Reaping Whirlwinds

Content Warning

blood, dead bodies, death of a loved one, depression, gore, guns, mental illness, suicide

 

by Deborah L. Davitt

The rusted metal roof on the Larson barn had been patched with lighter silver rectangles so often that it had the appearance of a rumpled quilt. Every building on the farm had some of that unkempt look — the fence posts had sunk in different directions, bending the barbed wire. The house leaned towards the sunset, its white paint peeling away.

The fields, however, looked as neat and trim, wheat stalks glowing gold in the last dim light of day. Down the road, Ava Larson could see the Carter farm — and Tom Carter climbing into the seat of his combine. She frowned. Tom had been working the fields at night lately. A bad idea — you couldn’t see the rows in the dark, and you risked injury. When she’d asked Betsy about it, Betsy had fobbed her off with how Tom’s eyes bothered him in daylight. Cataracts.

But Ava had known Betsy for six decades, and Betsy was a rotten liar. Doesn’t take after her grandma at all — I remember Solfrid’s tall tales about flapping her apron at tornadoes to shoo them away. Everyone laughed.

Ava remembered laughter fondly, like a childhood toy. What spare time they had these days, her husband Eric spent listening to the radio — usually college football on an AM station. His hands limp in his lap, his eyes unseeing. As if he could will himself into some other life.

Ava finished the milking and headed back to the house, smelling the sweet odor of the cows’ feed and wondering where the time had gone.

And how they’d lost so much.

Ava paused at the door, staring at the wheat waving in the field across the narrow, unpaved road. Time was, that was ours. Passed down from Eric’s father and grandfather. All it took was a single hailstorm that took our crop. The bank was all over us, and then the corporation bought us out. Three hundred acres gone, and then planted in SantAgra genetically-modified wheat. Her lips thinned. I’ve got no problem with “genetically modifying.” Everything humanity’s eaten since we started breeding plants and learned to graft has been ‘modified.’ It’s the company I’ve got a beef with.

To keep off the creeping sense of loneliness in the house, she turned on the kitchen radio. “This is 970 AM, KBUL all-talk out of Billings,” the announcer’s voice crackled. “Our top story tonight is the disappearance of another area farmer. James Johansen is in his fifties and was considering selling his land to agricultural giant, SantAgra—”

Ava twisted the dial to a music station. She hated listening to the news. “Next they’ll be saying that someone killed him to keep him from selling,” she muttered, working scratch-biscuit dough. “But he’s the fourth— no, fifth man this year to go missing.” Her lips turned down, pulling at her cheeks. They’ll find him in his truck in a week, and they’ll rule it suicide, and it won’t be anyone’s fault at all. Certainly not SantAgra’s.

She’d gotten into the habit of talking to herself as she worked. As little as Eric spoke now, there were days when her own voice was the only one she heard.

She patted the biscuits into rounds, her touch gentle. “Of course, it is SantAgra’s fault. Always pushing. But that’s not something you can jail them for. Murder by inches.”

As she worked, Ava looked down at her hands. Her wedding ring hung loosely around one bony finger, but the red and swollen knuckle above made it as impossible to remove as the roots of an old tree stump. That’s us. Stuck here. Can’t move on, and don’t even want to, because what else is there for people like us? There’s just the fight — wresting crops out of unforgiving land in the face of nature’s scorn and corporate greed. Taking artisanal cheeses and breads to the farmers’ market once a month in Billings isn’t helping to make ends meet.

It made her laugh bitterly when she’d go into town to buy groceries — a single pack of English muffins cost just north of two bucks, when a bushel of wheat — some sixty pounds of potential flour — sold for a mere eight bucks off the farm. None of that store markup ever seemed to make its way back here.

By eight, dinner sat cold on the table, untouched. “Eric, where are you?” Ava muttered. He’d taken a job in town at the feed store to help with the bills, but he should’ve been home by now.

She checked the gun safe and relaxed marginally when she found their pistol inside. The antidepressants that were eating into their budget weren’t helping Eric much. At first, he’d perked up. Almost been his old self, smiling and talking to her more often. And then he’d slipped back down into the well of his own mind. Lost in the endless battle, with SantAgra pushing in on every front that nature herself wasn’t fighting. “Don’t do anything stupid, Eric,” she muttered. “Don’t drive off the road. Don’t be another ‘disappearance.'”

None of the men who’d disappeared had been located yet. Just their trucks, in ditches. And Ava couldn’t even whisper the fears that knowledge evoked. Maybe some of them saw something they shouldn’t. Maybe they’re out there under the prairie grass, waiting to be found. Or cemented into the foundation of the shiny new SantAgra building being built downtown.

Easy to dismiss these thoughts as paranoia in daylight. Much harder at night, when the rain drummed on the roof and the house creaked emptily around her, settling with the temperature change.

To banish her dark thoughts, Ava lifted the phone off the wall — their son had talked about getting them a fancy cell phone, but they couldn’t handle another monthly bill — and called her neighbors. “Hey, Betsy. You seen Eric?” Determinedly casual.

“Saw his truck in town today. At that Dr. Martin’s clinic.” Hint of disapproval in Betsy’s wonderfully prosaic, normalvoice. “He’s a psychiatrist, right?”

They’d known each other since they were kids. Ava could read the nuances of Betsy’s voice, and the scorn she heard also held undertones of concern and fear. The scorn was just a way to express the fear. To push the outsider away. “Yeah. Eric’s been seeing him. Helps him to have someone to talk about things.”

“Well, I suppose we can’t all just rely on our families for that sort of thing,” Betsy allowed. Unspoken words hovered behind the ones actually voiced: We’re self-reliant up here. If someone’s having a problem — particularly a man! — we’re supposed to keep it to ourselves. If you have to talk to someone about it, why not your spouse?

And hard on the heels of that, Betsy added sweetly, “I know you’re proud of your son, Brandt, off being a lawyer in Billings, but you’d think he’d come home to visit you two more often.”

Ava silently rolled her eyes at the ceiling and counted to ten. When Betsy unstoppered her store of honeyed venom, you could confront her about it — and make it worse — or you could wait for it to pass, like the weather. So she didn’t reply as Betsy chattered on, “Why, our three live just down the road. Such a help they still are.” A hesitation, a false note in her voice. “Tom and I couldn’t get on without them—”

“Yeah, and all three of them working for SantAgra now, I hear,” Ava pointed out with false cheer of her own. “Guess it pays well.” Pays well to work for someone else, on land that used to belong to you. Like we’re all turning back into serfs, and the company our feudal lord. A mental image of the SantAgra building in town, like a castle of old, towering silver over the dilapidated buildings of Main Street, with their corrugated, patchwork walls.

“Well, at least they’re close by,” Betsy finally replied, as if that were the biggest victory imaginable.

The town just kept shrinking. Even the church had closed its doors two years ago. Too few congregants to stay open, and most of them over sixty. Most of the children moved away as soon as they turned eighteen. Heading for college, or jobs in Billings or Missoula. And Eric often muttered that they were right to leave.

The silence had gone on too long. Ava cast about for something to say that would keep things on an even keel between her and her neighbors.  It wasn’t that any of them were standoffish. It just seemed like they all had less and less to say to each other. Each of them curling in on themselves like gnarled old trees. “Say, I was thinking of something today,” Ava said, the words racing out of her. “Remember when we were working in town, and we rode in to pick up our paychecks?”

A sudden burst of laughter from Betsy, who sounded as relieved as Ava to have something else to talk about. “Yes! We couldn’t have been more than sixteen—”

“And I gave you my reins so I could go inside—”

“And someone set off firecrackers, and both horses bolted!”

“Didn’t mine slam into that truck—”

“She did! Moved it sideways, and then she ran straight into that gas pump and took it clean off its stand. Then she got caught in that barbed wire fence.”

Ava winced at the recollection. The horse had needed stitches. She’d turned over her entire paycheck to her parents, and the next one after that, to cover the insurance deductible. “To this day I wish I knew who’d set off those damn sparklers—”

“My grandma always said those weren’t firecrackers.”

“Oh? What’d she say they were — Native American spirits?“ Ava didn’t feel in the mood for one of old Solfrid’s tall tales.

“Landvættir cracking rocks, she said.” Betsy didn’t sound enthusiastic, however. “Come up from the Black Hills because the summer was too warm for them down there.”

“Uh-huh.” Ava rolled her eyes. “What were those again? Old-country spirits?”

“Wights, or elves. Dwarves, brownies, whatever. I know, sounds all cutesy. Kid’s stuff. But in the old stories, they were guardians of the land that could rise up and protect it from invaders, draining the life out of them.”

“Too bad we don’t have any of those. We’ve got invaders aplenty.”

The joke hung there for a moment. “Yeah,” Betsy replied, her voice tight. “Too bad.”

At least the conversation had set things right between them. Reassured Betsy that despite Eric seeing a psychiatrist, the Larsons were still the same people she’d always known. One of us, not one of them.

Now Ava spotted headlights through the rain. Her shoulders eased. “Hey, I think I see Eric. I’ve got to go. Thanks, Betsy.” She meant it. Sometimes, you just needed to hear another human voice, to keep the crazy at bay.

She met Eric at the door. “Sorry,” he mumbled as he limped in, removing his hat. His plaid shirt was worn but clean — he kept an apron over it at the feed store — but his jeans were filthy to the knee. The limp itself was a souvenir from a combine accident thirty years before. “Got talking with Ted Mason. SantAgra is suing him.”

Ava gave him space. Let him slump at the table, seeing how his face had thinned into a series of vertical lines, bracketing his mouth spreading along his cheeks in wrinkles that looked like ripples in a pond. Sometimes she could still see in him the boy she’d loved. But most of the time, he seemed like some gray, diluted ghost of himself. He rarely spoke, and she usually feared to break the silence, lest the anger that boiled under the depression explode out with cataclysmic force.

She waited for him to fuel up, eating the cold food without interest. And then asked, “Ted’s the seed-washer, yeah? How can they be suing him?”

A seed-washer collected wheat from his own property, or used wheat brought to him by neighbors, and cleaned it of chaff and debris with industrial equipment. And then turned it back around and used it as seed, so that a farmer didn’t have to waste money buying seed the next year from a supplier.

Eric stared at the table. “They claim he’s got SantAgra strain in his seed stock, and no one can sell that but them. ‘Cause they’ve got a patent.”

Ava frowned. “No one’s gone into their fields to steal—” Realization hit. “The crops cross-pollinated. Damn.” She paused. “That could happen to us.”

A vision crawled through her, of their wheat somehow being infected, stained. Of it growing up between the bones of dead men, feeding on their blood.  Stop that. He’s home, you don’t usually get the creeping horrors when he’s here…

But he wasn’t really here. Not really. His eyes locked on the window past her ear, and he muttered just one word in reply: “Yep.”

“But that’s stupid! You can’t control how the wind blows pollen, or what path the bees take between fields. The only thing they could do to prevent that is to not have anyone else plant wheat for twenty miles around them—” She shut her mouth with a click.

Eric’s head lifted, his pale eyes filled with fury. “Guess that’s what they want. All of us just gone.”

Her lips quivered. “Well, they don’t get to tell us what to do.”

“Yeah, they kind of do.” The fury leached from his eyes, replaced by the blank, inwards-turned expression she hated to see.

“Has … has Ted noticed anything off about the seeds he’s washed?” Tremulous hope in her voice. “If they’re genuinely putting something off in there … using cancer-causing chemicals in the soil—”

“What, you think he has a lab out behind the washer?” Eric’s voice became a lash, scathing and cold. “Think he’s picked up a degree in genetics, or can identify glyphosate by smell all of a sudden?”

Ava raised her hands, trying to slow the sudden, explosive torrent of words. “I— I just thought it could be something. Something we could use against them—” There has to be a reason men have gone missing. Something they know. Something that might let us take it all back—

His voice dulled. “There’s nothing we can do.” A pause. “You know how many days I go to bed, and wonder what difference it makes, if I wake up or not in the morning?”

Her throat closed. “It matters to me.“

He never seemed to hear those protestations. Spoken softly or shouted, her love wasn’t enough reason for him to live, and it killed something inside her every time he failed to respond. And she withered again as he looked away, muttering, “Some days, the only thing that keeps me going is spite, Ava. It ain’t healthy.”

A rush of words. Struggling to pull him back from the abyss. “We can call Brandt. Get some use out of his law degree. Get him to help Ted — countersuit or something—” Maybe then you won’t feel so helpless. So hopeless. Fight back, damn it!

“Won’t make any difference. SantAgra’s got a lot more lawyers.”

He stood, patted her on the shoulder — oh, that brief human moment of contact, so rare these days! — and shuffled towards the bedroom.

Ava put her face in her hands, trying not to cry. It would do no good. So she stood and washed the dishes — by hand, because electricity was expensive. Turned off the lights, and went to bed. By the time she got between the sheets, Eric was already asleep.

She listened to the drumming of rain on the roof, her eyes locked on the dark ceiling, anger welling up within her. He walks around like a ghost. If there were any justice in the universe, if tales like old Solfrid’s actually were true … then all the ghosts of the farmers who’ve lived here for the past hundred years would rise up. Find the SantAgra executives and give them heart attacks. Those land-spirits would rise up and suck the life out of their crops, their workers. Except ghosts and spirits don’t travel in any of the old stories. Bound to their lands. And I bet SantAgra’s CEO lives somewhere in New York or Los Angeles. One of the big cities that sneered at the “fly-over” states and didn’t care where the food came from, so long as it never ran out.

She had a mental image of the rest of the country sometimes as a gaping maw. A bottomless, black pit, lined with teeth, chewing and chewing, devouring everything that they gave, everything that they had, and giving nothing back.

Maybe the food should run out. For a day. A week. A month. To make them understand where it comes from.

But she chastised herself for the thought. It felt irresponsible. If people like them didn’t tend the crops, harvest them, the whole world would break down. Every time they sent off grain to the market, it had always felt to her like the moment when her family sat down at the table and bit into her hot, fresh bread: I made this. I give this part of myself to you, in love.

Except no one in the cities valued that love, and companies like SantAgra were out to steal it all.

She drifted off at last, dreaming of dark, billowing spirits rising up from between stalks of golden wheat. Of white bones in the black prairie earth, and red blood running in the furrows.

A loud blam woke her. She lurched upright in bed, her head pounding. Her first thought was gun, and then she reminded herself that it was probably a transformer blowing — but when she turned to touch the bed beside her, Eric’s warm form wasn’t there to reassure her.

She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and flicked on the bedside lamp. Padded through the old house, which creaked like her own bones, and caught the sound of the screen door flapping rhythmically open and closed in the breeze.

A prowler? Ava thought of going back to the bedroom for the pistol, but figured that Eric would’ve grabbed it already. Instead, she took a frying pan from the counter and made her way to the door. Stood there, feeling her heart race, painful and tight in a way that made her worry about cardiac arrest, and peered out onto the rain-slick wood of the porch.

Saw Eric, sitting slumped in the old rocker, head bowed and unmoving. “Honey?” she whispered. Not wanting to think the thought. “Sweetie?”

And then she saw the dark stain across his shirt, and the dull metal of the gun that had fallen between his feet, and she screamed.

It took nearly twenty minutes before the sobbing passed, the blank incomprehension, the denial, the pleading with him in broken sentences not to have done this, not to have left her alone, not to have abandoned her. Then a kind of numbness, a fog, rolled in to replace it, and she dully made her way back indoors. Looked at the phone. I should … call someone. The police? I mean, he did it to himself. Do I need to call someone?

Another belated thought hit her. Oh, god, how am I supposed to run this place without him?

She slumped at the table, feeling cold into her bones. Then picked up the phone and dialed. Got the answering machine. “Betsy? I’m sorry … I know it’s late. Please pick up. Eric’s…” A sudden, overwhelming rush of anger. Rage. Gone and left me alone to handle everything! Left me to have to sell out to SantAngra! Left me to handle the bills and the funeral, left me alone, God, Eric, why did you have to go and do this?

How was it that love wasn’t enough? It was supposed to be. All the songs and stories said so.

And yet, it wasn’t.

A click on the line. “Ava?” Betsy’s voice, suddenly much more concerned than it had been a few scant hours ago. “What’s wrong?”

“Eric’s shot himself.” The words sounded unbelievable. Tasted wrong in her mouth. “He’s dead. I don’t know what to do.”

“You stay right there.”

Ludicrous words.  “Where would I go?”

“Hush. We’ll be right there.”

Ava put her head on the table. Grateful for once that Betsy, with all her officiousness, was close at hand. Grateful that there was someone else to pick up this intolerable burden, if only for a moment.

Twenty minutes later, the rain let up, and another pickup nosed its way down the drive. Betsy slipped from the driver’s side, her frame dwarfed by the battered red-and-white Ford F-150, and then ran to put her arms around Ava. “I’m so sorry, Ava. You have any idea what set him off?”

Ava stumbled through a litany of woes. Accounts close to overdrawn. No end to the work, ever. No appreciation for what they did. Antidepressants that didn’t work, or left him feeling like a zombie when they did. Their son having left the farm for the city. No way to pass on what they had. And SantAgra threatening to sue Ted Mason— “I guess he might’ve thought that we’d be next. I mean, we’re right up against their fields, too.” Their fields. Which used to be ours. Her voice sounded leaden as she added, “God damn it, Eric.”

Betsy sat down with her, right on the steps, and chafed her hands to get warmth back into them. “You’re mad at him right now?”

Ava let her head fall down. “I guess.”

“That’s going to go on for a while. I know.” A world of weariness in Betsy’s voice now.

“How?”

“‘Cause Tom killed himself last December.” Empty voice.

Ava’s head snapped up. “This isn’t the time to joke—”

“I’m not. Shrink in town said that it happens a lot close to the holidays.” A snort. “What does he know, anyway?”

Ava blinked repeatedly. “Betsy! I— I didn’t know — I’m so sorry—” And then the words spoken earlier this evening, about how the kids were such a comfort to her and to Tom. The false note there — a lie, yes, but … “But I’ve seen him! Out in the fields! I mean, not often, and he’s been working at night… ” She stared at Betsy in confusion. “The kids are picking up the slack, after working all day, or something?” Her head and heart were a muddle of despair and confusion. “Betsy, we’ve known each forever. Why didn’t you tell me? Why hasn’t there been a funeral?” Is this like … a fraud thing? Collecting on his disability payments … no, that doesn’t sound like Betsy…

Betsy’s voice tightened. “I don’t know how it all happens. Happened.”

“What are you talking about?”

Betsy stood, pulling Ava to her feet. Took her to the passenger side of the truck, and made an imperative spinning motion to whoever was still seated inside. Ava’s mouth fell open as the window rolled down, revealing the pale face of Tom Carter.

Except, this wasn’t a Tom Carter that Ava recognized. His gray hair remained concealed by a tractor cap; his shirt remained clean plaid. But his shoulders slumped, his mouth hung slack, and his eyes, as he slowly turned his head towards her, were blank.

“For Christ’s sake,” Ava muttered uneasily, pulling away. “What … you said he’d killed himself—”

“He put the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth out in the barn. The hat covers up a lot.” Betsy’s voice sounded detached. Emotionless. “I… found him out there.” For an instant, her tone wavered. “I shook him and shook him and shook him. I told him that I needed him back. And then he … opened his eyes.” Betty’s voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s not really him. Just … magic holding his body up.”

Ava stared at her. “Magic isn’t real.”

Betsy raised her chin. Half-proud, half-ashamed. “Grandma Solfrid told me about the landvættir. And more. Stop looking at me like that. I know how it sounds.” She cleared her throat. “They’re not how we’ve been taught to think about them. Cleaned up for children and Disney. For the sterile, shiny modern world.”

Ava’s mouth fell open, but she turned and stared at Tom’s gray face. She wanted to deny everything, but it was difficult with him looking at her with glassy, empty eyes. “The SantAgra world.”

“Yeah.”

“So … saying that it’s true, that they exist … what are they, then? Is one of the landvættir …. inside him?“

Betsy’s face crumpled. “I don’t know. But I see them at sunset, sometimes. Shadows billowing up—”

“—from between the rows of wheat. From the blood in the earth.” The words fell from her, a shadow of her dream. She didn’t want to believe. But here, in the dark… she did.

“And the bones in the ground.” Just a whisper in the dark. A cold hand took hers, and they held hands like when they’d been children. “You’ve seen them, too.”

“Maybe. What are they? Where do they come from?”

“I really don’t know. But I wonder if… if they’re us. If you live generation after generation on the same ground, giving of yourself to the land, and the land nourishing you. Maybe you become it, and it becomes you.” Betsy’s voice sounded singsong. “All the atoms from the soil passing through into the wheat, from the wheat into the bread, and the bread becomes flesh—”

“Like communion?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Ava shivered. Forced herself to look at Tom in the car, staring at them lifelessly. “So he’s a zombie?”

“No. A draugr. Someone who died with unfinished business. Well, he was finished, but the business wasn’t, and neither was I.” Betsy sniffled. “I needed hands, Ava. Needed someone else to run the farm with me. He’s…” She closed her eyes. “The real Tom’s gone. But I called his name and I begged, and his body woke up.” Her voice tightened. “There’s not much difference between before and now. He still sits in the kitchen after working, and I turn on the radio so he can listen to the game. If there’s anything really left of him … I hope it makes him happy.”

“He’s … not really in there?” Ava felt a wrench inside her heart.

She felt Betsy’s headshake. “If there is … maybe he’s one of the shadows out there at sunset. I don’t know what would make me feel better. It being him in there … or one of them.”Ava shuddered. “So that’s why he’s working after dark.”

“Yeah.” Betsy exhaled. “So people don’t come over and try to talk to him. And, well. Sunlight makes the rot go faster.” She sounded sick.

Ava poked Tom’s arm. It was cool to the touch and oddly flaccid, making her recoil. She could remember him chasing her and Betsy around the playground when they were eight. He’d fallen and cried, and they’d laughed as children did, because he’d deserved it for chasing them.

Flickers of memory, fleeting before her eyes. Baseball games, sitting next to Betsy in the stands. Tom had been a catcher, Eric their team’s starting pitcher. Young and confident. Ready to take on the world.

Their first double-date, back in ’74, all four of them crammed into a tiny booth at the diner where she and Betsy had worked. Laughing and eating ice cream and listening to something sappy by John Denver on the radio — what had it been … Sunshine on my Shoulders. Eric wrapping an arm around her shoulders and whispering that she was his sunshine. That she made the whole world better. But love isn’t enough, I wasn’t enough, I failed him, somehow or he failed me, or …  “Oh, god, Betsy. You want me to do that to Eric? I mean, I don’t even know how—”

“It’s about blood. And need. And love. You have enough of all three and … they come. Whether you want them to or not, I guess.” Betsy’s voice wavered. “It would mean that you could keep working this place. And what’s the other option? Sell out to SantAgra? Go live in a retirement home in Billings and slowly turn into a potted plant? Living for the days that Brandt comes to visit. Except, of course, he won’t.”

Brutal words. Devastating. Except … they were true. Ava licked her lips. Couldn’t turn to look at where Eric still slumped in the chair. What kind of a choice is that? I can surrender, or I can keep fighting. Keep trying to win crops out of the land and raise a great big middle finger to the company that pushed my husband to his death. The company that took the light out of my life. “There’s always a catch in the old stories, Betsy. What is it?”

A pause. “They need to eat. I… did mention the blood part, right?”

“They?” Ava repeated blankly. “Are there others?” Then, her heart hammering against her ribs, she yelped, “All the disappearances! Elizabeth Anne Nilsson Carter! How many other draugr are there?”

“I don’t know! Some of the disappeared, yeah, I’ve visited their families, and there they are. Just like Tom. Sitting at their kitchen tables, deadalive. But the rest?” A pause. “I don’t know.” She shuddered.  “People keep dying. Or killing themselves. Newspaper in Billings called it an epidemic of depression that’s being ignored by the rest of the country.”

That vision of the cities and the coasts as a chewing maw flashed back into Ava’s mind. “Of course they ignore it. They care more that their coffee beans are ethically-sourced than about paying their own farmers here at home a living wage.”

“I know, Ava. Christ, how I know.”

Ava put a hand over her face. “Is there anyone left in the county who’s alive?” Another shift of her inner vision, showing her farmhouses peopled solely by shadows and the dead. Fields worked by the dead in service of the living…

Betsy made a shushing sound. “Don’t be overdramatic. We’re alive. Missy Baker. Edith Sorenson.” Misery in her voice now, clear and true. “But yeah, as I said, there’s a price. They need feeding. A gift of human blood mixed with their native soil, once a week. My kids … they know. They donate in shifts with me. But you… ” A wave to encompass the emptiness of the farm. The fact that Brandt hadn’t visited in a year. “We could spell you a bit, give a little blood now and again—”

Ava’s eyes drifted to the SantAgra land over the fence from her own. To where their silos towered like sleeping giants. To where their corporate office building stood in town, cloaked by darkness and distance. “That’d be kind of you,” she whispered. “But maybe we could find some other donors.”

“Ava.” Betsy’s voice turned stern. “My kids work for SantAgra. So do a lot of other folks who’ve had no other choice—”

“I know. I wasn’t saying to make us serfs the donors.” Ava lifted her face, feeling her expression harden into stone. “I meant our corporate overlords. The SantAgra management building in town, for instance.”

“We can’t—”

“They’ve been eating us alive all this time.” They chew and chew and spit us out—

“We’ve got to keep this quiet, Ava.”

Ava closed her eyes. “For now, yeah. But what happens when all of us are dead, Betsy? When every last one of us gives up and becomes … this?”

Betsy’s face tautened. “I don’t know. I’m not giving up. And neither should you.”

Ava closed her eyes.”If Eric wakes up … I’ll give him my blood. Though I don’t know how…” She closed her eyes, her throat going tight. “I don’t know how I’m going to look at him.” He’s not even there, it’s not him anymore, but I can’t…

“You get used to it.” Betsy’s voice roughened. “You can get used to anything. But the question might be … if you really want him back. If you need him back.”

Her friend stood and walked away. Giving her the time to think about what she wanted. What she needed.

Ava went indoors. Found a red ball cap, and, trying not to cry, slid it over the ruin of her husband’s head. Looked for a clean shirt, one that wasn’t covered in … everything. Tried to dress him.

But she couldn’t. She sat on the steps. Betsy approached and took over, giving her shoulder a squeeze.

In a dazed mumble, sitting on the splintering stairs, Ava whispered, “Eric, if your ghost’s around, I hope you can forgive me. ‘Cause I’m going to fight. I’m going to remind everyone out there that while the earth comes into us through the wheat and through the bread, transubstantiated … that the bread we give them is our flesh. Made of our toil, our sweat, our blood. And that while we’ve given it to them in love, there’s no love left in us for them. They’ve eaten it all. And while we loved each other … it’s not enough. There has to be more. There has to be fidelity. No running off ahead without me.”

Her eyes opened, fixed on the SantAgra fields. An image formed in her mind — an army of farmers walking out of the golden fields, skeletal and pale. Some carrying rusted old scythes left by their great-grandparents. Flanked by shadows rising up from the earth like tornadoes, a thousand faces blurring into one. Marching towards the gaping maws of the cities.

She didn’t want that apocalyptic vision. Denied it. Knew that it was born of grief and rage. But part of her yearned for it. Could see her own shadow sliding over the dark earth beside Eric’s, her shambling body walking beside his.

Ava covered her face. God, don’t let it come to pass. But if it does …  let them know that what they’ve sowed, they’ll also reap.

“Come back,” she whispered, tears caught and channeled by the lines on her face, spreading like bitter irrigation. Falling to the black mud at her feet. “Come back, Eric, I need you. I can’t do it alone.”

Betsy’s hand touched her shoulder, and Ava turned her head in time to see Eric’s body sit up. Even in the dim light filtering through the screen door, she knew it wasn’t her husband’s soul behind those eyes. Something else filled him now. Something older, and far more inimical. She jabbed her hand on one of the wooden splinters of the porch, letting the blood well up, and then picked up a clod of earth, softened by the rain and her own tears. Let it mix with her blood, and then lifted her hand towards whatever now dwelled in her husband’s flesh.

He licked it from her palm like a horse, blood and earth staining his face. And then stood there, waiting patiently. Waiting for her instructions. Ava licked her lips. “Well, don’t just stand there,” she told Eric. “We’ve got work to do.”

And her eyes lifted past the fence-line once more, towards SantAgra’s land.

About the author and the piece

Deborah L. Davitt tells us that this story was rejected at least 30 times, which makes it exactly the sort of piece we wanted to introduce you to with Hell Itself: a beautiful story that just isn’t what anyone else publishes. For more about her poetry and prose, see www.deborahldavitt.com. 

 

©2025 by Deborah L. Davitt. All rights reserved. May not be used for A.I. training.