Page 1 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

1

Katie Rutledge

September 2026

Friday – 10:47 pm

Mile after mile of cornfields slid past the car, every row the same pale color as dried husk, every space between them a slice of dark the headlights couldn’t reach. Katie rested her palm flat against the cool glass, the faint hum of the road traveling up into her fingers. Through the half-cracked window came the dry rasp of the field. That faint papery whisper the corn always made in September. A thousand husks rubbing against a thousand other husks, soft enough that she had to hold her breath to be sure it was there at all.

“You good?” Josh asked, glancing her way without taking his hand from the steering wheel. His other arm rested along the back of her seat, his thumb tracing a slow circle against the bare strip of skin where she’d pulled her hair aside. His touch was both warm and absent at once. “You’ve been quiet since the four-way.”

“I’m good,” Katie replied, sliding her hand down off the window and folding it into her lap with the other one. Her palms were colder than they should have been, and she clutched her fingers together to warm them. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing?” The corner of Josh’s mouth lifted in the way it did when he was teasing her without really teasing her. “Really?”

“I said that I’m good, Josh,” Katie repeated, hoping that he would just let it go.

She glanced down at the light blue shirt she’d pulled out of her drawer instead of the new red one in her closet. Anything nicer would have meant something to her mother, and Katie didn’t want her mom guessing where the night might be going.

“Talk to me, Katie,” Josh said gently, his thumb pausing for only a second before resuming its slow circle. “If you aren’t ready to⁠—”

“It’s not about that,” Katie murmured, wondering if she should tell him the truth. “It’s nothing. Really.”

“Third nothing tonight, Katie,” Josh said with what seemed like a genuine touch of concern, this time studying her instead of the road. “If it’s not about us, what has you so worried?”

The headlights pitched as the road dipped, and the long beams swept up the wall of corn and threw a stripe of light deep into the rows. Her gaze followed, and she wondered what life would be like away from the small country town of Whistlerun, Arkansas. The light caught one row, then the next, then the next, until it gave up completely and let itself be swallowed somewhere among the stalks.

Whatever was past that, the moonlight wasn’t reaching either.

“My parents still believe in the Threshing Man.” Katie pressed her thumbnail into the soft pad of her index finger until it left a small white crescent. “Especially my mom.”

Saying her fear aloud loosened something in her chest.

“Oh, Katie,” Josh sighed in what seemed to be disappointment. He removed his arm from the back of the seat to take her hand instead. The warmth on her neck where his thumb had been faded fast. “There is no Threshing Man.”

“You don’t know that, Josh. Mom has already put a talisman in the window to ward off evil,” Katie continued, keeping her gaze on the road ahead. She didn’t want to catch his expression while she defended her mother’s superstitions. “You know, the one with the husks. My mom made a new one this year.”

“Babe,” Josh murmured, the single word carrying the same dismissal he used when she got worked up about anything that didn’t seem to fit the world that he had decided to live in. Annoyance began to flush the fear right out of her. “It’s just your parents stuck in the past, is all. There is no Threshing Man, and there is no boogeyman creeping around the cornfields of Whistlerun.”

“How can you be so sure? My mom isn’t the only one who still believes in him.” Katie turned in her seat to face him. “I came down for breakfast this morning, and there it was, hanging over the sink, the husks still soft because she’d just braided them. Why would she go to all that trouble if she didn’t still believe there was something evil around here?”

When she had asked about it, her mother had said It’s that time of year, the way other mothers said Time to put away the white shoes or Time to switch the closet over. In Katie’s opinion, it was just flat-out wrong on every level to live in fear every single fall.

“They caught the guy, Katie,” Josh reminded her, taking his hand off hers. He gripped the steering wheel instead, his tone containing that edge. The one he used when he wanted her to drop something and pretend that everything was fine. “There was never any Threshing Man. The townsfolk just made up a story, and it caught fire somewhere along the way.”

“The authorities caught his son,” Katie corrected as Josh pressed the brake to slow the car down. “They arrested Kalen Telfort, not his father.”

“Same thing,” Josh muttered as the headlights brushed over a hickory. The hickory. The old tree was just off the side of the back road, in a small patch of bare ground that the field had been planted around for as long as anyone could remember. “Emanuel Telfort is dead. And you’re right. They did arrest his kid, Kalen. And after that, they dug bodies out of the ground and rescued that girl. It’s done. His father’s crimes are what started the legend in the first place, Katie. That’s all the Threshing Man ever was…a sick, old, and perverted man who’s dead. He can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

Josh pulled the car to a full stop, shifting the gear into park.

“That’s not what some of the townsfolk are saying,” Katie replied quietly, settling back in her seat. “They believe he’s real, Josh. Did you know that Missy Claymont is in some mental institution in Little Rock? I heard she doesn’t even speak. Not a single word.”

He killed the engine.

The sound of the field slipped in through the cracked windows. It had been there the whole time, underneath the engine, but only now could she hear nothing else. The long, sustained whisper of dry leaves against dry leaves. The small clicks and creaks of a field at night. Maybe it was a mistake coming here.

“You know I wouldn’t let anyone or anything hurt you, right?” Josh turned the key back a notch so the dashboard lights came back on, then pressed the buttons on his door to roll the windows down even further and let a cool breeze pass through the car. “You said yourself that Lacy and Benny come here all the time. Nothing ever happens to them. It’s safe.”