A tractor and its plow are lifted far above the ground and deposited gently intact and operable upon the mansard roof of the grange hall. Within the blast's bowels a roan pony is impressed against the side of a washtub inside which a bantam rooster roils and riots until the pony bursts like the bag of blood it is, dying the day red. The crooked and ambiguous air, running scales on the metal tines of a springtoothed harrow, mimes a folksong sung by frightened children who are hidden in a storm cellar tunneled beneath the barley shoots. Alfalfa, bromegrass, bird's-foot trefoil, soy, timothy, and clover are pulled from broadcast and banded fields alike. Barbed wire and tumbleweeds dance flibbertigibbet like greased lightning now.
Spittlebug flies with wheatstalk, sweet clover, and hourglass fagots.
Leafhopper twirls like screwy zozzlestick in the sorghum. Aphids and guidoing crickets cling to the peeled ground in flight. Turn and turn about the tornado weaves across the rolling yards and dells northeast toward the sprawling clutter of a town where men and women and their children crouch against the oncoming whirlwind. Like a clotted dervish it marks a course toward the dust-paved streets of this town. The minimal contents of a trickling stream named after a forgotten settler are partly sucked and ascend in gyres around the central core of the glutted monster.