Making his way down to the stadium he pulled a cigarette, nestled up against its neighbors, wantonly from the shelter of the pack. Bypassing the locked gates he climbed the dirt hill settled against the stadium wall and hopped the cement barrier. They had dropped four dozen or so truckloads of fresh earth in pyramid precision on the football turf, but this had been weeks ago. The stadium stood unused.
He eased himself onto a flat section of the crumbling cement and gazed past the far end of the stadium. There, past the trees, past the fields sewn with potatoes and barley, thick, slate colored mountains heaved up out of the valley, stabbing at the sky. It was August but a thin dusting of snow lay hidden in the fissures in the rocks. He took a drag and held it against the panorama. As his shoulders dropped he watched it be coated in a rising cloud of breath and disturbed air, the dust now mixing with smoke.
It was a sizable park that circled the stadium, wrapping around it like a horseshoe settled on its spike. He had paced it the week before, laying out potential golf holes, dreaming of a perfectly shaped shot cutting the gaps and running the pin. An altruistic farmer had seeded the ground with crops for the government, growing vegetables and animal feed on public land. The caretaker of the property told him it would be impossible to play here and why don't you go play over in the stadium there? Next time he'd come with a few discs and show her how far they could fly. But now he was just kicking at little clumps of dirt, nicking at the little knobs of yet eroded soil, pushing out a hundred micro landslides, watching the crumbs tumble and shake and quiver along ancient river beds carved into the hill below.
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