Lilting at Windmills
Content Warning (click to expand)
child neglect, suicidal ideation
by Rachel Ashcraft
My childhood home is built from the skeleton of a windmill. Grandpa told me that windmills used to sing. Not with a human voice, but like a finger running around the rim of a glass. But off a little. Otherwordly. It would raise and lower in pitch, hum and vibrate, make the hair on the back of your neck stand straight up. Like wind through tree branches, but even that isn’t quite right. It was many things all at once, but none that could really be understood.
I guess I just assumed every lonely girl had a house that sang her to sleep.
The windmills didn’t die when the farmers cut them apart, saws singing through their bones, their frames creaking and giving, snapping and lying useless in the harvested hay.
I wonder if they remember who they used to be, where they came from, why they decided to descend from the stars what must have been so long ago. Because even when you ask the old farmers, they don’t remember who built them. They foist that task back another generation, back to the dead who can’t deny it.
Except Grandpa whose great grandpa remembered. How the whole sky turned purple and then lit up. These great tripods falling so fast that their legs sank deep into the loamy soil right in the middle of the fields. At first the farmers had just worked around them as the government men in their black vehicles and suits tried to determine what they were. Inconclusive.
Corn had poked through the hole in their metal legs. The legs that tripoded together at the top and formed a great structure that looked like the approximation of a metal flower. Not a traditional windmill, their petals level with the horizon rather than facing out. The wind made them turn. They rumbled when the animals drew near them, when the corn grew larger around their bases than it ever had, even though they blocked out the sun. As if they fed the earth.
That’s when they were told to cut them apart. That they weren’t natural and would lead to nothing good. So, they took whatever they had to them. Chainsaws, drills, trucks and chains to pull them apart. And then they left them there dismantled and broken, their singing still filling the fields. They hadn’t made a sound when they cut them apart, but everyone could feel it. Like that feeling in your chest after an emotional blow when your ribs cave, and you fold inwards, and your singular world becomes just a little smaller.
It is many years later after I’ve moved to the city that I’m drawn back home like migratory birds. A thrill in the chest, an invisible hand lacing fingers through mine. Something in the soles of my feet won’t let me turn away. No one has lived there for years. It has started to change back to field. To wildness. The outside of my old house moldering and tearing away from its frame. Pieces of shingle lay in the driveway. The door hangs inwards on its hinges. The screen door, a broken prison fence.
When I touch it, the song that has vibrated through its metal all these years shocks through me. This song has been with me too. A part of my very skeleton. When it grew as quiet as it could in the city, I still heard it, this place that sounds both far away and so close. Striking my bones, singing out, pulling me home.
I was alone a lot as a child. My dad worked in the city. My mom couldn’t handle being alone. My grandpa died. In my room as a child, I rested my hand on the frame and the skeleton of the windmill showed me a different place. An earth that thrived, an earth where I was wanted.
I think they came to save us, but we weren’t ready for them. I don’t think we ever would have been.
I peel the siding from the frame of the windmill and my head is filled with its humming. It unfolds itself. All these years it held its shape, but it didn’t move. It stayed for me. If it couldn’t grow the corn in the fields, it decided to grow a child instead. It held me when no one else did.
The house stretches, sheds its shingles, and broken glass, and appliances. Refrigerator, stove, the tubes of our told tv spilling out into the dead grass. The petals — I think it has never been a windmill — bloom and the legs bend to me as if in a bow. It creaks and groans and all the birds in the field take to flight. Fly. Fly. There is a way out of here. I climb upwards, and the petals close around me. It feels right, like being in the house. Like being a child that is loved. The tightness here, the closeness like a hug. Inside there is a strange lulling heartbeat. I lean my head against the metal. It’s warm.
I won’t think that it’s done this to me. That it took away the people I needed and replaced them with itself. That it grew me for itself. No, I won’t think that. I’ll think of space and the warmth here. Maybe I will sleep just a little on what has to be a long journey.
I barely feel the tripod leave the ground. I know we’ll go somewhere better. For the first time I sing for it. I sing whatever I can think of. I sing songs my grandpa sang from his childhood of places across the sea. I sing the song I heard my mother sing under her breath, out in the field, hanging up the washing, while the sun burned down and killed the corn. I sing until it vibrates back through my bones and our feet leave the earth and the sky bends and opens.
About the author and the piece (click to expand)
Rachel Ashcraft tells us that this story was rejected 35 times before coming to us. Rachel is a librarian in the rural midwest of the US. She has short stories published in Gavagai, Plott Hound, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Grendel Press’ More Than a Monster Anthology, Apex’s Strange Locations and elsewhere. Follow her at rachiea.bsky.social.
©2026 by Rachel Ashcraft. All rights reserved. May not be used for A.I. training.