November 6, 2025
10:00 PM CST

They used to say the land out by Weller’s Hollow had a hunger of its own. That it would yield more than it should, more than nature allowed—but always at a cost.

Emmett Weller never put much stock in old talk. He was a practical man. A widower with cracked hands and a tired back. The kind of man who counted his blessings by the bushel.

So when his cornfields began to sprout a second harvest—in November—he didn’t ask questions.

Not aloud.

The moon had been strange that week, a sharp crescent hanging sideways like a sickle blade in the sky. Emmett worked long past dark under that bent moon, his oil lamp swinging from the plow handle.

The corn grew taller each night. Richer. Darker.

And when he brought the blade down, the stalks wept.

Red. Not sap. Blood.

The first time, he told himself it was rust. That’s what he said to his dog, Jasper, who wouldn’t go near the rows after that. The second time, he didn’t say anything.

Just sharpened the sickle and kept cutting.

There was meat on his table, and jars filled with preserves. The firewood stacked itself. The winds skirted his roof. The blessings were undeniable.

And so was the price.

One morning, Jasper was gone. No signs, no blood. Just absence.

The following week, neighbors stopped coming around. When the preacher visited, he stood at the edge of the field and refused to cross. “It don’t smell like soil anymore,” he muttered. “It smells like old promises.”

Emmett didn’t care.

By then, he had dreams—silver-eyed things whispering in plow-hand verse, teaching him to chant their names in a rhythm like hooves on hardpan.

Each time he repeated their syllables, the corn grew fatter. And his shadow got thinner.

He finished the second harvest on the final night of the crescent moon. The field lay bare behind him, and he stood in the silence, sickle still slick in his grip.

Then he saw it: one last stalk standing. Taller than the rest. Its leaves curled like fingers.

He approached it like a man climbing the gallows.

The stalk bent toward him.

Whispered his name.

When morning came, the field was empty again. All of it.

Even the house.

Even the barn.

No blood. No sign. Just a ring of frost, and in the center: a single crescent of corn, curved just like the moon.