whispers in the wheatfield

Stranger In The Fields

"Jazzy, don't you know it's a terrible idea to go run into the cornfield in the dark?"

I stared back at my sisters, the TV illuminating their faces in the dim room. I had a decision to make.

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My name is Jazzy C. I'm 17 years old and I live on my family's farm. I help take care of it when my parents are out of town. It's just a little family farm, not a commercial farm or anything like that. My parents want me to take care of it when they're too old anymore, as I'm the oldest of three daughters, but honestly, I don't really want to. I don't see myself staying in the middle of Arkansas my whole life, and especially not after all the strange things that have been happening lately.

My parents were on a romantic trip for a week, so it was my sisters, Krystal, Morgan, and I taking care of the property while they were gone. There's not much around here, lots of privacy and such, a little too much in my opinion; except for this one night.

It started later on in the night as it was approaching time to go to bed. My sisters do schoolwork online, and Krystal was in her room on her laptop, doing work. Morgan and I were just hanging out, watching some dumb show. All three of us kind of want to get out of the farm lifestyle, especially me, since I'm the oldest and in the prime of my teens.

One dreaded part of farm life is the predators, though. Not just the animals that come and eat your produce, but the people that come and steal from you. Believe it or not, it happens. It hasn't happened many times to us, but it does happen. We have a few guns in the house for this exact reason.

Our two dogs outside suddenly started going crazy in the backyard, something scared them for sure. I first thing went outside to the yard to see what they were barking at. They both were looking in the direction of the crops, going crazy. "Shut up!" I yelled. The dogs fell silent.

I stepped right in front of the crops and listened. I heard a whistling from inside the cornfield. It was undoubtedly a human's whistling. This was the first time I was experiencing a trespasser on the property with my dad not here. I had to hurry inside to get one of the guns. The dogs started barking again.

"Someone's outside in the cornfield, I have to go chase them away." I uttered to my sisters, searching the house frantically.

"Jazzy, don't you know it's a terrible idea to go run into the cornfield in the dark?" Morgan protested.

They knocked some sense into me when I realized they were right; I also realized how downright terrifying that would be. So instead, I went out back to the dogs, once more going crazy,  barking in the direction of the crops. I aimed the gun into the air and fired off a shot, which echoed into the night, silencing the dogs.

"GET OFF OUR LAND!" I screamed as loud as I could, seemingly on some kind of power trip in the moment. I felt that would have done the trick and went back inside. My sisters were both laughing, which caused me to laugh too, but our little laugh amongst each other didn't last long, because the dogs started going crazy again, even crazier this time.

I went back outside, ready to do the same thing again, but I felt my heart skip a beat when I saw the guy standing about twenty feet from the dogs, right in front of the cornfield. He looked at me.

"HEY!" I screamed, at which point he ran into the cornfield. I started running over and fired another shot into the air.

I stopped by the dogs. There was no chance in hell I was going in there. I wasn't about to leave the dogs out here, either. I unclamped their chains from the hooks, and brought them inside the house. "Someone was sneaking around in the cornfield." I told my sisters.

So what did we do?

We called our dad. "Jazzy, you have to protect the house and your sisters. Fire another warning shot outside if whoever it is comes back." After this, we all just gradually went to our respective rooms. My sisters each brought one of the dogs in their rooms, and I brought the gun in my room, just because we were all a little scared by this. I had the window open, and as I was laying in bed, watching a movie on my laptop, I heard a whistling from outside. I hurried to the window and looked out to see someone slowly walking the grass.

Then, like he had some sixth sense, he stopped walking and turned to look at my window, still whistling.

This jerk was obviously trying to mess with us and scare us, a very stupid idea when I had made it clear I had a gun. I ran to grab the gun off the bed, and aimed it out the window. I shot at the grass a few feet away from him, purposely missing, of course. This cut his little horror movie act short, and he ran out of view of my window, towards the front of the house.

This time, he didn't come back. He'd have to be a fool to come back after that. I made my into Krystal's room, and began explaining myself. "I shot because he was walking around under my window, staring up at me. He ran after that. He won't be back." I assured her, and repeated this with Morgan.

We never found out who it was or why. It could have been some teen, or multiple teens, just trying to scare some innocent farmers for fun; or it could have been an actually dangerous person.