Fielded
Katie Harms
Willodean lived in a green cornfield under a white sky. In the summer the boys would run on the hard dirt path and Willodean would run with them barefoot and empty-faced. She’d spit as she ran and the boys wouldn’t look at her until after she had already gone, the stalks rustling in her wake. She had two friends, both with blonde hair and blonde skin and blonde teeth just the same as her. They were tough, too, and they left their bikes at the start of the path and wandered until they found her. Some days it would be so hot, the white sun and white sky and fat black horseflies all biting at their necks and ears and ankles until they stripped off their shirts, tying them to the legs of a wooden memorial bench that was sat across from a barn beneath a cottonwood tree. The three of them wore training bras not quite the color of their skin, a puckered seam stitched down the sternum.
Jenna was the meanest, but she didn’t know it, neither did Willodean or Sally. Sally knew the most, but this didn’t matter because none of them cared about knowing what they knew or didn’t. Willodean could talk to the mice that sprinted across her feet in the cornfield, but she didn’t tell Jenna or Sally because they wouldn’t be interested in what the mice typically had to say. She couldn’t talk to anything else, not the cottonwoods or the corn stalks or the white sky and the light behind it, just the small brown field mice half-earthed in the loamy black soil.
Willodean looked out the window and waited for the boys. She looked past the rusted car metal and car tires, the cans and bottles lined up across the wood and chicken-wire gate to the goat pen, the ones her dad and his friends would shoot at when they drank. Willodean and Jenna and Sally drank too—once—but it hadn’t made them want to shoot things. The three just walked through town and looked at everyone. Beer, they thought, made everyone blurry, like they all belonged when they usually didn’t.
As she waited for the boys the cicada cry was almost louder than the mice, but never quite. She heard the mice but she didn’t listen. She waited. And when she saw the boys, their wet skin in the white light, their feet harder than the dirt, she sprinted as fast as the thick corn and half-hidden mice would let her, the screen door snapping at her hair as it trailed too slow behind her.
Willodean was most interested in Johnny, but, like the rest of the boys, he never looked at her. She wondered if she couldn’t be seen. Johnny ran easy, all limbs, joints stony as a goat’s head and loose as a goat’s aimless eyes. He had hair on his legs and none on his chin and Willodean liked that because she was the same. Her lungs never hurt but she stopped all the same, more or less in the same place each time, when she tired of running in the middle of the boys without being seen. She considered it. Their bikes were never stolen from the start of the path, their shirts never untied from the legs of the wooden memorial bench. Willodean could talk to mice, and Sally was smart and Jenna was mean, but it didn’t seem to mean anything.
So she’d turn off into the cornfield as if she lived there, in the field itself, not the trailer behind it with the shooting cans and the goats and the rust. And sometimes she would stop in the field, right in one spot, the soft fur of mice between her toes, cornsilk against her arms, the white sun pressing against her skull of blonde hair, and she’d watch Johnny through the stalks as he ran towards where the dirt became the sky and he was the one who couldn’t be seen.
Not one of them could climb a cottonwood. No one could, they were too long and skinny and branchless. Sally stood on the backrest of the wooden memorial bench in her training bra and cotton shorts and reached for a branch twice her height away. She reached on tiptoes until she fell, skinning herself on the way down. The blood was red and dusted with dirt and the three stared at it and decided what to do. Sally’s arm dangled as though it was broken even though it wasn’t. Willodean figured the mice would smell the blood, the new rust and rot of it, and they’d have a lot to say when she got home. Jenna picked up a stick and pressed its tip into the deepest well. They left the blood there, in rivulets down Sally’s arm and on the memorial bench and on the path and they kept wandering until their legs got tired, Jenna trailing her stick behind her until the dirt scraped clean, Sally trailing her arm behind her until the blood stopped dripping flat and round.
They lay in a crop circle waiting for Sally’s arm to dry up. They counted the stunted red heads of vultures as they passed overhead in their own circles and the three girls thought their own thoughts. Willodean thought about Johnny and his hairy legs. When she pictured them, she imagined herself so small that, when she looked up, she couldn’t see beyond his stony knees. Sally thought about everyone, the walking mailman and her math teacher, the women who gardened in the community garden. She couldn’t picture that it meant anything to any of them. Jenna thought about her mom’s paperbacks and what it would be like to be kissed by someone and want it. She couldn’t picture it but tried, eyes closed, the white light cold against her mouth. When the occasional cloud slipped across the sky they all breathed as if they hadn’t been, or had only just remembered they should.
When the sun settled into something more tolerable, holding less of the day and more of the night, blurry and warm like beer, they wandered back to the bench to untie their shirts. Sally’s arm no longer dangled; it was just an arm. Willodean listened for the mice but heard none. Jenna scraped her stick as they went, dragging it across the span of cornstalks as though it were a wooden fence. Sally’s stain was gone when they got to the bench and Willodean listened again for the mice but heard only the silence of stomachs filled with blood.
On a day so white Willodean could hardly see, only a few boys were running. She squinted through the cans and the corn and the light to see if Johnny was one of them and he was. She ran so hard and so fast her hair didn’t catch in the door and her shins splintered against the hard dirt as if her bones were truly breaking but they weren’t, just like Sally’s arm. Her emptied face turned red with effort and after a few minutes of running with the too few boys Johnny did something he had never done before. Johnny turned his head and he saw her. His eyes were the same as his knees, stony and loose, aimless and rolling in their sockets as he looked at her. Willodean looked back. Johnny’s face was red too, and she couldn’t remember if it had been before—surely it couldn’t get that way from the white light. Maybe she had never seen his face before, maybe she had only thought she had. Maybe the mice had told her, which is different than seeing it for herself. But today his wet skin was hot and swollen but not from exertion, and his cheeks were pock-marked and pimpled, the pustules pink and puss-filled.
Then came the spot in the cornfield Willodean usually turned and disappeared into. She heard her mice and they were loud, as loud as the red on Johnny’s face. She couldn’t stand it, the chatter in her ears and being seen by Johnny’s eyes all at once. When she turned into the cornfield she ran until she stopped, the hard pounding of feet against the dirt path fading behind the mice, the soft silk of the husks curling from the corn and towards her body, sliding against her arms and legs and stomach. Her footsteps and Johnny’s that followed were quieter in the soil, and when she stopped in her usual spot everything was as still and silent as the white sun in the white sky.
Johnny could still see her, in her watching spot in her green cornfield. He ran a finger across a hanging corn leaf, then twisted and untwisted the green blade around his finger, so slick and thick and shiny he could give himself a cut. Johnny looked at the puckered seam up Willodean’s sternum and sucked his teeth. Willodean didn’t look at Johnny’s red face but at his finger and she worried about the blood, the blade one twist away from slicing the belly of it, right down the middle to his palm. A mouse ran across her bare foot, something soft twitched between her toes; they were anticipating the cut too, she could hear it. While the mice and Willodean thought about blood and Johnny’s finger Johnny had unsucked his teeth and used his mouth to kiss her. He had to bend down to do it.
“Do you live there?” Johnny asked when he was done kissing her.
Willodean looked at the trailer, at the cans and bottles and the wood and chicken-wire gate, at the rusted cars and scattered tires. She thought she heard a goat bleat, but it was just the mice.
“Yes,” she said, and she looked back at Johnny.
Johnny had gone back to not looking at her. He considered the trailer for a moment longer and then nodded before running from the cornfield back out onto the dirt path, his body moving as easy and loose and aimless as ever.
That night Willodean thought the mice had woken her, but it was just Johnny scratching at the screen on her window. She laid in her bed until the scratching stopped and then she got up to get it. She peered through the screen and he was still there, leaning against the side of her house and staring at the cornfield which shone brighter than the moon at night. Willodean slid the window screen open and it scraped loudly against the dirt and dead flies caught in the track. She let in the night and Johnny’s long legs, followed by his body and then his head. The smell of night was different than the emptiness of day, and when Johnny stood in the middle of her room the floorboards creaked and the air felt like something. The mice weren’t quiet but they weren’t loud, and they weren’t in the field but in her walls. Willodean sat on her bed and listened.
When Johnny ran he ran like the rest of the boys, all skin except his shorts. Now he wore jeans and a white tee-shirt and cowboy boots and his hair was slicked back as though he were older than he was. He bent again, not to kiss her but to take off his boots so they wouldn’t rattle the house when he walked. His face was still red; it still held the day in it. With socked feet he walked toward Willodean and the bed and for a brief moment the patter of the mice was abruptly cut off by the sound of Johnny’s belt buckle and zipper, the only two sounds in the room.
Willodean lay back and she felt Johnny’s bundled denim at her ankles, his hairy legs and stony knees and goat eyes pressed on top of her. She heard his hot breath and the mice and the rust of her metal bedframe shifting under their weight. She looked at the small gleaming eyes—not Johnny’s—that reflected the night; a mouse on the windowsill, one eking its way through a holed knot in the floorboard. They usually stayed in the field but sometimes they came into the house, the first time being a few months prior when Willodean had menstruated for the first time. The mice had come and nudged her awake, skitting across her stomach and between her thighs, chewing through the bedding before she could scrub it clean in the bathroom sink.
When Johnny left through the open window the night stayed and she stripped her sheets off her bed and folded them into the corner, stain-side up for the mice. They said nothing as they flit from their hiding places between the floorboards and the in walls to the blood in the corner, pausing only to bite at her ankles like horseflies.
The boys never ran on Saturday or Sunday.
On Sunday, after church, Sally and Jenna rode their bikes down the hard dirt path and met Willodean at the wooden memorial bench. Sally’s blood was still gone and Willodean used Jenna’s stick to trace crop circles in the dirt at her feet.
“Was it like my mom’s books?” Jenna asked, her bike falling to the ground by the bench, front wheel still spinning.
Sally’s bike spun too, and she sat on the backrest of the bench, above and behind Willodean, and looked up at the tall cottonwood. She picked at her crusted and bloodless scabs. Sitting so high up on the back of the bench, her legs dangled like her arm had days ago.
The tree leaves shook in the white breeze, silver when they showed their stomachs. This morning the cottonwoods were louder than the mice—all three girls could hear the trees; they were normal trees and cottonwood leaves always rustled—so Willodean didn’t think much of it. “More or less,” Willodean said, shrugging her shoulders against her blonde hair, turning her blonde face up towards the sun. It never made her face red; she never felt its heat if it had any. It seemed to have heat for Johnny, his blood at the surface of his skin when he ran beneath it.
Jenna nodded and Sally knew Willodean was lying, Sally being the smartest of the three.
Before Sally could try to climb the tree again they left the bench and wandered, Willodean dragging Jenna’s stick. When they reached the spot Willodean usually turned into when she no longer wanted to run with the boys, the wind stopped blowing and the cottonwoods went as green and quiet as the cornfield. The wind was replaced by a smell, the rustling replaced by a silence. Willodean followed the silence of the mice and Jenna and Sally followed the smell of rust and rot and dirt and corn.
The cornstalks brushed them soft as silk and the sky was as empty as it always had been, a white nothing holding the heatless sun. When they turned into the cornfield Willodean had dropped the stick and Jenna had picked it up. She was last in the line of girls and she pulled her stick low and slow behind her across the bottoms of the stalks. All three could hear the flies, fat and black and buzzing. All three could smell the smell, and it filled them where the sun had emptied them, right up their throats and around their tongues.
They stopped at the spot Willodean would usually stop, at the place in the cornfield where she’d watch the boys through the stalks; the place she’d watch Johnny as he ran towards where the dirt became the sky and he was the one who couldn’t be seen. But Johnny wasn’t running because it was Sunday, and because he was lying in the spot on a flattened bed of cornstalks, green shafts bent backwards and broken like Johnny’s splayed limbs. He was bloodless and half-eaten and the silent mice gorged and full wandered his bones and emerged from the hollows of his stony joints and aimless eyes. Jenna poked his bleached skin with her stick and the mice didn’t scatter.
When the police came they stretched yellow plastic tape at the start of the path where everyone gathered on their feet and on their bikes. Willodean and Jenna and Sally were questioned and then left alone. The goats bleated, the vultures with the stunted red heads circled. Willodean’s dad rubbed the back of his neck as sweat dripped from the beer bottle in his other hand, down his wrist and to his elbow where his sleeved was rolled-up and wrinkled. The world was probably warm to him, the sky as blue as it ever could be on a hot summer day like this one. Nonetheless he told Willodean to go inside as they wheeled the gurney through the green and down the hard dirt path, and she listened, waiting at the window for the cornfield to turn as blonde as her, when the crows would come to roost in the dry stalks and hunt for mice.
Katie Harms received her MFA in Creative Writing from Ohio State University. She was shortlisted for The Malahat Review‘s 2024 Open Season Award, Writer’s Digest’s 93rd Annual Writing Competition, and the 2024 Novel Slices Contest. Her work can be found in Action, Spectacle and Creation Magazine and is forthcoming in Every Day Fiction, The Other Journal, and Qu Magazine.
Back to Table of Contents for Translation and Transition