Whispers from the Cursed Well
On the fringe of the countryside where hedgerows curl like aging wrists, the well sits at the edge of a field as if listening for a confession. Its stone jaw is chipped and mossed, a throat carved from weather and rain, and the rope hangs there like a fading breath. In summer it wears ivy; in winter it wears frost—every season a mask for something older than the village.
When I returned to tend my family's land, the old well kept its secrets in the same low murmur it has carried for a hundred years. The village told me to walk away, to pretend the whispering never began, but the well's draw was stronger than the plow, and I found myself listening as I had when I was a child, standing with a cup of rainwater and a coil of rope that answered with a rasping sigh.
The night it spoke again, the bucket stirred without being touched. A cold breath rose from the water, and names drifted to the surface like pebbles skimming a pond. The whispers did not beg; they offered a mission, a tally of debts unpaid by the living to the dead. I heard the story of a drought-stricken harvest where a secret was buried beneath the barley, a truth that would not stay buried, no matter how many prayers the village muttered.
“We keep your secrets if you keep ours, and in the end the well remembers every breath you stole from the earth.”
So I stood at the edge and wrote the terms across a scrap of old burlap, a ritual to calm a hungry history:
- Speak the truth aloud at dusk, when the field lies quiet and the water remembers your voice.
- Return what you borrow from the land, for the soil keeps score in the dark as surely as the sun tracks its course.
- Do not name the drowned, or their hunger will find you in your sleep.
- Offer earth from the untouched corner of the field, a small sacrifice to remind the well that the living still owe the dead.
The morning after I performed the rite, the whispers softened to a tremor, then to silence—like rain stepping back from a roof. The well, so often a throat of rumors, became a slow, listening friend. I knew the debt remained, but it no longer demanded my fear; it demanded respect. And when the flock of swallows returned to skim the surface at daybreak, I understood that the countryside remains haunted not by specters alone, but by the stories we are too ashamed to tell—and by the patient, patient well that keeps them alive.