Their thin skin wrinkled and cracked as his fingers brushed over each patch. Their wine-dark cover was in fact black, diseased in comparison to that delightful sky-like hue they normally took on. The farmer surveyed his crop, imagining the dreadful wine it would make with its muddy, lumpy broth rising and falling inside a cup as if it was that sickening sea with its crashing waves moving evermore back and forth, up and down until he could no longer take it. There would be no harvest this season, not with so weak a crop. Each stem, each vine, was a handful of drachma he had buried in the earth and bet on, wasted. Now he was broke.
“Pater, when can I get the baskets out and start the harvest? You said we would start days ago.”
“Not today. Today we wait, and we eat. Go kill one of the goats
