I love my ranch. I love the space and the seclusion. I love my animals and my crops. I love that no one bothers me way out here, and I love that I’m free to be myself. I can wear my favorite pair of overalls everyday – the ones that used to be my father’s – and that’s okay.
I start everyday feeding the animals, and tending to my gardens and crops. I use my acreage to grow lavender, which I sell off. It’s maddening how popular these stupid purple flowers are, but you won’t hear me complaining. I make a good living off of them.
My gardens, however, are for me. I’ve got a collection of raised gardens that have a different spread in each box. My largest has all my squashes. The smallest are my herbs. The others have mixes of fruits and vegetables. But my favorite is my berry patch.
I’ve got raspberry and blackberry bushes and an overflow of strawberry plants. I use my special fertilizer only in the berry patch, and it’s the perfect mixture to make the berries juicy and sweet. It’s one part compost, one part fresh steer manure, one part ash from my fireplace, and two parts human corpse.
The trick is to pulverize the body – a wood chipper is ideal, but a lawnmower will work in a pinch. The smaller the pieces, the better to mix in with the other ingredients. Sometimes I have to run it through the chipper three or more times to get the bone fragments small enough to mix well. And it’s really best if you just remove the teeth entirely. Those just don’t break down well, and never mix the way I need them too. The teeth I generally remove and just throw in the junk bucket in the shed.
I only use riff raff – bums and hitchhikers and drunks. People that no one will miss. They come so rarely into my neck of the plains that I take every opportunity presented to me. It’s only about one per quarter, sometimes not even that, but it’s enough for my fertilizer mix.
It’s also enough for Officer Ford. He showed up unexpectedly one afternoon, looking for a missing woman who was trying to get home for her father’s funeral. She never made it, and her mother raised a very potent stink. He had tracked her to my road, then couldn’t pick up the trail again.
He toured my fields and barns and sheds, even my house, but found nothing. He found me charming enough that he even missed the junk bucket as I batted my eyes and giggled a little. I was very careful, and I had procedures in place to keep myself invisible. Those procedures worked.
My downfall came when I offered him a small bag of berries for the road. They had been recently fertilized, and were at the peak of their flavor season. He happily accepted and off he went, none the wiser. Or so I thought.
He’s back now, with dogs and more men and handcuffs. Apparently my raspberries have a blood type of O-negative.
