The field had been in the family for three generations, and every year the same song got sung at harvest, half-joking, half-ritual, the kind of thing nobody really believed but everybody did anyway because your grandfather did it and his grandfather before him. This year the harvest was late, the corn heavy and strange on the stalk, ears grown long and knuckled like something reaching rather than something rooted, and when the youngest hand went out at dusk to check the rows, he sang the old song under his breath without thinking about it, the way you hum something you’ve heard too many times to notice.
The corn cracked back.
It wasn’t loud. It was more like a held breath let go, a hundred small snaps rippling down the row in the wrong order, against the wind instead of with it. He stood there in the dark with the husking knife still in his hand and told himself it was just the temperature dropping, stalks contracting, nothing that hadn’t happened before. Then it happened again, closer, three rows over, and this time something in the sound had shape to it, almost a rhythm, almost an answer.
He didn’t finish checking the field that night. He told the family it was too dark to see straight and left the rest for morning, and nobody argued, because everyone had grown up hearing stories about this particular field and had always assumed the stories were just a way of explaining why the yield was better on this land than anywhere else nearby.
In the morning the corn looked ordinary again, dry and gold and patient, and the harvest went ahead as scheduled. But nobody sang that year, and nobody has since, and the field still produces more than it should for soil that tired, and everyone who works it has learned, without being told directly, to walk the rows in silence.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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