Sky Blue Jacket

The husband sat upon the open-top tractor ploughing the paddock. He shivered in the frigid air of a post-dawn July. The machine dragged and pushed the dirt into small gullies behind him. It was a mechanical, boring task that would normally induce sleep, but icicled shivers made a mockery of that. His teeth chattered and his dick shriveled back into its skin like a frightened Kurrajong tree grub.

To be warmer, he wore the new sky-blue jacket he bought yesterday at Rod’s Menswear for five quid. A sports coat woven from a mix of wool and cotton; it came sprinkled with thin strands of silver polyester that sparkled in the now rising sun. With the lulling chug of the motor the only sound for miles, the husband stared ahead, imagining himself dancing with his wife at the local hall, taking her hand, and twirling the floor with smooth grace. During slower songs, her hands would rest on his shoulders, stroking his new jacket and telling him how handsome he was.

But the wife had hated it.

‘I’ll still go dancing with you, but not if you wear that,’ she had said.

A little while later the tractor coughed a plume of black smoke before hacking up another. The husband cursed, turned off the engine and jumped down. He kicked an upturned sod of soil and bent down to see what was wrong with the engine. He could see oil oozing from somewhere and hoped that it was nothing more than a loose oil hose. With the cold air punching hard at his chest, he removed his sky-blue jacket and began wiping oil with its sleeve.