PRISTINE

Pristine had always had great soil.

Fine black deep soil that you could dig your hands into and feel like you were milling flour.

It was famous in the region and people knew that crops grown there would always be lush.

As lush as crops could be and prize winners they were too.

Yep, the residents of Pristine were rightly proud of their fertile till and the thick veg jumping out of it.

It had always been so and so it was that summer of '84, the summer the reporter came. Satz.

Satz worked for the regional paper, City Light and she specialised in local interest stories for the metropoles who wanted to read about the provinces.

Technically Pristine was so far away from the city to be almost non-existent in the region but the reputation of its award-winning harvest had even reached the sweatshop of the urban hacks.

And so it landed on Satz's desk.

"What's this?" she said, looking up at her weary boss McGruder.

"Its a story. Its local. Its interesting. Its local interest. So its yours, so go report!" he reasoned dripping coffee down his considerable paunch.

"Pristine? Where the hell is Pristine?"

"Its on the edge of the county, about fifty miles away. They're sweeping up all the local horticultural prizes round there. Its quite the leguminous sensation if you like that sort of thing. And some of our readers do, so go report it Satz!" he ordered as he wandered back to his office.

"Pristine. Sounds perfectly tedious!" she mumbled reaching for a map.

There it was. On the edge of the sheet. Almost in the neighbouring region. A tiny speck in a sea of nothing. Despite being the local interest reporter Satz hated going out of the City and its suburbs. Pristine may as well have been in Greenland!

She went home and threw some stuff in a bag. Her camera, films, notepads, pens, pencils and tape recorder. Adding a few essential clothes and toilet things, she grabbed her typewriter and slammed the door shut.

"A couple of days Satz. Three at the most. That's all it'll take to get the story including travelling by car. You'll love it, you know you will. All that country air!" McGruder had chuckled as she left the office earlier that morning.

She planned to get there late afternoon and find a room for the night. She could grab some food somewhere and start asking a few questions. The next day she would try to meet the local dignitaries among the local growers. The cabbage patch kings. She laughed at her own joke and thought it might make a good headline and jotted it down.

The drive was as lifeless as she'd feared. No sooner had she left the confines of the beguiling urban sprawl her heart wilted as the endless quilts of maize and wheat stretched out before her. It all looked the same, one crop after another, the same mundane fields jostling each other for the title of most boring cereal in the world.

Now and then she passed a cyclist, a dog-walker, a priest tending a small chapel turning to wave at her and a dead fox splattered at the side of the road eyeing her with dead retinas as she flew by.

A light lit on her dash. She needed petrol.

"Damn and blast!"

Satz pulled into a local garage about ten miles from where she wanted to be.

"Shall I fill her up Miss?" asked the garage owner, a crooked withered old man, who looked as if he'd lived a hundred years in the same twenty square yards of oil and fumes. A swarm of plump flies hung around a large fetid bone thrown down for a decrepit mutt sleeping in the late afternoon sun. The flies billowed and turned like starlings as they harried the comatose dog and bone.

"Yes please."

"Where you heading?" he inquired shoving the nozzle deep in the hole.

"Pristine."

The old man stopped pumping and looked at her.

"Pristine. Now what would you want over there?" he asked restarting the counter.

"I'm a City Reporter. I've come to write about Pristine's supposedly amazing crops."

"City Reporter eh. My advice would be to report on the city and leave the fine residents of Pristine to talk about their crops with each other and not with a nice young lady like you! A funny bunch they are. Secretive. Always up at night. I see 'em with my binoculars in the moonlight clapping. Nope, I've never been to Pristine and I sure as dammit won't ever be going to that godforsaken hamlet."

Satz looked stunned but made a mental note of what he'd said. There were some great quotes in there.

The old attendant finished pumping and scratched his scabby head. He coughed and bent double, hawking up a huge gob of phlegm flecked with blood. It landed on the gravel between him and Satz like an spilt oyster. In its centre was a fat squirming fly on its back.

"Sorry Miss, I'm not so well at the mo. It's these damn flies I think. They get everywhere. Don't mind me and my opinions either. Don't mean to scare you. That'll be a straight twenty please."

Satz shivered and paid the old fella. Driving off she thought he couldn't have long for this world. Poor sod. He looked so terribly ill. And what did he mean about Pristine. Always up at night he'd said.

The last five miles were suddenly different. The landscape changed. It was lusher. Thicker. The crops were markedly taller and sturdier. There was an abundance in the fields that was staggering.

Satz had to stop the car to look.

She walked over to the edge of a maize crop by the road and held up a corn cob. It was as heavy as a baby; weighty, succulent looking and bulging with yellow corn. She just wanted to boil it and butter it and eat it there and then.

"My God," she exclaimed, "McGruder was right. Its a regular garden of Eden out here!"

As far as the eye could see were imposing ranks of fat yields, like corn, wheat and barley, the fruit bending with the weight of the heads like rows of soldiers stooped in prayer. Strange dark clouds flitted over them in the distance. Were they birds?

Beneath the crops' shoots was a fine black till of obvious quality, a perfect sable loam from which all this glory sprang.

Satz bent down and rubbed some in her fingers. It felt crumbly like cheese and had a unique earthy smell, full of vigour and zest. There was a hint also of something she just couldn't put a name to. A sweet but rank ferrous sub-song clung to it, this soil of champions.

She was unexpectedly intrigued by this story of miraculous plenty and drove into the township with all her journalist's senses tingling.

A small roadside sign in the shape of a tractor read 'Welcome to Pristine. Don't be a Stranger".

Cute she thought.

Satz drove round a bit and found a room at the Pristine Guest House. She was also unusually hungry. Starving in fact and set out to find somewhere to enjoy a first evening meal.

Strolling down the high street as the sun was setting she noticed just how deserted it was. There was nobody about, not a soul.

Now ravenous she noticed a sign for a restaurant down a shadowy side street. The sign read The Last Lick. An odd name Satz thought but as long as it was open she wasn't fussed.

It was and she sat at a table in the window. She was the only guest. She snatched the menu from its stand as pangs of hunger began to pound at her belly.

Last Lick Special: Harvest Soup, Succulent Pristine Vegetable Medley Bathed in our Local Red Sauce, Best Yield Pud, coffee.

"I'll take that!" Satz said to the old waitress pointing to the special, savouring the menu's promise that you'll eat till the last lick. By now she was groaning with a uncontrollable need for food.

When the waitress returned with a steaming tray of produce, Satz was sat gripping her knife and fork with her mouth wide open. She began eating before the tray was fully on the table and trying to get a drowning fly out of the bowl she accidentally flicked some soup onto the waitress's sleeve. Satz stared at her and without thinking licked it off, flay and all.

"Delicious! The soup! It's so delicious!" Satz explained with pale hot fluid dribbling from her mouth, the fly crawling down her tongue. The waitress just smiled. With her arms folded she simply watched Satz trough the meal like a country pig, mixing starter, main, sweet and coffee together in one huge sloppy binge.

"Its so goooood!" exclaimed Satz, her mouth stuffed with veg. "What on earth do you put in the soil to make such fantastic flavours?"

"Oh, this and that. Its mostly good ploughed earth full of manure, compost, chicken eggshells and one very special ingredient" replied the old waitress.

Satz ate, asked for seconds and the old crone brought out another tray and then carried on watching. She could have been a hundred years old judging by the wrinkles on her tanned skin. Perhaps more. She stood and had time to apply some thick red lipstick to her ancient lips whilst she waited.

Satz looked up.

"What's the special ingredient? For God's sake tell me!"

The waitress gave her a huge smile of perfectly white teeth and slowly replied.

"Strangers!"

She laughed loudly and outside the restaurant the residents of Pristine had gathered and were all laughing loudly too.

Satz stared in horror at the old hag and was violently sick and puked in a bucket held out by the waitress.

The old woman looked inside the bucket in admiration.

"Oh, excellent chunder. That'll do nicely on my turnip patch! Any more?"

A maggot crawled out of her nose.

Satz spewed the last of her guts up and staring at the howling waitress keeled over from her chair, overfed, engorged and gagging on delicious food that she'd never swallow now.

Lying on the floor her distended belly stuck out like a baby and she died choking on her Pristine meal, her eyes wide with terror.

The waitress licked her lips as the rest of the residents piled into the room.

"Well done! She's an excellent catch!" guffawed the Mayor of the town as she patted the waitresses's back.

"Right, we need to get the stranger in the ground by morning everyone. You know what to do!" she instructed.

Satz's body was lifted into the kitchen were she was butchered on a mortuary table into six main cuts: head, torso, arms and legs. The blood was collected in a huge steel jug by the Mayor singing while she dipped her finger in the red grue and tasted it eagerly.

"Puuuuuurfect!" she meowed, like a cat, to which the assembled company bayed with laughter.

The six crimson cuts were then shouldered by bearers who humped them, whistling merrily, to the mincers at the edge of the main field.

The mincers hefted the severed parts into six mincing machines attached to tractors spread out equally across the edge. The Mayor divided the blood between the six, pouring it into the wide maw of each machine.

"Start the tractors!" she shouted.

"Mince!"

On this command the machines began their grisly work slowly shredding Satz into a thick scarlet tartare, which was strewn across the black field as darkness buried the light completely. The rear harrows tilled the meat finely into the soil.

The gathered throng clapped vigorously and when the tractors returned they all went to the restaurant to celebrate.

By morning nothing was left of Satz except a tinge of wetness on the dark tilth. Flies swooped over the land in frenzied swarms and stooped to lay their eggs.

A single glob of Satz's blood, a clot, had hit the township's sign, but it would dry quickly in the morning sun as the township waited for another stray.

As per normal the sign greeted passers-by with its customary 'Welcome to Pristine. Don't be a Stranger.' An ambulance pulled up next to it. Inside was the old fuel attendant. Dead.

The driver found himself suddenly hungry. Starving in fact.

A single full bluebottle dropped on his sweating head and rubbed its legs together slowly. The Mayor's smiling face was reflected many times in its big split eyes.