The Harvest

Sorrow

It took me almost a week to gather the courage to go to my parents and confront them with everything I had seen. But when I did, they sat me down at the kitchen table and explained it all.

Every year, in the last week of august, a Rhododendron blossom is left on the doorstep of a family. Five nights after that, the thing in the shadows comes and takes the family's child away. The child is never seen again, but the family is granted a wish and the town thrives for one more year. A bargain that can't be refused.

"But there must be a way to stop this!", I pleaded, almost petrified with fear.

They then told me about the family who had tried to defy the thing. A young family had found the Rhododendron on their porch and they did the unspeakable to their infant daughter to "save" her from the fate that awaited her. Five days passed without anything happening, until there was another plant on their doorstep. A cypress branch. They died that night, suffocated by cypress that had grown in their lungs. The whole house was still overgrown with said cypress today.

Nobody had ever tried to deny the monster its wish ever again.

It took me a very long time to get over the disappearence – and almost certainly the subsequent death – of my childhood friend. Or maybe I never got over it, not really, but at some point, I stopped crying myself to sleep. His death was never properly acknowledged by the adults, so I took it upon myself to make a little memorial for him. Nothing too special. I tied two small planks together, crudely carved his name in with a kitchen knife and placed it near a pond in the woods, where we had liked to spend our time. And I placed flowers there. Every single week.

The truth my parents had told me terrified me, of course. I appreciated their absolute honesty, but it caused a countless number of sleepless nights. I was afraid something would come for me in the night, take me away to some sort of hell or just kill me right then and there. Maybe devour me whole without leaving a drop of blood behind.

Nothing like that ever happened, of course. The monster never appeared outside of Harvest Week.