Field 1

With great care, but without excessive ceremony, the boy turned his head to the side...

A boy stepped out of the flowers and tall grasses at the edge of the field and stood there. The tall grasses closed back up behind him, becoming, once again, an unbroken wall. The rest of the world was hidden from view. The boy, who was naked, had three injuries on his body: a scrape on his right knee, fresh and leaking red; a bruise on his solar plexus, brown and mottled, resting atop a thatch of old scratchmarks; a small circle on the side of his neck, near the jugular vein but not crossing over it, where the skin has been carefully cut away, creating a quarter-inch porthole into the nerve and muscle beneath. At the center of the field, on a square patch of burnt ground, was a doric pedestal, a few feet tall, atop which was embedded a length of twisted rebar. The sky was flat with clouds. A slight breeze disturbed the tall grasses.