by Erin McDermott
They were born under the waving stalks, in the mud, underneath a grey sky. Their first breath was ash and smoke, and their second was poison and dust. They had pink skin, round new flesh, red insides. But the lingering toxins in the air were already in their bones, passed on from their mothers and fathers, and it would work its way, from the inside and the out, until they looked like their parents.
Mottled green and grey flesh, soft to the touch. Black scars and scabs at the corners of the mouth, the nose, the eyes. Thin hair that fell out at the touch of the harsh wind. Cracked and chipped nails, and stomachs wrinkled and dried up like sick raisins. But they didn’t know what raisins were.
They lived under the watch of the cornstalks, which rose as high as the tallest man’s head and no taller. They wore the husks as clothes and wrapped the leaves around their feet for shoes, but fungus still grew between their toes. Damp seeped in, no matter what. There was no rain, but forever clouds. They had never seen blue before.
The children were riding on their parents’ backs, as they always did. The land rolled into hills, the muddy yellow stalks waving, making everything ripple like an ocean of sludge. There was nothing else, nothing forever. The children always shivered up there. They were used to the corn all around them, used to fighting through reeds and seeing through cracks, with a patch of emptiness overhead. Up above, everything was open. Turning their heads, they could see out, until the land was only a sickly smudge in the distance.
What wasn’t a smudge was the big black plume of smoke coming right for them. Trailing that smoke… was a strange shiny box. It flashed light into one child’s eyes and made her scream. The older ones tensed, locking eyes. They felt a rumbling under their feet, the sound of a thousand cuts at once, of stalks hitting the ground and tires plowing through the mud. The machines. The stampede of the big beasts, the beasts made of things so hard, bodies shattered on contact. The beasts with hard, shiny teeth that could move as fast as the wind, that belched blackness that made everyone cough harder than ever.
They ran. But for some, the corn was death as it had been life, and they couldn’t get through the stalks fast enough. They were on hands and knees, in the mud, stumbling over each other like when they first came into this world. And the machine passed over them. That was when everyone knew that inside, they were no longer pink and red, but black and grey. The corn got them all in the end.
They always had to keep moving. Keep on going and eating the corn from one area and walking to the next. Always keep moving. Never sleep in the same place twice. Even though they’d been born here, even though they knew nothing else but these stalks and this muddy land, they knew there was something more. There must be something more. Maybe if they found it, they could stop walking. They could eat something other than corn, but what would that taste like? Their bones were brittle, their eyes burning, their skin begging to be scraped off. Maybe somewhere else, it would be pink and whole and clean again. They walked in search of it. An end. And so they continued their race, in the hope that their children would find the dreamed-of place.
They left their dead behind, unburied. The mud would swallow them.
One day out of thousands, a child saw another great glass box, flashing light, trailing smoke. But she’d seen one like it before, and told her parents, and her parents told the rest. They were ready for it when they felt the rumbling in their feet. They ran away from the machine’s blades and wheel, but did not leave it behind completely. They stayed to watch, to see. And then one of them leaped onto the machine.
They all followed, climbing up, though they didn’t even know what up was. They gripped hard metal and plastic in their hands and saw the glass box at the top. Their finger and palms seared and burned, their bodies shaking with the rumbling of the engine, their lungs shriveling from the black smoke. But they kept on. They kept on until they reached the glass box and beat against the sides, hands slapping, elbows jabbing, feet kicking. And the glass cracked, and shattered.
Inside was nothing.
Nobody. Just a metal console with little grey buttons all shaped the same. No seat, and no steering wheel, though they would not have known what those things were just as they did not know what this harvester was. But it was still running, still chugging along, pulling in the stalks and spitting corn out behind. They all looked around and saw the smashed trail left in the machine’s wake, and then they lifted their eyes to the sky and the land.
The corn went on forever. There was nothing besides the corn, and there would be nothing besides the corn, going on into infinity.
It is hard to tell, in such a decrepit state as they were, if these people had any relation to the ones who came before. But they were most likely the descendants of those who built those machines, of the ones who planted that corn. Maybe they watched as the stalks burst up from beneath their houses and tore up the foundation, and the machines mowed down their streets until nothing was left but the perfect rows.
Things do tend to get away from people. And now the people must run from them.
