Farmer Zero’s Nothing Farm

By Joshua Dobson

Nothing came and Nothing went.

If one were to leave Butcher’s Gorge traveling southwest on Rural Route 6849, one would encounter a most bizarre spectacle roughly sixty some odd miles past the crossroads where 6849 intersects Dead Skunk Road. As the bumpy hill country smoothed to a nice flat plain and the curvy black road became straight and true, one would pass through a seemingly endless forest of gnarled, dead, black trees only to emerge in the perfect nihility of a serene lunar wasteland. All around, as far as the eye can see are beautiful grey fields full of some of the most beautiful Nothing ever seen outside Al Capone’s vault.

And if one were singled out by some mysterious force and either blessed or cursed, then, as one drove through this vast funereal moonscape one would see, trudging slowly through this desolate Sea of Fertility, a strange figure clad in a shiny tin-foil moon-suit.

No, NASA is not faking another moon landing, not here anyways. Nor is this the sight of a hushed up nuclear test/accident. Nor is this a top-secret dumping ground for vampire-ashes. Vampire ashes are quite moist; the swirling grey dust dancing idiotically on the howling vacuous wind all around appears to be dry as a bone.

In bloody point of fact, this desert of grey ash is Zero Farm and the mysterious figure in the moon-suit lumbering through the haze of grey dust is none other than the government inspector with the harelip

I do so wish dear reader that I could tell you exactly when one could steal an eyeful of this strange spectacle, but the visitations of the government inspector with the harelip seem to be stochastic. The only pattern old Abbadon Zero has thus far been able to discern in the government inspector’s visitations was that it was never more than twenty-eight days between visits. Other than occurring once per lunar month the government inspector’s visits were quite random, as was from whence he would manifest on Zero Farm. Sometimes he would crawl up out of the old crumbling well in front of the burnt out black barn. Sometimes he would slither out of a hole in the gnarled trunk of one of the dead black trees along the property line. Sometimes he burrowed up out the powdery, grey Nothing field earth like some kind of tunneling varmint. One time Postman Gipley delivered a huge black box wrapped with a shiny black bow, a box so big and heavy Postman Gipley had to use a rusty hand truck to move it, and when Farmer Zero made to open the big black box with a machete, the government inspector with the harelip and biohazard moon-suit jumped out. One time Farmer Zero’s flat-chested, albino daughter Jezzy-Lou baked a moonberry pie, after cooling it on the window sill for an appropriate length of time, she made to cut her daddy a slice with a machete, only to have the government inspector with the harelip burst out of the pie which was much, much too small to contain him. Several times he had crawled up out of the outhouse hole. Once while Farmer Zero was taking a shit, the government inspector with the harelip and the biohazard moon-suit crawled right up between Farmer Zero’s bare thighs, seemingly unfazed by the runny, green shit splattering across the glass faceplate of his hazmat suit.

The government inspector with the harelip drew a lot of water ‘round these parts, one adverse word in his report and no more government checks for Farmer Zero’s Nothing Farm.

The government inspector with the harelip was known by everyone in the county to be exceptionally thorough. The government inspector with the harelip would sometimes get down on his hands and knees and check an entire field for the tiniest little yellow-green sprouts of life. Every once in while he’d even break out a magnifying glass. He would take off the helmet of his hazmat suit and sniff the ashy grey dirt like a pig hunting a juicy rotten truffle. He never found anything on Zero Farm though.

It’s hard work growing Nothing. Nothing does not want to grow. Nothing wants to shrink. Nothing is anorexic. So is Jezzie-Lou ever since the pie incident.

People think Nothing Farmers got it easy, but Farmer Zero is up every day at the crack of dusk. Nothing grows better in the dark. The vast impersonal corporate Nothing Farms, with all the high-paid lobbyists and crooked inside connections, got government grants to build huge geodesic domes of opaque black glass that cover hundreds of acres so the Nothing can grow in perpetual darkness and vast silence. The Juan Corona migrant laborers who tend the vast corporate Nothing fields inside the black domes are all blind as cavefish. The pus that leaks from their milky eyes is lucky for medicine, or at least so sayeth the townspeople. The true purpose of “Daylight Savings Time” is to give the Nothing an extra hour of darkness so as to coax it into blooming. Blooming Nothing is so gorgeous that many folks who’ve caught a glimpse of it will blind themselves with lye so as to make blooming Nothing the last sight they ever see.

The craggy wrinkles carved deeply into Farmer Zero’s gaunt, leathery, Lance Henriksen face were full of grey dust and he picked dark grey boogers out of his nose endlessly. Moonrise would find him out in the fields amidst the swirling grey dust dancing idiotically on the vacuously howling wind, spraying the desolate grey fields with acid, scorching the earth with his daddy’s old flamethrower, salting the earth, then you have to put down poison on top of that cuz all the salt will attract deer from the ancient black hills.

Nobody was really sure of the rules about deer. You always heard that a guy down at the barbershop knew a guy whose cousin had stopped getting his government Nothing Farming check cuz there were so many deer in his Nothing fields all the time the government inspector with the harelip had re-zoned his Nothing Farm into a Deer Ranch.

You couldn’t ask the government inspector with the harelip and biohazard moon-suit what the rules about deer were neither, cuz when you first went to the government building to get your Nothing Farming license they made you read this huge book of senseless gibberish, a lot of which wasn’t even words, and then they made you sign forms with your blood, saying you understood the book of senseless gibberish and would follow its teachings to the letter, some of which weren’t even real letters.

People think Nothing Farmers got it easy, but if you ever laid eyes on Farmer Zero’s weekly deer-poison bill you wouldn’t be so quick to say that he don’t need every penny of those government checks just to stay afloat.

If this was about the money he’d quit right this unfucking instant, get hisself a sweet ass union job down at the crotchless panties factory, but this is about less than money, old Abbadon Zero does this for the pure unfucking love of Nothing.

Sure, Farmer Zero thought about giving up sometimes, but then he thought of all the children in the world with Nothing to eat. And he felt their weakness surging into him. If he gave up and let the thing-things reclaim Zero Farm, then those children might eat something and live to propagate and shit out more of their thing-thing kind and more and more and more, always more with thing-things. Because they cannot accept that they are the Nothing the Nothing is them and dissolve quietly into the perpetual darkness and vast silence, instead they try to fill the Nothing inside them with thing-things, like spawn squirting out of their filthy cloacae perpetually until the entire universe drowns in shit.

The Nothing inside is the only thing that allows one to float.

One of Farmer Zero’s teeth had a cavity that ached whenever he probed it with his tongue, an action he now found he could not stop himself from performing every few seconds. He was applying moonshine to the affected area when his reverie was suddenly shattered.

"Pa, pa, come quick, somthin's a happenin'," Farmer Zero's flat-chested, albino daughter Jezzie-Lou squawked as she burst through the rickety screen door on her rusty, creaking polio-leg-braces.

Goddamn Nothing Circles were back, only thing that could upset Jezzie-Lou this much.

The Nothing Circles were white spider webby filaments that invaded the Nothing during the day while Farmer Zero and his flat-chested albino daughter Jezzie-Lou slept. At first they were simple circles and geometric designs. Some kinda spider webs, Farmer Zero thought, so he dowsed the fields with thousands of gallons of Arach-RidTM. Not only did the Nothing Circles return, but the complexity of the designs increased. Farmer Zero decided the Nothing Circles were probably some kind of reverse growing fungus, whose fruiting body hides deep in the earth, and whose root-like haustorium crawled up through the surface. Farmer Zero rented a backhoe from his cousin the blind gravedigger and dug up the infected fields, but he could find no end to the silky white mystery filaments for no matter how deep he dug, they stretched even further down into deeper, ever blacker and more ancient earth. Farmer Zero figured maybe they were roots from clear down inside the hollow earth itself. Then one day the Nothing Circles just stopped appearing. But it seems they had returned.

Farmer Z slugged down a belt of moonshine from an old jelly jar.

Jezzie-Lou’s beehive hairdo, inundated with grey Nothing field dust looked like a powdered wig. Visibility was next to nil in the cloudy haze of Nothing field dirt swirling on the vacuously howling wind. Farmer Zero followed the glow of Jezzie-Lou’s white beehive bobbing through the night like a floating ghost, it and the occasional wink of leprous moonlight glinting on Jezzie-Lou’s polio-leg-braces through the swirling grey Nothing fields guided him.

The white noise roar of the vacuum pumps swallowed most sound. Father and daughter wandered seemingly aimlessly for quite some time. Farmer Zero probing the aching cavity in his tooth all the while. Jezzie-Lou was a pretty poor guide cuz she couldn’t see none too good. She had some sort of suppurating infection in her eyes from all the black-lights used to light the Nothing fields. Nobody displays an infection better than an albino, the pinks are pinker than pink, the pus is whiter than white. Jezzie-Lou was going blind from the black-light infection in her eyes. The pus dripping from Jezzie-Lou’s eyes is beautiful under the black-lights.

Jezzie-Lou is beautiful. Traveling salesmen were sniffing around more and more. Farmer Zero gets exhausted from running all them varmints off his property at gunpoint. Even so, Farmer Zero was glad he hadn’t drowned Jezzie-Lou in the old abandoned well like he had thought about doing when he first laid eyes on her disgusting ‘outtie’ bellybutton. The veterinarian had been able to surgically correct it after all.

Jezzie-Lou’s mama had been beautiful. She was a famous one-legged porny star named Long Jeanne Silver who had come to town to shake her tits and ass at the strip club in the strip mall down by the strip mine, as part of a featured dancer tour.

Anorexic moon tonight. When the Apollo program lunar modules shed spent rocket parts onto the surface of the moon, NASA documents reveal the moon rang as if hollow inside like a bell. The crash of Apollo 12 junk onto the lunar surface produced a ringing lasting four hours. The moon is empty inside.

Father and Daughter were nearing the black forest of dead gnarled trees on the northernmost edge of Zero Farm. The government had planted the whole dead forest, back when Farmer Zero was a boy, in one day. Fleets of eighteen wheelers towing refrigerated trailers full of twisted dead black trees with horrible distorted faces which could be seen to emerge from the rotten black bark if one stared at it too long. The dead trees were planted, in no discernible pattern, by wee people, about three feet tall, either dwarves or children, who wore pointy dunce cap type hats and fleshy grey rubber hazmat suits, gas masks with long, rubber hoses snaking from the mouth region down through the crotch and connecting to the asses of their biohazard suits. As the gnarled dead black trees rot, they release toxins into the sandy black soil assuring its barrenness.

Jezzie-Lou’s sclerotic shuffle had led her father to the northernmost field on the edge of the twisted forest of dead black trees with the horrible gnarled faces swirling in the rotten black bark if one stared too long.

There were some kind of thing-things, worse, countless times worse than any Nothing Circle filaments, sprouting in the northernmost field.

There was more salt in a given square inch of that grey Nothing field dirt than in a similar measure of water from the Dead Sea. Nothing should grow there. But there they were, twisted little yellow thing-things poking up through the fallow grey dirt, clogging the Nothing like hanging chad.

“Paw, I’m a scared,” Jezzie-Lou whined in terror.

“Don’t look at ‘em,” Farmer Zero counseled his weeping albino daughter.

The sight of them filthy thing-things made hot, acidic puke bubble up Farmer Zero’s throat.

“Go and get daddy his gasmask and his flit gun,” Farmer Zero sputtered, eager to send his flat-chested, albino daughter away lest she see him toss his donuts. “Go girl, ‘fore I take a switch to ya.”

Everything is empty inside, even the human face. The stink of the twisted little yellow thing-things fouling the pristine grey dust of his Nothing fields made Farmer Zero’s sinuses ache and fill with angry black snot.

Under the baleful glare of cold empty space, hunched over, spine like a question mark, hands on his thighs, Abaddon Zero puked himself to emptiness.

Then, in a lunatic rage he set upon the Nothing Scarecrow crucified upside down in the center of the infected field. Farmer Zero ripped the worthless Nothing Scarecrow to bits with his pitchfork and tossed the torn and tattered bits into the poisonous forest of dead black trees.

The stink of thing-things brought back memories, bad memories.

Zero Farm had not always been a Nothing Farm. It used to grow thing-things until one day when the boy who would grow up to be Farmer Zero, (when the appendectomy took his daddy back in ’88) was about ten years old. That was the first day the government inspector with the harelip had come to Zero Farm. He hadn’t had a biohazard moon-suit back then, he got that years later when he got promoted to district manager.

The government inspector with the harelip and raggedy SCUBA suit told Farmer Zero’s daddy, who was half Eskimo, about a government program that paid farmers to grow Nothing. Gave daddy a suitcase full of money. Under a new moon, Farmer Zero’s half-Eskimo daddy gave his son a rusty axe and put him to work exterminating the thing-things, which, back then, were called cows.

Farmer Zero’s half-Eskimo daddy was killed by his appendix. The appendix is an organ inside the human body which does Nothing, but when it malfunctions, which is to say when it does thing-things, it will kill you if it is not cut out in time.

When Farmer Zero’s half-Eskimo daddy had first started growing Nothing, the mud in the fields had been fecal-brown and full of rotting thing-things and destined to rot thing-things growing all through it, disgusting really. Years of growing Nothing had turned the soil nice and clean and grey as ash. Zero Farm so resembled the surface of the moon that one who spent any significant amount of time there would begin to feel as if gravity were decreasing to lunar levels.

The thinness of the air furthers the lunar illusion. The air should thicken as one descends from the hills, instead the air in these low lying plains is far thinner than even it is at the zenith of the black mountains.

Both poison and fire were insufficient to destroy the twisted yellow thing-things which had taken root in the grey dust of the northernmost field of Zero Farm.

The poison just made the thing-things grow bigger. And they seemed to enjoy the fire in a sex type way. Everything old Farmer Zero tried succeeded merely in eliciting little crackling noises from the damnable thing-things. He was pretty sure the twisted little yellow fucks were laughing at him.

Like to see those little bastards laugh at a couple sticks of dynamite.

Only when he checked the TNT cupboard in the burnt out black barn, Farmer Zero found that he was plumb outta dynamite. He climbed onto his tractor and set out to borrow a couple sticks of dynamite from his nearest neighbor, Farmer Purgatory of Limbo Farms.

The desolate landscape and the rattling vibrations of the sputtering tractor were making Farmer Zero’s privy member stiff.

Whenever his dick began to stiffen, Farmer Zero would find his brain wracked with extremely detailed and realistic visions of the amputation, by a team of midgets in grey-blue surgical scrubs and painted harlequin faces, of his left leg, just above the knee. When the visions began, his left leg would fall asleep and go numb. With the superfluous leg removed, he would finally feel complete, and he would ejaculate cataclysmically and collapse into himself like a dying star.

He’d tried to bribe the veterinarian with moonshine to lop the superfluous leg off, but the vet, even as big a souse as he is, had been to ascared of losin’ his license. Lately Farmer Zero had been ponderin’ on chopping off the extra leg with the rusty axe his daddy had given him and then eating it so the veterinarian couldn’t sew it back on. Speculating on what his own flesh might taste like made his wiener hard as steel.

His wiener shriveled up right quick when he saw the changes that had overtaken the poisonous black forest of rotting trees with horrible leering faces in the bark.

The changes began halfway through the expanse of rotting black forest betwixt Zero Farm and Limbo Farm. Thing-things everywhere, perched in the twisted, dead black trees, buzzing through the air, crawling across and bursting up through the fallow, sandy black soil.

The only things thing-things think about is sex. And shitting. There was stinking slime everywhere, a mixture of jism and feces.

What the hell is going on? Farmer Zero silently asked no one.

Perhaps I can shed some light on this mysterious matter dear reader. You see, the government inspector with the harelip has some competition, an inspector from a different branch of the government whose interests seem to be at odds with those of the department that the government inspector with the harelip serves. The new government inspector wears a red Hazmat suit made from the fleshiest of rubbers.

The government inspector with the red rubber biohazard suit plunges a thermometer into a pile of putrescent meat-mulch which was once either a family of four murdered in the night, or a station wagon full’s worth of dead naked mole rats.

The bureau of the government which employs the new inspector in the red rubber biohazard suit pays farmers, quite handsomely, to convert their Nothing Farms to Rotting Ranches. This bureau of the government has a special thirteen-point program for converting Nothing Farms into Rotting Ranches.

Corpse Ranching requires far less poison, acid, incendiary chemicals, and dynamite than Nothing Farming, but the labor is even more grueling. Every few weeks government trucks deliver to the Rotting Ranches loads of cargo and instructions for it’s arraignment that must be followed precisely if one does not want to garner an adverse word in the monthly report of the government inspector in the red rubber biohazard suit. For instance, one week the government trucks delivered loads of rusty junk cars, baskets full of dead babies, some still slightly warm to the touch, and instructions for their arraignment like: Place dead baby A on spot W (inside glove compartment) then close. And: Place dead baby I8 on spot Q19 (under spare tire). The Corpse Ranchers then had to photograph the rot hourly with digital cameras (National Endowment for the Arts stamped on the bottom) provided by the government inspector in the red rubber biohazard suit, who collected the pix during his monthly inspection tours. The pix were used in Thingist propaganda, pro-life pamphlets, and disgusting pornographic magazines which are distributed free of charge to all cops.

Farmer Purgatory is up at the crack of dawn, pinning plastic sandwich bags full of severed children’s fingers to a clothesline made of intestines, twisting huge dead snakes with man-sized bulges in their bellies into arcane patterns, and burying severed hooker heads in the rich brown soil of Limbo Farm so only their leering faces were left above the ground to rot and be feasted upon by maggots in the photos cops would one day jerk off to. The heaping mounds of dead pregnant women, bloating in the hot sun, have begun to bloom. The waste gases of the millions of invisible thing-things devouring the corpses have built up inside the cadavers to such an extent that many of the dead fetuses are being expelled from dead cunts melting in rot. Like a coffin-birth twenty-one gun salute.

Farmer Zero never made it to what used to be Limbo Farms. The thing-thing stink choked him. Had to turn back or he was gonna black out.

If this was the world he wanted no part of it.

Old Abbadon Zero stuck the hole in the end of the barrel of his scattergun into his mouth, opened his skull with a shotgun shell, and let the Nothing out.