Jon made no effort to sit up in the top bunk of the bed this morning when he awoke. Instead, he allowed himself to stay comfortable in his mattress, staring into the familiar ceiling of his room he saw every day before and after he went to sleep. It was a constant cycle, one he had fulfilled for as long as he could remember. Now, he would use the ceiling to avoid the coming dread of what would be the rest of the day.

It would be his third time taking, or, well, failing the farmer’s test in a row, as far as Jon was concerned.

There weren’t many things Jon didn’t like. In fact, Jon was apathetic to most things in his life. He liked his mom’s cooking. He enjoyed riding in Farmer Dan’s wagon. And he enjoyed using his father’s blunderbuss to shoot targets whenever he had spare time.

Most other things seemed to take up this time without giving anything back, and so he avoided them.

Other than his mom. He loved his mom.

Jon didn’t hate his life. He hated thinking about what he could change, mostly because the answer always felt like it was nothing. But he could live peacefully forever if it wasn’t for the fact that he was a farmer. Or rather, the son of a farmer.

Jon hated that his best two job prospects were taking over the farm or becoming a seller in the town. He much preferred staying in the house and doing housework. Sweeping, mopping, cooking. Things that he understood.

His father, Jassiter Thurmond Armstrong, was a farmer on the land known as the Farmer’s Province or known simply as the Farm. Jassiter worked hard to get Jon into the family business, which his siblings had all done before him. They all proved themselves to be more than capable farmers before setting out onto their own jobs in far-away lands. And now, Jon, being the youngest, was expected to follow in their footsteps.

But Jon didn’t care for farming. He certainly didn’t hate it, but it seemed to hate him. He failed at measuring the distance between crops, remembering what crops grew in what seasons, and many other things that he didn’t seem capable of getting right. Due to this, he failed the farmer's test twice in a row and would need to take it again in order to fully be integrated into the farming community.

And despite knowing all of this, Jon stayed right in bed. He didn’t want to go to the test to fail once more. Even if there was a chance he would pass, Jon didn’t want to see the other farmers who taught at the school pity him as they officiated the test. He would be the oldest one there, as anyone he knew had passed the test or gone on to another field of study in a distant land. And thus was the decision to stay firmly in bed.

This was at least until there was a familiar knocking on his bedroom door.

“Hello? Honey?” His mother’s muffled voice called from outside the room.

“…Yeah…” Despite his continuing attempt to withdraw from society, Jon’s mother was always able to draw a response from him.

Velvet Armstrong opened the door very slightly.

“Not gonna get ready for breakfast?” she inquired through the crack in the door.

Jon’s eyes stayed transfixed into the ceiling of his room. He knew that if he had looked into his mother’s warm brown eyes he would have to melt and eventually acquiesce to his mother’s demands, but he wasn’t done with his sulking yet.

So, instead, he turned his body ever so slightly away from the door.

“I don’t think I can…” He answered.

“…Worried about the test today?”

Jon squirmed in his bed. His mother knew him too well. Even if he did his best to hide his worries, she would always be able to tell when something was wrong, and more often than not, she was quite good at being able to pinpoint what it was. Still, he stayed under his covers, hoping for her to go away.

Velvet “Strong" Armstrong, known as Vel to most others, was a somewhat plump yet fairly tall woman who had a keen intuition. She was smart enough to coerce just about any answer she wanted out of the two men in the house, and yet, she never seemed to force the answer. She seemed to know what was wrong all the time and made you feel guilty about hiding it until you finally gave up and told her.

She had never forced anything out of anybody.

Except maybe for that marble Jon almost swallowed when he was 3.

“…Yeah…” Jon spoke with apprehension, but he couldn’t bear to do anything else. Imagining his Mom standing outside of his door worrying about him was killing him on the inside.

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“I think you’ll do fine….As much as your father worries, you might actually do well this time. You’ll be well on your way towards graduating in no time.”

“Not really…” Jon knew what parts he would do well on the test. That was because he took it so many times he remembered the answers. It didn’t help that some of them changed every so often with the season or the new crops, but he would get by. He would also do well on the target practice with the school’s blunderbuss. Despite the kinks in the school’s weapons, Jon would get nearly a perfect score on that part.

If it were scored. The goal was simply to be able to hit the blank piece of wood that stood several feet in front of you. Jon could nearly hit the middle every time, hip fire or aiming down the barrel. But other than some words of encouragement, it wouldn’t have changed the rest of the test.

Farmers lived on what was endearingly known to them as “The Farm,” a collection of barns and fertile land meant for growing animals, and whatever sorts of crops they could create in abundance.

Many of the crops grown weren’t just for eating or clothing. There were also crops that were used for making all sorts of concoctions that Jon knew existed but never bothered with. His mother had a cabinet where she kept a little bit of almost every crop on the farm, but Jon was never interested enough to see what each of them did.

In fact, it only occurred to Jon that maybe if he had studied the cabinet, he might have been able to do well.

Oh right, Jon could just barely pass the written part.

Jon knew that there were other farms but there was no necessity to refer to his home as anything but, for him or the other farmers. Jassiter lived in a house that he built himself with help from a couple of farmers a long time before Jon was born, but Jon never asked him much about it, because Jon hated reminding himself how much like he wasn’t like the other farmers.

Farmers more often than not learned how to cultivate crops at school, since animal farming was more than easy enough to learn at home. In fact, there was much more of a need for crop farming than animal farming in general. The farmers-Jon withstanding-excelled at making an excess of material which was then sold to the surrounding counties, one of which included the Apartha Townsend. All of the money was then collected and spent on what Jon’s father referred to as “who-in-God’s-name-knew-what.”

The other things that happened were that you got married to take care of kids, you became a seller and helped ship and sell products, or you left to train at another land to learn a new skill and hopefully come back to provide for the rest of the farm.

Jon was interested in none of those. He wanted to stay home, but there was incredible pressure from his father to at least succeed in farming.

Jon could see it every time he saw his father’s face. There was a wrinkle of disappointment on his father’s eyebrows whenever he saw him walk by, at least if he wasn’t too occupied and exhausted by whatever farm business he had for him.

The thing is, Jon would do okay in the first part of the test, and he would do well on the blunderbuss, but he would fail when it came to the actual planting.

Every student would get a section of their own fertile land where they were given various roots and seeds to plant using a shovel.

When Jon didn’t forget the names of the crops, he would dig the wrong amount into the dirt, or he would spread the seeds too far or too close to each other.

He never knew why. The distances always appeared to be wrong. When he used the blunderbuss, he could hit the targets from far away with ease, and up close, he just had to pull the trigger.

Had Jon excelled at other prospects, he could have been sent away for school to study a trade pertinent to the growth and prosperity of the farm.

He didn’t.

His sister had once tried to get him into metalwork, and that ended with the kitchen table in flames. Jon learned there that maybe it wasn’t the best to try new things he didn’t understand.

Jon noticed that his mother hadn’t said anything for a while, and so he breathed a sigh of relief. He could continue to wallow in his indifference to the world.

“If you come down early enough…” Vel teased, “your father wouldn’t have eaten what’s left of the lavabread…”

Even as the door pulled shut Jon had already lifted himself up from his bed. He tossed his clothes on before running out the door and rushing down the single-story staircase. Tall, broad, and balding with scruffles of dark hair around his face, Jassiter was reading a letter while sitting down at the table. One handheld the paper to his face, while the other slowly crept to a basket with loaves of lavabread inside.

He looked over when he heard Jon stepping down the stairs.

“Jon, I know your test is today, and-“

Jon quickly grabbed the loaf from within his dad’s grasp and started chewing.

“Gosh, Jon, aren’t you going to prepare more before you head out today?” Jassiter was visibly annoyed at both Jon’s demeanor and his own lack of lavabread.

Jon looked at his dad but didn’t respond, instead of continuing to bite onto his bread.

“Are you even gonna finish that thing before you get to school?” Jassiter continued.

“Oh, leave him alone.” Vel patted Jassiter on the shoulder. "There’s enough bread for everyone… if Jon is going to stay for breakfast.”

Jon shook his head side to side, signaling his answer.

“...Are you sure, Jon?” Velvet frowned. “Don’t you want to go over any of the materials?”

Jon nodded, then shook his head again. He then went for the door.

Jassiter quickly stood up. “Jon!”

Jon stopped and turned to his father while swallowing the last of his lavabread, awaiting his comment.

"...Good luck…”

Jon knew why his father had struggled to say the words. His father believed in results. He believed that you got what you put into things, and that luck wasn’t really a thing to rely on.

Jon also figured that his mother had pressured his father into saying something good. So Jon dignified the comment in respect for his mom’s effort.

“…Yeah…”

With that, Jon walked out the door.