The war began in the summer, during the hottest months of the year. As the seasons passed into years with no end in sight, those sweat-filled evenings became a time of glum reflection for those who lived in The Hovel. Sore and exhausted from a day’s work, mothers and fathers would lie awake and reflect on the time that had passed. The first and second summer, most of them could fall asleep with some kernels of hope. But as the war went on, they came to accept that their children weren’t coming home. 

The one lonely stretch of road that bisected their little farming community had never been a bustling highway. But shortly after the war, it felt abandoned, which had the secondary effect of making The Hovel and its inhabitants feel abandoned as well. Months after bands of soldiers had passed through and taken their children with them, the electricity disappeared, effectively eliminating any word from the front lines. The world had changed yet again, so they did their best to keep up, restoring old manual tools and leaving more crops than usual to dry on the stalk. They collected seeds in coffee cans and jam jars, hiding them in the dark cool of their root cellars. What future they were saving for was unclear, but it just felt like the right thing to do, whatever was happening somewhere in the distance. The earth still lived, and there was still good, cold water from underground. Rabbits and squirrels and mink to trap. They passed the time chatting and arguing with their neighbors, wondering out loud how long a war could last without new children to fight it. Wondering idly when they’d die. They made the best of it. 

Just like before the war, a favorite topic of conversation was food. There were no seed banks anywhere nearby that they knew of, so many fruits and vegetables ceased to exist outside of their memories. They daydreamed of shiny red cranberries and tall, stately stalks of asparagus. Crunchy, dusty peanuts and bright, juice-filled citrus fruit. They would head to their kitchens, stomachs gurgling, and eat the same sunchokes and corn and alliums as they had for years now. 

Occasionally, a stranger would arrive: always scared, always hungry. Sometimes armed and often bleeding. And the farmers in The Hovel would descend on their new guest like brooding mother hens, feeding them, cleaning them, tending to their hurts. It didn’t matter what uniform the visitor wore, and often they didn’t wear one at all. And after a few days of kindness and recovery, the caller would be on their way. Sometimes they’d leave the way they came, back to the far-off warzone somewhere to the south. But more often than not, they went in the opposite direction, leaving rifles and clubs and other weapons behind. The farmers collected these implements and kept them locked in a communal shed, unsure how to dispose of them, but not interested in keeping them handy. 

No visitor to The Hovel could ever be described as dapper, or even bathed. But the latest was exactly that. Sharp, creased, and shiny from his pomaded hair to his click-clack wingtips. He came from the direction of the war, but he didn’t carry a gun or a club or even a walking stick. The springtime pollen that coated the ground kicked up around him, creating a yellow cloud that never seemed to adhere to his suit or his shoes. Old farmers stood in their doorways and watched him march determinedly to the center of town. What was once The Hovel’s only stoplight had long since died and become a relic of the past. A nostalgia piece on better days, a rotten reminder on others. 

The Stranger considered the small crowd that had steadily approached, and held his hands up placatingly, though no one was saying anything. A corn farmer named John Velázquez watched from his porch with a bemused grin. In a time long ago, he and his wife had been regular theatergoers, spending their evenings watching bright, garish musicals and somber, sensitive dramas. He knew the way this was supposed to play out. The smooth talker would offer them snake oil and try to charm them into buying it or otherwise trading with them for it. He’d haggle and make absurd claims. Velázquez was looking forward to it. Nothing much happened in The Hovel anymore, and even the prospect of being swindled was more interesting than planting dent corn. But instead of a booming voice and a raucous sales pitch, the Stranger said something that Velázquez couldn’t hear from his porch. But whatever it was, it was enough to send one member of the crowd away. Curious, John got closer, nudging his neighbors and asking what the Stranger had said.

“Asked for a glass of water,” someone said. And indeed, someone handed the dandy man a mug of well water that he drank gratefully. 

“I’m seeing a lot of corn, am I right?” the man in the suit asked. It was a confusing question, because it was barely halfway through April. If he’d come in the summer, the Stranger would have seen acres upon acres of the stuff. Stalks as tall as any man in The Hovel. But as it stood, the only corn that existed were the greenhouse-grown sprouts raised in anticipation of the last frost. 

“Carrots, too, I’ll bet,” the Stranger continued. “Onions? Potatoes? Am I leaving anything out?”

“Sunchokes,” said Willy Todd, who had been growing the tubers for more than a decade. 

“Sunchokes,” repeated the Stranger. “How are those coming along?”

“They grow like weeds,” Todd said. “I’m sick to death of them.”

The Stranger chuckled and accepted another mug of water.

“Can we help you with something, sir?” Velázquez found himself asking.

“I’m passing through,” the Stranger said. “We’re on the other side of the war, you see.”

“The war’s over?” asked Peggy Gladly, who had watched all four of her children march toward the conflict without returning. 

“Not over,” said the Stranger. “But close. We’re almost there. Another year, I’d say. Maybe two.”

Several farmers grumbled, not feeling like two years was “close” to the end of anything. 

“I’m walking the road, looking for communities like yours,” the Stranger said. “My orders are to give you these.”

And he produced a black leather satchel, though Velázquez had no idea where he’d been keeping it before. It was absurdly large – the size of a shoe box – and tied off with olive-colored paracord. The Stranger handed it to Todd, who was the closest to him.

“It’s something new – something that’ll help our soldiers fight,” he said.

“A superfood crop?” someone asked. 

“Something like that,” the Stranger said, finishing his water. 

Todd pulled the green string and opened the bag. The seeds inside were a shocking ruby color and as minuscule as carrot seeds. 

“You know your fields better than I do,” said the Stranger. “But whatever space you can spare for this new crop would be much appreciated by people on the front lines.”

“How far should we space it?” someone asked.

“How much water does it need?” asked another.

The Stranger put his hands back up, a smile playing on his lips.

“Don’t you worry about that,” he said. “You think sunchokes grow like weeds? Wait until you see these.”

The crowd gathered around Todd and the leather sack, passing it from one pair of curious hands to another. 

“If it’s for the kids out there fighting, I can spare a quarter-acre at least,” said Gladly, who left to get a jar. 

“Hell, I’d be happy just to grow something other than onions,” someone else said, leaving for their own receptacle. 

When it was Velázquez’s turn to hold the bag, he realized that no one had asked the obvious question: just what the hell were they growing? He swiveled his head, searching the faces around him, but by then the Stranger was gone.

#

There was enough in the bag for everyone to have a handful, which amounted to hundreds of seeds at least. Some farmers spaced them carefully in their own beds, while others sprinkled them liberally among other crops, just as they would with radishes. Velázquez was more prudent, sowing a scattering of them in a raised bed his wife had once used for flowers. Flowers had been important to Pilar. If it had been up to Velázquez, they would have grown nothing but practical things: vegetables and herbs and hemp. But his wife wanted to bring something into the world that served no purpose beyond its own beauty. And then their daughter was born, and it seemed to both of them that this goal had been achieved. And when Dorothy marched away to war with The Hovel’s other children, they kept growing flowers: zinnias and mums and dahlias. And not long after that, Velázquez found her hunched over the raised bed, unmoving on a blanket of petals. He buried her with those blooms and had left the bed fallow in the years since. Perhaps that was why he was dedicating so much time to seeds about which he knew nothing. The off-chance that they’d be lovely. Something that Pilar would have enjoyed. He watered the soil and watched the sun do its work. 

“Alright then,” he said before returning to his cornfield.

#

The following morning brought a warm breeze, the promise of afternoon rain, and the first reaching fingers of sprouts in the garden bed. Velázquez’d never seen a plant grow so fast, and at first he assumed that these weren’t the Stranger’s mysterious seeds, but some errant scattering of weeds brought by the wind. But it was the same throughout The Hovel. Delicate green shoots grew anywhere the old farmers had sown seed. They marvelled and wondered aloud what it was they were growing. 

“Some sort of vegetable, for sure,” said Ben Kettle, who, in his excitement, had begun tearing up a small plot of tulips over his wife’s protestations. That evening, when the work was finished and a spring shower had begun, he tossed the last handful of Stranger seeds across the suddenly abused earth. He let the weight of rain bury them beneath the soil. 

Another morning brought another push of growth – the stems were now above ankle height and dotted with tiny, saucer-shaped infant leaves. Willy Todd pulled up another bed of sunchokes and emptied his seed jar. Others followed suit, and by the end of the day, Velázquez suspected that at least ten acres of the Hovel’s land was sown with a plant no one could identify. Though he was impressed with the green carpet that now covered his wife’s raised bed, he didn’t feel the urge to sow any more. The remainder he poured into a glass canning jar, which he placed in the root cellar along with a handful of onions and some moldering farmer’s almanacs from years past. 

After a week, the stalks had grown to waist height. True leaves had appeared, with the first closed buds and their promise of secret color. Their growth left Velázquez feeling nervous in a way he couldn’t quite put into words. Perhaps it was less the plants and more the gleeful excitement that seemed to wrap around everyone else. There was a hum of excitement that ran through the town at a level he hadn’t seen in years.

“What are we going to do when something sprouts?” he asked a few of the other farmers one afternoon while they played checkers. “How are we even going to know the right time to harvest? It’s not like they’re following the same rules as the other crops.” And the others nodded, acknowledging these perfectly valid questions before jumping a plastic button forward or backward on their respective boards. 

            “We’ll know when the time’s right,” said Peggy Gladly. “King me.”

#

Velázquez wouldn’t really appreciate the mystery crops until the end of the first month, when they finally bloomed. Tall as cornstalks, the now-wooden central stem reached out with whip-thin arms that coiled like cucumber vines. And at the end of each spiraling green branch was a flower the size of his fist. It was a soft, pink color, and petals overlapped each other in a seemingly endless way, like the pages of a book thrown open. Later, Velázquez wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest to find out that each individual farmer had flowers of a shade unique to them: ice-cold blues, bonfire oranges, and hyperactive purples. No work was done that day. Something about the speed of their growth made the farmers know that their time with these blooms was severely limited. Each of them spent the remaining hours of the day staring stupidly into the peeling, velvet scales, every now and then daring to graze them with the softest parts of their hands. In the months and years to come, they’d never talk about the force that kept each of them pinned to the spot. Velázquez would never know anyone else’s motivation for losing the day with their faces mere inches from the towering crops and their blooms. All he knew was that their scent was something intoxicating. Something he couldn’t at first put his finger on. It wasn’t until he finally crawled into bed that night that he realized what it was. 

The flowers smelled of his wife’s perfume.

#

By the next day, the flowers had shed their petals. There was a general disappointment, but nobody complained too much. They’d had a blissful 12 hours with their spring-fed plants, and that was better than nothing. That week, the bare ovaries of the crops began to distend and take shape, forcefully working themselves into the shape of fruit. Though the towering plants themselves were uniform, the various berries and nibs seemed to have nothing in common with each other. One stretched like an ear of corn while the other sprouted the thick tongues of succulents. The farmers forgot about their usual crops and dedicated themselves entirely to watching over this new growth. The days were spent in quiet concentration, as if they were on patrol for someone they didn’t know. The nights were long and filled with a disquieting sense of dread and fear that no one understood. 

Years later, Willy Todd, full of corn mash liquor, would tell a story about waking up in the middle of the night to some alien yowling sound. At first, he assumed it was coyotes, but he couldn’t think of the last time he’d had to shoo the scavengers away from his fields. It had been before the war, that much he knew for sure. He crept outside and found himself drawn to a place in his plot that had once been overrun with celery. The sound was shrill but somehow unsure of itself – as if it was testing the waters with this new voice. It grew louder and louder until Todd found the highest plant in the bunch: twice as tall as himself. It wavered in the stillness of the full moon, and the old farmer swore he could see movement near its towering apex: a curl of lips and a twitching red muscle that stretched and twisted as it pushed the noise and sounds together, trying to create something that sounded like words. 

The next evening, Velázquez found what appeared to be an ear of corn in the Stranger’s crops. It was alone – the only fruit of its kind, apparently. Being a corn farmer, Velázquez almost unconsciously pulled the ear from the stalk, which came off with a wet, thick snap. He peeled the familiar green husk back, expecting to see some variation on the vegetable he’d made his life’s work. What he found was roughly the same size as the rows of kernels he was used to, but colored dirty ivory and indented with tiny, irregular gullies. Startled, he let out a cry and dropped the ear into the raised bed where it rattled apart, sending molars, bicuspids and incisors into the dirt. When he’d regained enough composure, he was only slightly shocked to find the only evidence left of the freak vegetable was a few silk-laden husks. 

There was a pall of fear that settled over The Hovel that no one spoke of. No words were exchanged, let alone plans of action. By the time the stalks had reached their zenith, taller than any barn in the county, each man and woman in the town assumed their own individual apocalypse, watching the towering vegetation from attic windows or the roofs of sheds. The cyclopean plant life felt like beacons screaming to the heavens, attempting to catch the attention of gods, devils, or a combination of the two. They stood unmoving against the brick red of the evening sky, monoliths of the cruel, forgotten gods of the earth. As Velázquez fell asleep that night, he was sure he could hear them crying out for acres and acres. 

#

The crops were gone in the morning. As if they’d collapsed in on themselves, all that remained were the seemingly untouched stretches of earth that the farmers had started with. There were no dead plants, no detritus. 

But there were bodies.

Stretched out across the soil were young women and men, nude and the color of the flowers that had come before. Unafraid for the first time in days, the people of The Hovel approached them, helping them to their unsteady feet. Weeping, Ben Kettle covered two men in his field with horse blankets, guiding them to his home. From his front door, Velázquez could see Peggy Glady bringing a pot of polenta and butter to the quartet of multi-colored young adults that crowded around her. She went so far as to feed spoonfuls to each of them individually, laughing like a new mother. 

The woman in his wife’s raised bed met Velázquez with soft, gentle eyes that he recognized. He took her hand and she allowed him to walk her to his kitchen, where he wrapped her in an old robe before spending the better part of the day cooking. She ate everything he put in front of her: fried eggs, cornbread, roasted carrots and freshly fried chips. She ate until the sun went down and Velázquez asked her the questions he knew he should. Where did she come from? Who was she? And by the end of the twelfth unanswered question, he had the feeling he was staring at himself. 

They had another day with the fruits of their labor, and each farmer spent it differently. Peggy Gladly read stories to her little cluster, and they listened silently and contentedly as she recounted fairy tales of knights and dragons and soup made from a stone. Ben Kettle taught his two young men about swinging a scythe to cut down wheat in the fall. But Velázquez and his girl just spent the hours sitting in idle silence and watching the clouds crawl across the horizon. He thought of asking her more questions or even introducing himself, but ultimately decided against it. That night, he made rabbit stew, and the girl imitated Velázquez as he mopped up the last puddles of broth with a stale edge of cornbread. 

#

And of course, they were gone in the morning.

They’d risen early, even by a farmer’s standards. They’d considerately closed the doors behind them and excused themselves without saying goodbye, taking only the secondhand clothes they wore. Later, someone would find a broken lock that once belonged to a communal shed near the town’s center. Once filled with forgotten rifles, clubs, and ammunition, the little outbuilding was empty. Dewey footprints heading south on The Hovel’s road were the only evidence that they’d even existed. 

Some residents treated the loss with grim fatalism, returning to their original cornfields and onion plots with silent frowns. On the other hand, Peggy Gladly’s wailing could be heard for days. Another season ground to a halt. Another harvest and another winter ahead. More firewood, more boiling pots of stock made of bones and parsnips. In his root cellar, Velázquez eked out the time sweeping the hard floor and cleaning cabinets and dusty surfaces. When he found the canning jar full of seeds, he turned it over in his hands, watching them spill together like an hourglass filled with shiny red beetles. In the dim underground of his cellar, he contemplated the spring and what he planned on sowing.