Whispers from the Plains Farmhouse
The plains stretch wide and patient, a pale sea of grass that never forgets a footprint. At the edge where land tips toward muddy horizons stands a farmhouse with shutters like tired eyelids and a porch that sighs when the wind shifts. It has waited, you realize, for a century or two, listening for the softest creak of a visitor’s boot and the faintest tremor of a secret kept too long. The sign on the gate is weathered to silence, but the house itself keeps time in its own way, counting the hours in breaths and rustle of corn stalks.
I came chasing a rumor, not a memory, a rumor that the house keeps stories in its bones and offers to trade them for quiet. The locals spoke in clipped phrases, always glancing toward the pale sky as if the clouds might spill the truth if stared at hard enough. I opened the door and the air inside tasted of rain and old map pages, of ink that refuses to dry and wood that remembers every knot it ever wore. The floorboards pressed under my weight the moment I crossed the threshold, and the room beyond did not welcome me so much as invite me to listen.
The wind in the hollow corners murmured a name I refused to hear, and the house answered with a long, patient whisper: "Stay, and we will tell you who you are meant to become."
In the heart of the house, the air grew thick with the scent of earth after rain and something sharper—something that sounded like a key turning in a lock that never existed. The windows fogged with a breath that was not mine, and a clock with no pendulum ticked backward, counting down to a moment I did not want to meet. The corners held their breath, waiting for the moment I surrendered to the silence that remembered me first.
- A ledger on the kitchen table where each page holds a name that does not belong to the living, yet feels intimately familiar.
- A radio in the pantry that mutters numbers with a voice that sounds like wind through a hollow reed.
- A mirror in the stairwell that reflects not the present, but the memories I never allowed myself to keep.
- A door in the cellar that hums with the promise of a storm I never saw coming, guarded by a lock that only the house can open.
When I reached the attic, the light died away and left me with a map drawn in charcoal across the ceiling: routes to places I had never visited in waking life, all converging on a single, unnamed field in the distance. The field is not real, I realize now, but a memory the land keeps for its own harvest. The whispers grew denser, circling my name until I could taste the old metal of hinges on my tongue. I stepped back, and the house—heartbeat patient, walls listening—invited me to stay and listen longer. Outside, the plains exhale and wait for night to settle in, as if the world itself were learning to listen for the same whispers that once drew a traveler inside and reaped a new memory from him.