them. He shuffled back inside quickly, leaving the vines to curl in the sunlight and the face to whatever business it had.
There were two more when he went out again that evening. Both smaller, and near the first. The first was the same size it had been, but he wanted to say- no, he wouldn’t say, but he wanted to think it was a bit higher from the soil than it had been, more convex, as if whoever must have sculpted it had done so just a little higher now. Showing a little more of the head behind it.
Nothing on the vines. He could see them from the kitchen window if he squinted. Maybe that would be better. If he didn’t look down over the sill, he wouldn’t have to see the yard at all.
