Tales from the Otherside

The Field

Ryan was always a rather impressionable child. He was well liked by his classmates, but that wasn't because of his can do attitude or his polite and courteous demeanor, it was most likely because he was always easily persuaded to do something foolish to impress them. Whether it was the time he tried, unsuccessfully to eat an entire tube of Elmer's glue in elementary school, or the time he tried, unsuccessfully, to tip a cow over in high school; the only thing he seemed to be successful in doing was making a spectacle out of himself.

On this night in particular, Ryan had been peer pressured, fairly easily one might add, into spending the night in the old farmer's sunflower field. While this might seem like an innocuous task, it would certainly prove not to be.
The field was located just on the outskirts of the town of Pleasantville at a small farm. Ryan's two, "friends," or at least the closest thing that he had to them, had been egging him on all day. They said that he was a coward if he couldn't do it. It wasn't like either of them had ever done it, but Ryan consented nonetheless.

Now, the reason staying in a seemingly harmless field of sunflowers becomes a little less harmless is because of the legend surrounding the field. The local legend that was passed down from generation to generation was quite simply that the field was haunted. To make a long story short, the legend went that the old farmer had at one time lived on the farm with his wife. The old sunflower field was at one point, just a barren field covered with dirt and mulch, not unlike his wife—not the covered in dirt and mulch part, but the barren part.

You see, his wife had never been able to conceive a child. She had suffered a handful of miscarriages, the final coming during the eighth month of her pregnancy. After this one, and after numerous screenings, her doctors eventually concluded that she would never be able to conceive again.

The news had broken her heart. She always wanted to be a mother, but now she never could. Most days she sat, staring out the window toward the vacant field, perhaps commiserating with it, dreaming of the life she could have had.
The farmer could do nothing but stand by and watch as his wife spiraled into a dark depression. For months he worked tirelessly on the field, turning the soil over, monitoring the water levels closely and supplementing it with whatever nutrients he could find. Until finally one day, the field produced a singular sunflower, his wife's favorite. Eventually, the sunflowers began sprouting up by the dozen, producing a beautiful golden hue of flora all across the field.
The farmer came to his wife, hoping that all of the effort and time that he had invested was enough to brighten her spirits. However, she was unmoved. There was no beauty left in this world for her.

The farmer was empathetic, but his patience for his wife was running dry.  The two continued to grow apart until one day the farmer had met someone new. The only problem was that he was still trapped in a loveless marriage. All she ever did was stare mindlessly out at the rows and rows of sunflower fields. The labor of the farmer, which he had worked so hard for, went unappreciated. The woman felt as if the sunflowers were taunting her.

The farmer and his new lover began to plot his wife's demise. On a windy fall evening, the pair murdered her in cold blood and hid her body, burying it in the very field that he had planted there for her. The legend has it that the wife's spirit still haunted the field. On a quiet night, you could hear her weeping for her lost children and if you were unlucky enough to be caught in the field after dark, she would claim you for her own.

On this night, Ryan and his friends had each told their parents that they would be spending the night at each other's houses.

They got to the field around dusk and stared out at the rows of sunflowers that seemed to go on for miles. The center of the flowers reminded Ryan of a blank face, staring off at the fleeting sunset.