This is something I wrote for an assignment in Creative Writing a couple of weeks ago. We had to describe a barn from the point of view of a Father who had just lost his son. We could not mention death, the Father, or the son. Here's what I turned in.

The barn sat at the base of a hill on the southwest corner of the wheat field. It housed the hay for the horses and cows, as well as an owl that had taken up residence there some weeks ago. It was old. It had been there since before the farm was purchased and had been repaired and repainted. It was once the neighborhood clubhouse until Johnny Robinson from down the street sprained his ankle trying to jump from the 30-foot high roof onto a bail of hay. Since then the fame of this barn�s size had spread throughout the tri-county area. Indeed, from a distance it looked huge. Any man could appreciate the size of it, even the commercial farmers that lived across county that had farms stretching out for miles and miles. But today the barn was small. Surrounded by small bails of hay and small tractors and small farm animals and small oceans of grain. Not that it was physically smaller, or that it any part of it was missing. It had just become useless and pathetic. The once bright red walls that could be, and often were, admired from afar had now become an annoyance. Its metallic rooster weather vane could still rat out the wind, but did nothing to change it or stop it. The barn simply sat in defiance of time�s fury, the grains scratching against its base with a sound like that of a cackling witch. The old rusty doors shook and creaked in the wind, whistling as it made its way around the obstruction � the tumor. It was no wonder the owl that lived in the rafters of the barn spent its nights complaining about its lodgings. Nothing about this barn could be construed as pleasant or good or any other positive expression one might think of. Just a drafty, rusted cancerous growth on the face of the farm.