The hay bales weren’t inside before.
Who’d brought them?
The lock clicked. The Homestead barn door swung open. Milly froze. “Hello?”
She didn’t know either.
The hay bales sat more-or-less under the hole leading up to the barn loft, where stairs or a ladder might otherwise have been. Milly stacked bales like stairs, like an antique video game.
Alone in that loft, she found a ton of dusty old junk including a box of women’s beauty magazines.
Decades hadn’t changed their central pair of mercenary questions: “What Do Men Want?” and “What’s for Sale?”
Milly browsed glamorous photos of young ladies wooed by older men, surrounded by wealth, pages already earmarked.
She’d never seen anything like this: everything Father preached against.
One magazine article attempted to define beauty scientifically: symmetry of the face, measures of the female figure, and ideal proportions. A pull quote read:
— Il faut souffrir pour être belle.
That translates roughly as “Beauty is painful.”
The loft window, halfway broken, had a nice view westward, perfect for sunsets — or snipers.
After climbing down, Milly unstacked the hay bales so it wasn’t obvious she’d gone up. The cat watched. The pair shared a long stare. The cat blinked — slowly. Milly blinked back. Her rifle leaned upon the wall.
Milly pulled one haybale over a divot in the ground, making a little cave. She dropped a piece of turkey into the hole. That day was hot. She scrounged a wide bottle cap, blew off dust, set it down, and poured in water.
The hay bales were still there days later, and the week after that. So was the cat. Milly returned the hay bales to their original arrangement after each descent.
She hauled books up to the loft, making it her library. Milly laughed at her comic strips. She spent hours reading those magazines, too. She found a mirror, rusty and pockmarked. Milly held it to her face, teaching herself to match the models’ expressions. She marked her growing height in pencil on a wooden beam.
Milly got so skilled at hunting that she could fill her quota, read a while, and still be back at the Homestead in time for dinner and to finish her homework.