The Furrow King

A stone comes up out of the lower meadow, warm to the touch on a freezing morning, carved with an antlered thing whose mouth is a black rectangle. Leonard Probert, widowed and worn thin by three hard years on a mid-Wales hill farm, calls it rubbish and drags it to the barn. That night his seven-year-old daughter presses her palm flat against the carving and is burned. In the Cwnbrin Valley the soil remembers what it is owed, and it has begun to collect.