It was green.
Any direction you took out of town you would find it.
You could buy a cup of coffee from the Talon. Then, holding the cup of coffee in one hand you could get into your truck. You could drive out of town while holding the hot cup of coffee in one hand. Your truck would travel over the road to Metropolis. The tires would bounce over the unpatched cracked roadway. Eventually you would pass by the last of the farmhouses and trees and there would be nothing but fields of plants.
The green would be visible then, thin and insubstantial.
Not the plants.
The boundary around the town.
You could park your truck ten feet from it and get out. The coffee would still be warm in your hand and you could have a drink. Up close it appeared as solid and unyielding as diamond. It was all green facets and distortion. Nothing could get through. Not a message. Not a radio signal. Not a supply of food.
You could go back towards town and soon the green would fade away. You would see the blue sky again and the clouds above. You would realize there was no escape. Not for you and not for anyone else in the town.
This was Smallville.
It had been this way for eight years.
You called yourself Chloe.
You drove a truck.
It was blue.
You wanted desperately one of the new Volkswagen beatles mentioned in a well thumbed car magazine that you had read through fourteen times. You didn't have what you wanted. You had what you had. A V-4 Ford truck that drove somewhat better then a brick but not much better.
It got you places.
You had a camera but film was getting low. You could trade for thirty-five millimeter film as much as you wanted but there was only a finite amount left in the town. There wasn't much need for that in Smallville. And after almost nine years your supply of film was getting low.
You dreaded thinking of the day you couldn't be able to develop any more film.
Because being a photographer was how you defined yourself. You had taken pride in being a photographer.
You could hold a camera and imagine yourself important.
You could call yourself a journalist.
There wasn't a news story worth mentioning in the town for the last almost nine years.
Your printer had stopped working years ago anyways.
Your day job was working in the fields along with the rest of the people. The combines and tractors had broken down long ago. Without being able to get the parts you needed to fix the complex machinery it had just stayed broken. Soon all the simple machinery would break.
They had started using horses to plow the fields two years ago.
They had considered using the football team to help pull the plows as well but that had only been the gossip of the women from the high school around the lunch table out in the fields.
They ate lunch, pulled the plows, planted the seed, and harvested it. You felt warmed by the sunlight.
There were still a few people left in town who knew how to run farms without specialized machinery.
The work wasn't as difficult as it could have been. Water still came from the sky, as did the sunlight. At night you could see the stars and you would wonder if anyone on them was looking up at them as you did. At night you realized that it had been several years since your hands were soft.
Your hands were hard now, hard and calloused. You didn't need softening lotion anymore. Your fingernails were short. Your face was hard and lined.
You didn't feel like a girl anymore.
You had been married to Clark for nine months. You had been pressured into marrying him by other people.
If it had been your decision you would have flirted with him while pursuing your real goal of being a journalist. You would have fallen in love with the right guy at the right time. You could have had your childhood crush be your best friend and you could have also had your boyfriend. It was like two guys in love with you at once except there would have been nothing wrong with it.
You would have said no to the marriage if you could have. You would have fled and somehow Clark would have found a way. You would have fled through the forest and found a crack in the jade barrier around the town. You would have found help in Metropolis and somehow you and STAR labs would have figured out a solution. You would have been a hero and had your name in the papers. Everything would have been alright.
But you could not flee and Clark had not found a way.
If you wanted to keep your job and food card and gasoline ration and the approval of your friends and any hope of a future other then a crazy old lady in a trailer you had to marry him.
And so you did.
It hadn't been your choice. Except he was your childhood crush.
At nights you would wake up in the bed you shared with him. Next to you he was sleeping nude and on his stomach. You would look at his masculine shoulders as they rose and fell as he slept. You would regret in those early morning hours your decisions that had led you there. You regretted the marriage and wish you could have taken it back. Clark was boring, life was mundane, and there was nothing exciting about it.
The crush had been exciting.
The reality was tedious.
The reality was that Clark wasn't romantic. Clark never had a fiery passion for you. Clark was never in the mood. When Clark was in the mood he would thrust a few times and then it would be over. Clark would never listen to you. Clark never showed any interest in kissing you beyond a few feeble attempts before foreplay.
Clark wasn't a romantic.
But then again you kept telling yourself that you weren't.
But you were.
Your first time had been in his parent's old bedroom. Martha and Jonathan had moved into a smaller place in town and had left the farm work to Clark. Nobody asked too many questions how Clark could work so many fields. All anyone ever cared about was growing enough food, crop rotation, and would they have enough rain.
You had been married that day. You had undressed in that bedroom feeling your feet cold and feeling your stomach nervous. You had been newlyweds for only a few hours and it still felt wrong. You had looked into a mirror that had belonged to his mother as you looked into your face. You wondered if this was the right thing. You wondered if this was your dream come true.
You wondered this as you brushed your hair and tried not to look too much at Clark as he undressed himself. You would look at him out of the corner of your eye. You would attempt foreplay and be frustrated. You would be frustrated by his mechanical movement of his hands from your cunt to your breasts as he kept checking to see if you were wet. You hated his lack of romance and of style.
When he laid you down on the comforter you tried to smile for him.
You felt the cold squares of his mother's comforter underneath your knees as you straddled him. You tried to look him in the eyes and kiss his lips as cock met cunt.
You two had mated. Without passion or eroticism. You could see the despair in his eyes over having no choice. You knew he could see the despair in your eyes too. You two would never like talking about that despair. The knowledge that your entire life was inside a bubble in a town you could never escape from. The adventure was over. You had not enjoyed sex your first time.
There had been physical discomfort and you had to grit your teeth while trying not to cry. You had hoped that sex would make him love you more.
It hadn't changed him.
It had only stained the sheets and made you bite your lower lip to keep from crying.
Not from the intimate ache but from the realization that you would have given him up for that career in Metropolis.
Later that evening you were careful to be quiet as you used a washcloth in the bathroom. Clark slept on his side in his bed. His nude shoulder was visible and he was like some Northern God. Somehow you had married a man with godlike powers and now you shared his bed. Your bed now too. His sperm was messy and wet, sticky. You had cleaned yourself and thrown the wash cloth into the dirty clothes hamper.
You had stood there shaky legged and tired and tired and sad. You had wished 'it' had been more. Now life with you and Clark could now be entirely expressed by the sad expression of that half-bent cum stained cloth down on top of other old towels and clothing in the dirty clothes hamper.
You had taken your camera and had taken a photo of it. You had hidden that negative away and had never shown it to anyone in your life.
You wanted romance. The romance of a high powered career covering interesting news stories. As long as you had the career the guy you ended up really didn't matter. So long as he was nice and trustworthy... like a dog... that was housebroken.. You would have been alright. A mystery man with dark hair and kind eyes that was less complex then you were. You wondered as you cooked food on the stove for your husband what it would have been like with this other man. This mystery man.
You gave him a name sometimes. Sometimes it would be Jimmy and sometimes it would be Oliver. The eyes would always be mysterious and at night you would turn away from your husband. You would pull up your legs and pull your arms close to yourself. You would rock yourself to sleep while imagining some other life then this.
Then this.
The photographs you took of the corn that grew.
The families looking at you with their sad eyes through the camera lens as you took their photos.
The unceasing work in the fields.
The ever decreasing supply of human warmth and of pop culture.
The town of Smallville had adapted from being cut off from the rest of the world. There had been a period of insanity but now things were stable. About a quarter of the people were drunk at any time and when they were sane they were even more trouble.
Sanity was fragile when you lived in insane conditions.
It was insane to believe that any of them could make it.
Someone had calculated in math class in high school when they still had the high school they remembered how long Smallville could survive. They had calculated how many generations they could have before they risked genetic recessives and other horrible side effects.
It had been quite awhile.
Longer then Chloe Sullivan-Kent wanted it to be.
In the morning while the pot of potatoes bubbled on the stove Chloe would sometimes look out into the fields through the kitchen window. You would wish for that Volkswagen beetle that had never came. You would wish for that mystery man and the career that had never came. Your husband Clark would come up behind you and hug you and ask you what was wrong.
You would always lie and he would always accept it. You would say everything was alright and you were just watching the crops grow in. Then you would talk about teaching home economics in the high school to the dwindling classes. You would talk about the cobwebs in the halls and the leak in the roof and how nobody seemed to care that the classes were all about crop rotation and cooking and child birth.
You would talk about all these things at the breakfast table and Clark would stare at you with his impassive eyes. Clark loved you like a friend. A steady, enduring love. One that would never falter or grow cold. One that was always nice and always asked permission. One that never was exciting, or dangerous. A love that never wanted you in ways that made you feel like a slut to ask out loud for for. One love that was always there, always protected you, always was there beside you, never noticed you the way you wanted to be noticed, a love that did not warm you, a love that never satisfied you.
Some things never changed.