A concise, vividly rendered fable, presented with the dead-pan absurdism of a Buster Keaton skit. An engineer, travelling by train across the parched landscape of an unfamiliar country, sees a man floating in the air under a hay bale, and a mountain-high stack of teetering, slowly shifting bales. No one else seems to find any of this remarkable, and at his destination the engineer discovers that the mine he’s been sent to repair has been flooded with the tears of its miners: “A thousand men are sitting or standing, alone or in groups, their silvery issue sluicing across the floor: a great self-syncopating orchestra of misery.” He swiftly restores the mine to good working order and organises shifts of weeping miners to irrigate the surrounding desert, but this triumph of pragmatism is swiftly undercut by Hayden’s sly surrealism. When he returns to the now-prosperous mining town some years later, where the “sound of discrete crying arrives with the odour of ripening fruit,” the engineer sees from the balcony of the new resort hotel the tower of shifting hay and, silhouetted against the moon, a solitary man held aloft by a bale. The rational world and the world of fantasy and dream logic are equally real, but one cannot define, or be contained by, the other.
First published in The Stinging Fly, Spring 2010. Collected in Darker with the Lights On, Little Island Press, 2017
A Personal Anthology 