The FieldsEnd Crest

Recovered from a fence post at the edge of a field the wardens stopped working three hundred years ago. Flat-backed and heavy, built to hang and be seen from a distance. The rind has gone slack across the brow, sagging into the sockets the way old wax sags before it hardens, and the eyes behind it are cut deep enough to hold shadow at any hour. Below, the grin runs the full width of the piece — every tooth carved separate, ridged, and slightly uneven, the way real bone comes in. The stalk above is torn and twisting, split down its length where something wrenched the crest off the vine rather than cutting it free. The harvest wardens hung these where the rows stopped and the dead ground started, facing outward. A marker, and a warning, and a face for whatever was out there to look back at. They carved the grin last, so the story goes, and only ever at night. Every slump and striation in the rind was laid down one pass at a time, the machine's grain running with the melt instead of against it, so the weathering is printed rather than applied.