I woke up in a cornfield.
The first thing I saw were the stars. It pulsed – that dotted swirl of remote diamond light, flush against the abyssal black. The silvery veil of the moon that sat fat and gorged above was adrift, a slow drawl across the infinite expanse. But it was by the smell that I knew exactly where I was. Dry grass and sweet, humid hay. Corn. And a hell of a lot of it too. On either side and as far as I could see, the shrouds of tall, haughty stalks of maize quivered to the high heavens.
I couldn’t understand why it hurt. My eyes watered like I’d taken a particularly brutal ghost pepper to the gut and on instinct, I reached to scrub the back of my hand against it. Beneath the skin, there was a peculiar burn. But there wasn’t anything trapped within the eyelids, no speck of dust or hairline cut – instead, I stared as long, black eyelashes shook loose. It fell through the cracks of my fingers, sailing down and down onto the crusty earth, shoved over by the gusty sigh of rural wind.
I suppose that even mundane things have their playground bullies.
Thinking back, that was the first loss I mourned.
Dignity, I meant, or rather the lack thereof. Because after that, I twitched. The dirt pricked against my back and plumes of dust stirred in indignation, crawling into my mouth and nose. I sneezed. Half of my ribs creaked like an old ship docked at some forgotten moor, the other half snapped to splinters like desiccated planks. Startled and winded, I started to cough helplessly. It was a mistake. Bile burrowed and squirmed like worms down my gullet and the next thing I knew, I had rolled over and vomited something black and putrid all over my hands, splashing a good portion of my clothes in the process.
When it was over at last, I felt emptier than I’d ever been before.
Nails digging into the soiled earth, I dragged myself away an inch at a time until the smell of sweet, sickening corn prevailed once again. The silent field rustled and parted, like an unfathomable patina-tinted sea. The shrill warble of an owl shrieked. I fell flat back with a gasp, as heavy as deadweight as if my body had been freshly stuffed full of lead. For a while I just lay there – panting and drifting with the stars. It felt rather like being sun-warmed taffy pulled into the black ether.
I was nothing. There was no pain, no space, and no me.
And it was beautiful.
It would have lasted, and I drowsy and content in the arms of the universe. But damn my restlessness. That insatiability. Curiosity. Because even as I rested amidst the bed of earth and worms, the sliver of something stuck itself as sharp as a splinter in my mind. It wasn’t anything linear, just brushstrokes of half-formed thoughts and tingling sensation – about that same black sky and flickering argent stars set in a cosmic pattern, stories that someone so lovingly once whispered to me.
Orion. The hunter with a three-starred belt, eternally chasing the Pleiades and fleeing the scorpion. Rain-bringer, born from bull-hide and earth.
Cassiopeia. The vain queen of Aethiopia. Mother of Andromeda, the princess that was chained to the rock as an offering for her slights. Her stars wheel around as she clings to her throne. Because the Grecian gods leave nothing unpunished, and they have always delighted in delivering cruelty disguised as kindness.
Virgo. Persephone, the child stolen alongside spring. Hands stained with the ruby red of a deceitful pomegranate seed. And death wins, over and over again.
In that brief second, I saw her face. I called her the Storyteller. Lined with age, with pale blue eyes like bits of broken robin eggs pushed out of a nest. Downy brunette hair curling around her chin and neck, the glint of a silver clasp locket. She shared the same smile and face that I did. Then I glance down, and realize that my hands are tiny – smeared with the chalk dust of crayons and green-red paint all over. A smiley face is drawn in childish drawl on the wall. There’s a sentence on the tip of my tongue, a sheepish sorry oops, M-
But she’s gone, just as quick.
A strange feeling drifted over me. I think it was loss.
My chest keened. And I wondered to myself-
Even the stars had names.
So, why didn’t I?
Eventually.
That couldn’t be right, I decided. I was suddenly certain that all I had to do was get up and find it. It made all the sense in the world, that it could be as simple as that. The anxiety and dread passed, and I laughed. The field laughed with me. Still chuckling, I stood and wobbled on feet as frail as a newborn lamb’s. The corn helped, I think. The long, slender stalks kept reaching over with concern, occasionally lending a deft hand to keep me upright. After a while, the soil chipped in – suckling and planting me like a wooden stake in the ground with every ambling step.
It’s an odd notion to know that something’s missing, without ever being to pinpoint exactly what it is.
Like leaving the car engine running, or the gas stove on at home. It’s a scratchy thought, ever darting around at the edge of your senses but the moment it’s reached for, it designs to dissipate in a puff of smoke and all that’s left are the bare fumes. A heartbeat, with no heart. A breath, without lungs. You can’t fix something without knowing what’s first missing.
Here’s what I did know – I was from Wisconsin, I was the youngest child, I haven’t gone home since Thanksgiving three years ago, my brother hated me and ditto in return, I was allergic to shellfish, I liked Neopolitan ice-cream ever since my girlfriend shared a scoop of it with me on our second date, and I kept the strangest hours at night.
At least, that’s what I figured made sense.
The details were elusive though, like a fading dream – vapour after fireworks slipping from the cracks of my grasp. And the more I thought about it, the less it felt as though that life could have been real once. Because in that same vein, I didn’t know my childhood home. I didn’t know the face of my brother or girlfriend. I didn’t know how I had gotten that small scar on the crook of my thumb. I didn’t know if I was more of a Yankees or Red Sox kind of guy. I didn’t know my name. I didn’t know how I truly looked.
I did not know. I did not know.
But I was certain that once I had found my name, surely the rest of it would fall into place like a cascade of clever little puzzle pieces. It was that promise that spurred me onwards, past what felt like endless acres. The crust of cloth was another challenge – it made moving a stiff chore at first. As luck would have it though, I found the solution about a half mile past the deep burrowed trough that cordoned the next half of the field. With a hop, my poor bruised feet splashed through the achy chill of the trickling black stream and I saw that I was no longer alone.
There was a slight clearing up ahead – the throbbing mass of maize became sparser, pulling back like a verdant-yellow curtain dipped in a respectful bow, and the ground looked to be trodden and much more favoured. In the middle, stood the scarecrow.
Ragged pole arms stuck out in crucifixion. A baggy shirt billowed gently, the denim rimed by dew and rain. A motley uneven face – the hue of a blanched burlap sack – stared thinly back. A frown was hand-stitched above that drooping chin, small black threads running like sutures as the jagged husk of the nose writhed with pale silvery larvae. Straw hands spewed out of the bulbous sleeves, dripping with the ivory sheen of snail slime and exudate.
Settled across the scarecrow’s misshapen shoulders was a corduroy jacket. It was in remarkable condition and evidently loved, for there were small pins and patchwork embroidery that adorned the sides. A blue bird sat thread-bare at the seam of the right shoulder.
So yes, I stripped. It fit snugly as if it had always been tailored to my size. My fingers moved slow and clumsy as I zipped up the middle, shivering bare in the breeze, just a little bit blue at the tips. It was as I was leaning against the scarecrow’s frame that I saw the small yew sign hammered about three inches downwards – a handful of nails stuck out like the prickly thorns of a desert cactus, as it read rather plainly, COB. That made sense. Corn again.
“Thank you, Cob.” I said.
Cob-the-scarecrow said nothing in return.
I moved, and something hard slammed up against my rib. That was when I found the lighter tucked within the pocket – it was small and tarnished silver, and as I moved to flick it, it sputtered with the grinding of metal and the hiss of an angry, rancid flame. That brought a fresh set of questions to mind. Was I a smoker? A budding pyromaniac? Or perhaps I was an alcoholic – a black-out amnesiac drunk that was now waxing rhapsody about the stars, near-naked and suffering one hell of a hangover.
This too shall pass, a memory chides, brimming out of nowhere.
Then, possessed by some strange instinct, I looked up.
Now it was clearer – a grey mass swirled and lifted off into the air, rising like smoke leaving a chimney in the distance. The fog swirled and contorted itself around the shadowed light of the North Star. There was a deerskin drum beating in my chest and suddenly, I had the curious sense that I was very, very wide awake. I followed it in a thrall. The cornfield evened itself out along the way, cropped short as it came to an abrupt stop, and I was surrounded by open air.
A hilly knoll dipped, tangled in bindweeds and knee-high yellow grass. From this perch, I saw that plantation house in the horizon – a slanting, dilapidated structure with crumbling walls, choked with mortar and ivy, the red clay of the roof tiles bloodied and smeared. The rest was a graveyard. The earth all around was swollen with gravestones, faded letters in memoriam illuminated by the light of the moon. The copses of yellow sickly trees thickened and thinned out in the spaces between the graves.
Thistles swayed sluggishly, as I took an inadvertent step closer.
The screech of the barn owl struck again; a dark shadow swooped above, still in the periphery of my sight, and dropped a tawny grey blot that bashed itself against the ground right in front of me. Even in the dark, I could see the pinkish pool of ripped skin and white flecks of crushed bone, whiskers torn askew – it was a tiny field mouse. Half-devoured. I found myself crouching, tenderly picking up the mouse and laying it flat across my palm with all the morbid apathy of a child.
It twitched, in agony and alive.
The Hag was in my mind. And then she stepped free, out of those confines. Her ghost smiled at me. A toothy yellow grin peeked out of the wrinkled folds of a mouth, skin wan and pallid, as the old woman hunched so low that her back distended and her lips touched the blood on the ground. Calendula and tarragon choked the air. The white film over her eyes blinked, exposing red veins that were bulging and stark. “Poor mice.” She rasped, slathering ointment over the pitiful creature. “I will help you.”
The mouse groaned, still twitching.
“See, paidí?” My grandmother clucked her tongue. “You are only prolonging its misery.”
She reached over and snapped its small neck.
It stilled.
“This is what true, selfless mercy looks like.” She said softly.
I could feel the shards of its bone floating inside its throat, thumping against my skin. As if burnt, I released my thumb and forefinger quickly. I was alone again. Shaken, I found myself stroking the downy fur of the dead mouse, as I remembered something else entirely – when I was eight, I had a guinea pig called Lucky. He lived for about a year and then had gotten crushed beneath some boxes. I was devastated and refused to believe he was dead at first.
Sure, his head was sunken in and the smell had gotten pretty bad after a while, but I was insistent that he was just sleeping. In a fit of pure desperation, my mother snuck into my room one night and pried his cold body from my hands to bury in the garden. I’d thrown a fit the next day. Then I dug Lucky right back up. I remembered so vividly the museum my class had visited over the summer – with the deer and lions and crocodiles kept so exquisitely and preserved in the large display cases there. I held poor dead Lucky in my hands and promised fiercely that I would make him live forever.
And so I did.
I put him in a plastic container and poured hot glue all over.
My mother had shrieked when she’d seen what I’d done. I had made an admirable effort to keep Lucky out of her sight but unfortunately my earliest work wasn’t my finest, and I hadn’t realized that I was supposed to gut out the innards if I wanted to keep the decay at bay. In the end, the clover perfume I sprayed did very little to mask the stench of rot. So covered in maggots and ants, back went Lucky into the grave in the garden and I was grounded in my room for days afterward.
I vowed that the next time, I would do it right.
More images flashed in my mind. A small store at the end of Parker’s Row, in front of the run-down playground. The reflection of the Midtown apartments forever visible in the skyline of the second floor. Bottles of formaldehyde. Large, stocky pieces of styrofoam. A cutting blade. A white tray on a workstation, distinctly smelling of bleach and blood. Massive antlers on a wooden-panelled wall. Distinct types of furs and skins held by pins to a frame.
It all came rushing back to me in a flood.
I do not know for how long I stood there, mouth hanging agape and chest burning with realization. But when a highbeam of light cut over the sandy path to the house and I became aware of the faint drone of a car engine, I knew what I had to do. I wasn’t in unfamiliar ground. I had never been. The name of the man who owned the property was Tobias Jones and he was a childhood friend of mine. Yesterday, he’d come into my store to beg a favor preserving some of the elk game he’d caught. The Sparrow’s Nest was known for taxiderming large pieces in the area, so we’d eventually reached an agreement on the fee.
But I hadn’t liked the way he kept looking at me, with that peculiar light. He stood too close and sidled up to the pieces I had on display with an unsettling fervour. His hands flitted from one pocket to the other, tendons tightening and loosed as if stuck in the throes of a fit. He smiled vacantly and called me by name repeatedly, each time drawing out the syllables as if tasting something sour and foreign. When he shook my hand, his skin was cold as ice.
And as I turned my back to grab the receipt book, those russet eyes had tracked me all the while.
It was no secret that Tobias Jones’s father was a monster. I remember seeing him outside the school every afternoon – a stern, greying man with thick callused hands clenched by his sides, blue eyes harsh as ice, as he stalked up and down the curb restlessly, as if a furious demon that was kept at bay only by a meagre salt-line. There was no mother in the picture. I knew more about Toby than I wanted to – there always were bruises and cigarette burns on his back and arms. Once, his collar unfurled and I saw the poker brand pressed there, crackled raw and red. He never had enough to eat. He had a habit of just staring at people, with these large and luminous eyes.
I didn’t need to tell the teacher or another grown-up. They already knew, and did jack-shit about it. That was another lesson that I learned early in life – when someone had money, history, and enough influence around the parts, it didn’t matter how hard you tilted at the windmills. And god, I hated all of them for it. Hated myself too. So on Monday, I’d give Toby my juice pack and crackers. On Wednesday, I’d cover for him during gym class. On Friday, I’d sit with him on the playground and tell him to hold on and damned what snaky Pete and Oliver said, they were just another two jackasses who’d probably be dead before thirty in a lowlife bar fight or some shit.
But on Sunday-
I’d see him miserable in the front pew at church and pretend not to know him, no matter how hard his gaze burned desperately into mine. Sometimes, I think I felt the pale stretch of his hands in the crowd, the whisper of my name called as faint as the breeze. He was a year younger than me, and it was in times like this that it showed. He thought I was strong, bigger than him, and that meant that I was brave enough to glare into the eyes of his father and the whole town. That, maybe, I’d be the one who’d finally stand up and do something. But in truth, I was thirteen and just as scared.
In his eyes, I could do no wrong. I think that eventually translated to him believing that his father was right to hurt him.
Maybe things would have been different if I hadn’t moved in with my mother to Wisconsin after the divorce. My father haunted the shell of my childhood home for the last few years of his life, almost taking my brother with him when he drank too much one night and wrapped his car around a tree near the highway. He never forgave me for siding with mom, and I never forgave him for choosing dad and then not having the guts to admit he was wrong after all. It would be years before I settled back in Georgia – at first to sort out the family estates, but then finally making a more permanent decision to stay and open the Sparrow’s Nest in the shoplot that stood abandoned for as long as I could remember. Then I met Frida Howland in the local Starbucks, fell in love, and for a while lived with a joy I never imagined was possible.
My name was Sammy Jacob, and that was my story.
But that’s not the end of it, though.
Childhood shaped a hell of a lot of life. It was the dream that stayed long after you woke up. I remembered another scene of it – being eleven and swinging my legs as I sat on top of a wooden platform inside the barn of the Jones plantation. Tobias was sitting in the hay below, his hair golden with straw and a stick in one hand as he drew something in the gravel dirt. His tongue was pink, stuck out to the side in concentration, and there was an uncharacteristic flush of happiness in his cheeks. The massive and snarling mastiffs were chained far outside, but I could still hear the scuffle and growl of those rabid beasts.
“What’cha drawing?” I asked, curious after a while.
“Dunno, ‘Cob.” He said, still with that lisp.
“It looks like birds, Jonesy.” I announced.
He glanced down, and giggled. “Yeah. Sorta does.”
“Which one’s your favourite?”
“Bluebirds.” He said shyly.
“Mine’s sparrows.”
“Not a lot of those around these parts.” He said wistfully.
“Maybe one day we’ll see the world.” I promised. “You and me.”
“Yeah?” He looked at me as if I hung the very sun and stars in the sky.
“I’d reckon we can both fly out of here, Tobes. One day.”
The memory stung.
Here and now, that barn was the same as it had always been – covered in grime, farming tools and upturned stacks of hay bales. Iron horseshoes and old knives spilled out of a decrepit, rotted cabinet and there was a musky sigh of stale air that stagnated inside. I clung onto the rungs of the ladder, the rust and moss heavy against my palms, and pulled myself onto the platform. Through the cracks in the side, I saw the same dash of freckled stars in the sky, the rickety land, and the hunting shed at the edge of the pond to the east.
The smoke was rising from that shed.
Time chewed hours and minutes, and dawn was a pinkish-yolk ripple of grey clouds. I stood in front of the shed, just watching the twirl of broken bits of bottle glass that hung as chimes. Strung amidst it were ivory pieces of animal bone – hyoids, mostly. The light was already on inside. I pulled the jacket tighter around my bare chest and took a long breath. I didn’t bother to knock.
The first thing I was aware of was the squelch beneath my feet, hot and thick. Then the smell hit – a wall of iron and raw, foul meat. Tobias was there alright. He was bent over the gutting table with an expression of abject misery, dripping with sweat and blood, his hair curling like a set of bloody horns atop his head. Behind him was a rack, packed to the brim with bits of animal hide and tufts of hair. Chunks of tendon-swollen bone floated in jars of macerating fluid.
There was a frame in front of him – a grotesque stretch of jagged iron nails and skin, resembling the faint shape of a head from the neck-up. Black, tangled hair that smelled of sea salt drooped like a stiff mop. Pins were stuck into the gums of the mouth held agape, the holes of the eyes similarly ripped-raw. The threaded needle sat on the table, viscidly rusted. I picked up the bowl of pickled eyeballs, the liquid sloshing in tumult as I pinched one between my finger and thumb and held it upright to the yellow tungsten light.
“The eyes are always the hardest to get right.” I said at last.
He lifted his head, and stared at me aghast.
“Sammy?”
“Tobias.”
He shook his head desperately. “You can’t be here.”
“You brought me here.”
Pink saliva frothed at the edge of his mouth. “No- no. I didn’t, I- I-” He hit the side of his head with a clenched fist, pale watery tears sliding down his cheeks as he stood trembling.
“Oh, Jonesy.” I whispered. “What happened to you?”
He moaned and clutched a handful of dark hair, his knuckles white and painful. “Stop it. Stop it.”
Evidently, there was still a voice in his head. His glare was aimed at the old freezer at the side, roving into hatred. His skin burned fever-bright as he twisted his neck and bolted, head slamming into my chest – the same one that he had pumped three bullets in about a week ago. He cried like a mewling child, fingers clawed and digging into my back as he held on in a bitter parody of an embrace. He was small, the same way he’d always been. The anger in the candle of my heart exhaled, leaving only the wick of sorrow and pity. I stroked the downy scalp of his head, and he wept even harder.
“Who’s in the freezer, Tobias?” I asked, still as gentle, for he seemed to have been blinded to the madness of what he’d done.
Because he had made scarecrows. A lot of them. Some were bloated and torn, some bleeding and dismembered. Maggots crawled and flies hatched, dark and swarming, inside of mouths and eyes and ears; silvery honeycombs of termites and worms bulged from slit bellies and necks.
He tipped his head, and said nothing.
He didn’t need to.
I already knew before I pried open the lid. It was his father inside. Beard frosted over and face still frozen in that ugly expression of hate he wore so readily. I could tell that the body was a few months old, at the very least. I didn’t mourn that poor bastard. Tobias refused to look and instead clung even harder, so I shut the lid and turned away. I ignored the Hag standing outside the window, her leathery hands smeared red against the glance. My head thudded dully.
He cried himself to sleep.
I scratched his scalp until his breath evened out and we slid down the side of the wall to the ground, legs bent and strained. There’s a poem that my mother – the Storyteller – once told me. “What through the radiance that was once so bright,” I murmured, nearly the coo of a lullaby, “be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower. We will grieve not rather find strength in what remains behind.”
He never saw it coming – the awl that I buried in his neck.
I think it’s time that I kept my promise. We’ll fly away together.
Written by: Trishta
Edited by: Amberlyn
