The Barn - a writing challenge

November crows in the line of trees behind, nests overcrowded by the loss of one felled prematurely, crashing, crushing through the roof, rendering it beyond repair.    Monochrome, except black with red not white ... the red near brown the colour of dried ... no do not go there.   One end still standing, corner struts supporting despite the sagging centre where the shelter is no more, reduced to emptiness, no longer able to provide its once-essential role.  
Corrugated ridged and dotted tracer lines of blacker circled holes where nails had once held things together, now shown to have begun the breakdown, caused the sapping of inherent strength, allowed the red-edged crumbling to begin.   Aching jagged gaping where violent rust has torn away what once was bright and new, unmarked, was whole and made to last far longer than just nineteen years and twenty-seven days.
Thirty-seven weeks before those nineteen years and twenty-seven days a sweeter-smelling place  - new hay and striped inside with dust mote beams, shadow-interrupted by the nesting swallows, darker corners sought and found and stifled laughter, the future mirage-bright.


[This is my response to a challenge by Bill Latham and Six Sentences and is an exercise from The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, page 37. The challenge is: "Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war, or death. Do not mention the man who does the seeing." And, as always, only six sentence entries, please. The winner will receive the admiration of starving artists everywhere.]