Hope Burned

You sit down at the weathered harvest table to write a letter to your son. You need to explain the horrific events of the night, the circumstances that stained your hands with so much blood — the horrors that led you to take the lives of your own father and grandfather. You journey back through darkness, deliberately, tentatively, to recover your own childhood. You compose your captivity, your torture, and the brutality of the men you’ve just killed. This was life on the farm: the strange and un