Whispers from the Corn Rows
At dusk the cornfield wore its old clothes—the yellow stalks like weathered soldiers standing in a long, waiting line. The farm smelled of soil and resin, a scent that clung to your skin until you forgot who you were. Grandpa used to say the field remembers, that every seed plant carries a memory of some bargain broken under a summer sun. I never heard him wrong about weather, but the harvest carried another memory entirely, one that crept along the rows and found the corners of your breath when you least expected it.
I stepped beyond the fence, into the tallest rows, and the silences grew heavy. The corn seemed to lean toward me as though listening, listening with a patience that felt almost cruel enough to refuse me passage. A thin wind rose from the earth and whispered names I almost recognized, names that never belonged to the living. The whispers circled my ankles, forced me to slow, then to stop.
Then the shapes began—shadows that moved with the hum of a hive, stalks bending into arches like doorways. I caught glimpses of my own footprints, or what looked like them, leading in circles toward a hollow patch where the soil sank and the husks rustled with a voice too soft to trust. Something older than the season waited there, something that measured your fear and found it insufficient, something that promised an answer if you would stay and listen.
The corn is listening. The field will tell you what you owe, but only after you have learned to listen for what it owes you.
I found an old tin journal wedged beneath a withered cornstalk, its pages dry as soil, filled with handwriting that belonged to a grandmother who forbade the field from speaking aloud. The entries spoke of a pact sealed in silence, of a lineage tied to drought and a harvest that always asked for a price. As I read, the rows rearranged themselves in my periphery, a maze shifting into new corridors until the center no longer held the same truth I had come to seek.
- The air tastes of iron and rain that never comes
- The sound of footsteps that never match your own
- Shadows with the glint of eyes hidden in straw
- A memory you never dared to name blooming at the edge of your vision
I pressed the journal to my chest and stepped back toward the edge, toward the fence that would lead me away from the field's murmured debts. The whispers softened to a sigh, and for a moment I believed the dawn would erase what I had learned. But when the first light broke, the field inhaled again, and the name of the earth etched itself across my skin, a reminder that evil can do more than hide in the dark—it can grow within the grain.