The air was cold as it blew in through the open window, the scent sweet. The fragrance was the first thing that felt out of place on that late September night.
With her palms pressed hard against the wooden sill, Margaret stared out into the cornfield. The only light came from the soft, hazy glow of the moon, alighting only the tops of the corn leaves and the swells of the uneven road. Whatever figures stalked through the night, chattering in familiar voices, were lost in the sea of murky darkness that was spilled over the farmland.
Margaret’s eyes shifted over to her bedroom door. In the silence, the snores of her Ma and Pa were easily distinguished. Lips pursed, she looked back out the window.
Pa’s voice called out from deep in the field.
She squinted, studying the sway of the corn leaves, watching for inordinate silhouettes.
“Benjamin-n-n…” her father hollered. “Ben, Be-en, Ben-n-njamin.”
This troubled her. Why was he calling for her brother in the middle of the night? She rolled up onto her toes, leaning out the window, still squinting to see if she could fix her gaze on her father. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly where he was calling from.
The crunch of dry grass underfoot snapped her attention away from the field. Directly below her window something large shambled into view.
At first, the figure was indistinct from the rest of the shaded pools, but as the sounds neared, the body they belonged to took shape.
“Uncle… John…?” Margaret whispered. She hadn’t seen him in months. That he would show this late at night, in such a strange fashion had her mind reeling.
A loud thud cracked through the farm, emanating from the center of the corn field. Pa’s voice cut out abruptly.
Margaret’s body lurched forward, her nails digging into the wood of the sill. The pounding continued, savage and violent, crashing through the leaves of the corn. Terrified, the child shot a glance down at the man standing under her window, but he’d already started walking back towards the corn field, leaving behind nothing but the crunch and crack of the dead grass. Pushing herself from the window, she sprinted down the stairs to the back door, hastily putting her hands out to push open the screen.
Wait.
Her breath caught in her throat as she listened to the snores upstairs, coming from her parents’ room. There was a distinct pair of them, one for Ma and one for Pa. If that were true, who was outside calling for Benjamin? She pressed her forehead to the screen and squinted her eyes at the field out passed the old truck.
A figure stood by the mouth of the furrows. It was Uncle John. He lifted a hand, pumping his fingers in and out, motioning for Margaret to go to him.
What? A sick feeling roiled in her stomach. She bit her lip and tapped her heel against the floor as she churned over ideas like right and wrong, frozen to her spot on the cheap kitchen tile. With a sick swallow, she pushed open the screen door. A shrill cry twisted out from the hinges. She jumped but knew her curiosity wouldn’t be quelled if she stopped there.
The sweet scent in the air grew stronger, nearly nauseating as it swept in from outside.
“Uncle John?” She called, taking a step out onto the porch, the wood rough against her bare feet. The door slammed back into the frame behind her.
There was no one standing by the field anymore. Had he gone in? Her heart starting to pound. The feeling in her stomach spread to her chest. It felt like her insides had been became choppy like water, swelling, bursting, and dipping low to her hips.
“Uncle John?” She took another step. The air that blew against her face was warm for a moment but quickly turned cold. There was no response, just a slight shuffle in the corn. Her father’s voice had faded entirely, without even an echo to remember it by. Even the loud thumps had stopped. In the quiet, Margaret’s pulse pounded between her ears like thunder. A breath caught in her chest. She curled and uncurled her toes, scanning the corn stalks.
The screen door shot open with a bang.
Before Margaret could so much as gasp, arms wrapped around her shoulders, pulling her back into the house.
“What are you doing?” Benjamin’s voice growled into her ear, a harsh whisper. He turned her around by her shoulders so he could look her in the eye. Brows locked at the bridge of his nose, he waited for an answer.
“I saw Uncle John,” Margaret answered, throwing a look back towards the screen door.
“Mags.” Benjamin softened his grip a little, but his voice remained stern. “Uncle John hasn’t been around since last Spring, you-”
“I also heard Pa calling your name.”
Benjamin’s mouth twitched, his fingers trembling slightly. A silence, thick like cotton, stretched between them. He balled his hands into fists.
“You heard that, too?”’
Margaret nodded. She chewed on her lower lip, her stomach doing a somersault. The blackness that spread like ink beyond the screen door now felt nightmarish. Swallowing down the lump in her throat, she stared at the screen door with her brother, a little glad he’d pulled her back inside.
The two stood there for a while, waiting for anything out of the ordinary, but not a noise was out of place. The wind whistled through the corn leaves, the old heater bumped on and off, but somehow things felt quiet again.
As Margaret shuffled back to bed, part of her wondered if it had even happened at all.
***
Exhaustion brought a weak tingle to Margaret’s limbs as she dragged herself downstairs for breakfast. The dryness set-on by sleeplessness spread across not only her cheeks and chin, but over her eyes and through her mouth. She’d washed up well, but the taste on her tongue was still stale and disgusting.
At the foot of the stairs, she picked out her older brother’s outline as he heaped food onto a plate at the kitchen table. When he looked up, their eyes met. Both siblings paled.
With lips pursed, Benjamin gave a solemn shake of his head, as if to say: not a word about last night.
Ma called from the kitchen.
Margaret flinched.
Breakfast was a swirl of swallowing down the bitter taste in her mouth, monitoring the shaking of her hands, and studying every flick of a fork and twist of a vowel as Pa explained the harvest plan. Every line in his face was meant to serve as reassurance that he was Pa, that whoever was calling out in the field was an illusion, but paranoia was beginning to dig into her veins like roots.
Margaret picked at the eggs on her plate, but it was a challenge to swallow any of her food down. There was that scent to the air, almost nauseatingly sweet. It was enough to chase away her appetite.
When the boys chased out to the field, Margaret bided her time by clearing the table for her mother. She kept just enough space between herself and her family members that when she sneaked away to her uncle’s old trailer, no one thought anything of her absence.
***
Margaret stomped through the high grass that had taken root around Uncle John’s old trailer on the far-end of the property. It sat a mile or two from the main house, but little legs were made for chasing through the fields, or so Pa would say.
“Uncle John?” She called. The brush scraped at her ankles, the seeds catching in her socks. As she neared the old hobble, uneasiness took hold of her gut.
Even from the outside, the trailer looked abandoned. Tattered and missing pieces of the siding, it was beginning to wear its age and lack of care like a natty shroud.
She rounded the corner, gingerly peering at the door whilst wringing her hands.
“Uncle John?” She called out again, a mite quieter this time.
No response came.
The weeds, blanched and dehydrated from the heatwave August had brought, were now bending and cracking as September reigned. Stocks and leaves broke easily under Margaret’s feet as she walked to the front door.
Sour taste in her mouth, she stood in front of the entrance to the old trailer. She stared at the cracks in the lacquer, a grand trail of spider-webbed nicks bursting from underneath the seal of the window. Her inner voice spared a thought to the threat of splinters, but it was quickly waved away. A fear of splinters was nothing compared to the anxiety welling up in the pit of her stomach over what Uncle John might say or do if she walked in, unannounced.
Still. She had to know.
That voice from the field had sounded identical to Pa’s. If the man under her window really were Uncle John, then what of that voice? Moreover, what of the snores she knew beyond a doubt belonged to her father? No one could exist in two places at once.
If she couldn’t make sense of it, she feared she may never sleep again.
With a deep breath puffing out her chest in feigned bravery, she lifted her hand to the water-stained handle and jerked it down. The latch released, and the door opened with no effort on Margaret’s part. The grinding of the dusty hinges let out a squeal that made her shudder.
“Hello…?” Her voice was small, the silence that followed was vast. She climbed the two steps to the doorway, each one shifting under her weight. Hand gripping at the door frame, she pulled herself into the trailer. The sight of it left her stunned.
Empty. Not only that, but it was left in a shambled mess, like her Uncle had rushed to abandon the place. A thick film of dust coated the counters and stove top. Underfoot, the bodies of dead flies and wasps crunched like Autumn leaves. Margaret looked down on the carnage in disgust but walked further into the trailer. There was a familiar scent, growing stronger the closer she came to the kitchen cabinets.
It’s sweet…
Passing by the bed, her heart began to beat to a faster tempo.
The sheets had been pulled off, crumpled into a ball, and left there on the floor. They were stained and discolored. The mattress they’d clothed wasn’t in much better shape: a dented lump of a rectangle, with notable springs jutting out and god-knows how many stains.
Margaret didn’t even want to think about where those had come from. She scrunched her nose and turned away. With each step she neared closer to the kitchen.
There were dishes still piled in the sink, dirty and now dusted over. The flies that had surely been buzzing around them were now dead in the basins, shriveled husks of exoskeletons and crumpled wings. Next to the sink, a hand towel still hung from its bar, dusty, but it wasn’t stained like the sheets.
Walking across the chipping tile, Margaret swiped her finger across the counter-top, lifting away a thick layer of grime. She wiped it off on her pants. Her eyes locked back onto the cabinets next to the fridge. With a couple steps, she stood directly in front of them, her toes pointing at what she sought. The odor was thicker there. She lifted her hand to the cabinet door. The moment the pads of her fingers rested against the cabinet her ears caught a sound coming from inside it.
A scrape, a scuffle, and a chorus of clicks, like tiny fingernails tapping and scratching away at the interior.
She withdrew her hand from the cabinet quickly, taking a few steps backward. The numbness in the silence somehow felt amplified when coupled with such a distinct noise. Her eyes traced the corpses of pests on the floor once more. What could have lived in this death trap? A scowl twisted across her lips as she realized what the noise must be. Hastily, she tromped out of the trailer, slamming the door behind her, and sprinted back home across the fields.
Rats, her thoughts spat. Disgusting rats.
***
Margaret retreated to the barn directly after sprinting back from Uncle John’s place. The scowl on her face revealed how disgusted she was, and she didn’t want anyone to ask her where she’d been.
She pulled a strand of barley grass from a clump of dirt before sauntering in, the aroma of warm wood engulfing her. Still, a heavy sigh was stuck somewhere between her shoulder blades. Rats scurrying around in the cupboards was enough to make her skin crawl.
The tabby cat who lived in the barn had given birth a few weeks back to a relatively average litter of kittens.
Sitting against a beam in the far corner, she dangled the barley grass over a particularly well-fed kitten, breathing a little easier as she watched it bat the grains with its little orange paws.
“You’d get rid of those nasty rats if you could, wouldn’t ya?” She scooped the kitten up into her lap, scratching under its chin as it kneaded at her thighs.
“Ah, you’ll spoil ‘im, you know?” A voice chimed.
Margaret’s head jerked up. She hadn’t heard anyone come in.
Jaime, one of the boys from the farm down the road, pushed a wheelbarrow full of burlap sacks for a few steps before dropping the legs down. He walked over to where she sat, his boots thumping with every step. “Keep lovin’ ‘em like that, they’ll be as good as house cats.”
Margaret frowned at him. “What’s wrong with house cats?”
Jaime knelt down and gave the kitten a gentle poke. “I mean, that one’s already put on a few pounds, ain’t he?”
She glared at him.
He puffed his cheeks full of air. “Give ‘im a few weeks and he’ll be running around with his tummy draggin’ on the floor.”
Margaret huffed, lowering her attention back to the fluffy bundle in her lap. “Don’t listen to him,” she whispered, poking his tummy as he playfully attacked her hand. “Cats are better with they’re fat.”
Jaime sputtered a rough laugh, ruffling Margaret’s hair before standing back up. “Augh, I must be getting old,” he muttered. “Can’t stay down there for long anymore.”
Margaret plopped the kitten on the floor next to her before springing to her feet. “What do you mean?”
“Ah, my knees.” He swiped at them. “Didn’t ya hear ‘em when I stood up? Those are old man’s knees.”
“You’re not even thirty yet.”
“We get older faster out here” he joked, heading back over to the wheelbarrow. “Just look at your old man.”
Margaret snickered. “So, where are ya takin’ those?” She pointed at the lumpy burlap sacks.
“Ah, you haven’t heard?”
She looked up at him with a quizzical glance. “Heard what?”
“All the cursin’ and swearin’… It’s quite the bloodbath out there. Your Pa is losing it over this corn.” He shook his head, wiping his brow.
The sounds from the early morning haunts echoed through Margaret’s head like gunshots. Could it have been…? She clasped her hands together, rubbing the pad of her thumb across her knuckles.
“What’s wrong with it?” She asked, her voice low and cautious.
“Well, it ain’t pretty.” Jaime opened one of the burlap sacks and fished out an ear. His fingers traced the tips of the leaves before he paused. “You sure you wanna see this?”
Margaret pursed her lips and nodded.
“Alright…” He peeled back at the leaves, slowly. The sheath protested as it was pulled away from the corn.
Margaret swallowed as the yellow kernels began to show through.
“Here we go…” Jaime breathed. With a jerk, he tore the leaf off.
She re-fixed her gaze on the corn. The yellow, perfectly formed corn. Her eyebrows knit together. “What’s wrong with-”
Two large, hot hands latched onto her ribs from behind, lifting her into the air.
“RAW!!”
Margaret yelped, instinctively reaching for Jaime.
Jaime, on the other hand, busted up laughing almost immediately.
Looking over her shoulder, Margaret caught a glimpse of Pa. He put her back on her feet and she hastily swatted a hand at him.
Pa laughed and poked at her ribs. “Did I getcha, Mags?”
“Not even a little,” she lied.
“What’re ya doin’ in here, anyway?” He looked around the barn until he spotted the fat cat and its barley grass. “Ah, taming the beasts, are ya?”
“He ain’t a beast anymore,” Jaime scoffed.
Margaret scowled at the pair of them.
Jaime ruffled her hair with a laugh before tossing the corn back into the bag and picking up the handles of the wheelbarrow.
She stuck her tongue out at him as he left.
“Here,” Pa threw her a pair of gloves, “come help out with the corn or a while.”
Margaret looked over at the kittens with a sigh before slipping the gloves on and following her father out.
***
The gloves, meant for a man, were too for big Margaret’s small hands. Made of thick leather, she was already starting to feel sweat between her fingers from the heat. She lifted a glance to Pa who stood on the opposite side of the furrow they were picking.
He lifted his cap and wiped his brow. There was a wet spot between his shoulder-blades where he’d sweat through his shirt. The sun was getting hotter with each passing second.
A few furrows away, Margaret could hear Benjamin and Jaime fooling around, howling and laughing like hyenas while they picked their row clean. She frowned. The silence between her and Pa flooded through the stalks like an ocean.
Her father was a warm, but serious man, that was no different from usual. It wasn’t his demeanor that had changed, rather, what changed was Margaret’s interpretation of what she observed.
She continued to strip the corn and shove ears into the sack, biting back the questions on the tip of her tongue. The sound of the wind scraping through the long leaves was unnerving. She took a few steps to the next stalk.
Between the leaves, her eyes caught onto something: several corn stalks that were knocked over, broken like something large had tromped through the field.
The sour taste from earlier that morning returned to her mouth.
“Hey, Papa,” she asked, softly.
“Yes?” Pa replied, not taking his eyes from the plant he was stripping.
“Do you think Uncle John will ever come back?” She parted a few leaves and stared down the trail.
Had she been looking at Pa, Margaret would have caught the way his lips twitched, and the way his brows arched, high over his eyes.
“We’ve had this conversation, haven’t we?” He blew air from his nose, blinking away the weight of the discussion.
“He’s just a few cities away, it’s not that far,” Margaret protested, releasing the stalks to look at him.
“Uncle John is in a very special place, Mags,” he continued, coldly. “It’s the kind of place people don’t leave very often.”
“Why won’t anyone tell me what’s wrong with him?” She scrunched her hands up inside the gloves. “I understand more than you think I do.”
“It isn’t about understanding…” The way his jaw clenched over the word understanding made Margaret’s heart stop for a moment.
“Okay…” She surrendered. The two of them pulled ears in silence for a few moments. Margaret, who was hunched over to avoid her father’s gaze, swallowed before she spoke. “So, he probably won’t live in that trailer again, huh?”
“Nope,” Pa sighed. “It’ll probably never have anyone livin’ in it ever again.”
“Is it… dangerous?” She was careful as she meandered over her words.
“Well… I dunno about dangerous. ‘Spose it wouldn’t be in the cleanest shape, though-”
“PA!” Ben exclaimed from a few rows over.
Margaret shot up, her back stiffening.
“Yeah, Ben?” Pa called back, his eyes searching the corn.
“Can you come over here for a second?”
“On my way, son.” Pa twisted the top of his burlap sack closed. He turned to Margaret. “Just keep doin’ what yer doin’, alright?”
She nodded her head, nervously.
Pa gave her a quick nod and a gestured stay put before traipsing back into the corn to meet up with his son.
The sound Pa shuffling through the leaves slowly abated, leaving Margaret with the white noise of pulling and picking.
She strained to make out the words of the distant mumbling between Pa and Ben as she continued moving down the row, shoving ears into her burlap sack until it was too heavy for her to lift. She then took to walking to the stalk she was on, filling her arms with ears of corn, and walking back to drop them into the sack. After twenty or so runs, she sat down next to her personal harvest.
Pa’s looked scrawny in comparison.
The mumbling could no longer be heard.
She lifted a hand to the sky and looked up into the blue. Had the sun moved position? She stared into the field, vacantly, and pulled her feet in to sit cross-legged. Teeth catching her lower lip, she chewed until it felt sore. What time was it? How long had it been since Pa went to find Benjamin? Margaret stood up, pulling strands of her sweat-damp hair behind her ears.
Maybe I should go look for them.
She threw a glance at the break in stalks where her father had crossed through the rows, but the fact that she couldn’t hear their voices anymore had her continuing further down. She couldn’t pin-point how many rows over Benjamin was, and didn’t want to go galumphing through the fields just to end up too far down.
If I just make it to the scarecrows, I’ll get to the little road where the rows meet. She picked her pace up a little, feeling relieved when she saw the shadow of a scarecrow a few feet away. As she neared it, however, uneasiness filled her from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes.
There, in the brief clearing, stood one large scarecrow, tightly tied to its stake. Next to it, however, was just an empty stake where one had previously hung.
The wind picked up, blowing into the young girl’s face.
Smells… sweet? Her stomach dropped. The button eyes of the plump straw man stared down at her. She caught a glimpse of the little dirt road but couldn’t take her eyes off the watchful gaze of the scarecrow.
While hurrying across the clearing, Margaret caught the toe of her shoe in a hole and tumbled down with a loud yelp. With a groan, she pushed herself back up to her knees and stood up. As her hands were swiping the dust from her shirt, the skin between the index and middle fingers of her left hand was pricked by something.
“Huh…?”
A severed bird beak was caught on her clothes.
Panicked, she swatted at it until it fell back to the ground. Her eyes traced over the terrain surrounding the scarecrows. She’d been so transfixed on the eyes of the large one that she hadn’t spared a look to the ground around her. It was covered with bloody black feathers and chips of bird bone. The beak that had been stuck to her, likely belonged to one of the birds that had been crushed.
Her mind recounted the noises she’d heard that night. The thudding and thumping, could it have come from this massacre she was seeing? Stunned, she took a few steps back into the corn.
“Mags!” Pa’s voice reached for her, but she didn’t respond. “Margaret! You alright? I heard ya scream!”
She was still staring when Pa came into the clearing. Only when she heard him mutter a soft what in the hell, did she snap her attention towards him. Her index finger pointed shakily. “What did that?”
Pa knelt down and examined the carnage. “Looks like someone got to ‘em with a big rock, or somethin’.” He scratched at the back of his neck. “Can’t imagine who, though.”
Benjamin stepped into the clearing, but quickly lifted his hands and backed up. “What the fuck happened here?”
“Don’t let your Ma hear you usin’ language like that.”
“Ah, sorry.” He tiptoed to his father, careful to avoid the bits of bone and feather. Kneeling, he cocked his head to the side to make out what was being looking at.
“Take your sister back to the house, Ben,” Pa said, coldly.
“What about-”
“Just do it.” He waved them off.
With a huff, Ben stood back up and did as he was told.
Margaret followed behind him, quietly. He probably wanted to stay with Pa, she thought. I wonder if he’s mad…
“Did you do it?” Her brother asked.
Margaret scrunched her face up in response. “Do what?”
Ben cleared his throat. “Kill the birds… You didn’t right?”
“Huh?” She hunched her shoulders up, her eyebrows knit together in an incredulous scowl. “Of course not.”
He heaved a sigh. “… Okay.”
The two continued to walk in silence. It was getting uncomfortable before Ben finally spoke again.
“Do you think, maybe, it was…”
Margaret could see his Adam’s apple bob as he gulped. She stared at the ground with a sigh. He didn’t have to finish his thought; she already knew what was on his mind. She balled her hands into fists.
“I mean… it couldn’t have really been Pa,” he continued, cheeks burning, “out there last night, right…?
“Yeah…” Margaret agreed. “There’s no way it was really Pa.”
Wide-eyed and frowning, the siblings marched back home, dreading the thought of sundown.