(Imagine Rod Serling's voice) "Earth ... the year is ... well, of-course you know the year ... our main character, well of-course you read the title, so you know her name ... she leads the life of an hobby-artist. Her canvas: the earth itself. She creates crop circles and other Earth Art when there are no crops to trample. She does this for fun and adventure ... damaging crops at night because she likes the designs and the not-getting-caught part is an adrenaline rush. One might say she's a pretentious, privileged, middle-class, white (American or British or Canadian) woman who has no thought or consideration for the entire earth besides how she can use it to her advantage. But . . . in 2020 . . . the planet strikes back. With fires. With floods. With hurricanes. With a global pandemic. And for Eranthe? . . Weeeeellll ... the wheat field tries to kill that bitch by plugging her every orifice. But, in the end, it fails. But, does she learn her lesson? . . Do humans learn from nature's desire to eradicate them? Abso-fucking-lutely not!
"I don't think I've ever met a crop circle maker—ahh, designer? engineer?"
"Earth and Ephemeral artist. My mediums
vary: stones, sand, snow, sticks..."
"Sooo....only things beginning with an S?..."
"Ha! I just noticed that..."
"How do you add 'wheat field' to that
list?"
"Spelt."
"W. H. E. A..."
"Yea. No. Another name for wheat
... spelt."
"I want you on my trivial pursuit team."
"Thanks. Sign me up. Most people
aren't very complimentary when I show off my vocabulary.
Hang-on. There's such a thing as team trivial
pursuit? Or did you mean your Scrabble team?"
"Never heard of team Scrabble, but there's
definitely team TeePee. Six people, max. And there's
always a lack of AL knowledgeable teammates."
"Art and Literature, right? What's your go-to
category or specialty?"
"Guess. You already know it's not brown.
That leaves five choices."
"Ahh, Geography. That's my final answer."
"Wow. Most guess Sports and Leisure,
because I'm kinda tall and athletic; but playing basketball and knowing
who won an Olympic gold medal in the decathlon a decade ago, is not the
same. So, yea, I've always been interested in maps.
Geography-blue is my area. How'd you guess?"
"You don't seem very interested in these TV screens,
so I eliminated sports and leisure, as well as entertainment; then I
decided to go-with the statistical probabilities of the patriarchy:
science is dominated by men, which left history or geography. I
flipped a mental coin."
"There are a number of queer women, like myself, who
know their way around SN-green..."
"I was being biased, sorry. No offense
intended."
"No apology necessary...I was
also thinking with bias: when you said the reason you're leaving
early was because tonight was the trifecta: perfect weather, perfect
moon phase, and prime crop formation season, I - kinda - thought that
anything involving that level of subterfuge—like guerilla
street art—was dominated by cis-men."
"I don't frequent any online sites or communities
and do everything solo. No team. My art is for me.
Once it's done, I focus on the selection and design of my next
one. The famous earth-ephemeral artists who I know about
do skew cis-male, but you could say that about almost
anything. For every Andy Goldsworthy, there may be a hundred
creative dykes like me. There's no way to know."
"Do you have time to tell me your best crop circle
story?"
"Welll... I guess."
"No pressure. I'd just like a peek inside the
process. I assume you recon, and sketch, and measure, and use
tools?"
"Yup, OK. I had a very memorable formation
last month."
"In the spelt?"
"It was actually in Durman wheat, but that's an
unimportant detail. I ... haven't ... umm. Maybe I should
tell you about a different time. Sorry, it's just..."
"Aww. You got me interested!
But—hang on—I can see from your expression
you're not thinking about an exciting thing . . . seems you are, what? .
. scared?"
"Yea. I had an experience. I'm not
sure how to explain. Sorry, I don't talk to people much. And
I haven't told anyone about this."
"How come? None of your friends
understand about your artwork, Eranthe? Sorry, am I pronouncing
that right?"
"Please; call me Eran. It wasn't my
creation which, Bree..."
"Come on. Let's sit over here where we
can be out of earshot. You can confide in me. Or not.
But maybe talking to someone who won't judge you, like, ever, is
what you need? And, I prefer my friends call me Bry, rather than
Brianna. Please. Lose the anna."
"Ok. So I was assaulted. But not, well,
not . . . by a person. At least, I never saw anyone. That
night's creation was to be a hypotrochoid shape. All was going
fine, I'd been flattening for almost thirty minutes and then I began to
get lost. Lost in my own head. Dizzy. Confused as to
how far along in the creation I was. I walked back, retraced the
border. And felt paranoid. I listened. Heard
nothing. But got more scared. For no reason."
"How far out from the nearest road or building were
you at this point?"
"I parked almost 3 clicks away; but, I guess, I was
about six or seven hundred meters from a roadway. Maybe the
nearest house or farm was, thru the field, over a kilometer."
"Sorry to interrupt. Go ahead."
"The dizziness was not like being intoxicated
it was like vertigo—like I was going to fall over a steep cliff, but there was nothing
all around me but kilometers of farmlands and wooded plots. I
got down and crawled into the wheat with all my stuff. I lay on my
back, closed my eyes, and attempted to meditate to calm myself.
"You don't have to talk anymore. I can
see this has upset you. I'm so sorry. Don't cry.
Please."
"Maybe talking will help me understand. Maybe
you can think of something I haven't thought of. I felt my clothes
and gear bag get caught-up in the tangle of stalks and leaves and I had
to squirm thru a few rows so I was away from the trampled area.
But. I don't know how what happened next happened. The next
thing I know is my shirt and undershirt are gone. I sit up.
Kinda, raise up on my elbows and the leaves and grass seems all stuffed
into the top of my boots and waistband. I pull some of it out of
my pants and turn to look around. My gear bag is, like, three
meters away—deeper in. I could never have thrown my
stuff that far. And there is nobody around and there is no noise
besides a slight breeze."
"You fell asleep, maybe? And there were no
animal or bug noises?"
"Ahh, I recall bird wings; lots of them. I
might've fallen asleep, but that doesn't explain what I experienced
next. So, I roll over. Begin to get up on my hands and knees
to crawl and when I do, both of my boots are pulled off.
Foop. Foop. I twist and look. All I see is my boots
wrapped in blades of wheat leaves. I say, "fuck this," start to
stand up, and the sky lights up with lights and lasers. I freeze
and slowly lay back down."
"Drone or helicopter?"
"Silent. Too silent. Never heard
any blade noise. When I first noticed the lights, they were one
field away, on the other side of a tree-line. They did fly over my
position but never paused . . ."
"How high do you estimate it was over the
trees?"
"Oh, good question. I've gone back and
looked in daylight, the tallest tree is about 50 meters, no more that 70
meters tall and I think the lights were kinda close to the tops and
never came closer to the ground than that."
"What do you mean lights
and lasers?"
"Lights were yellow-white but not all that
bright. I never saw a circle of light on the field like a
searchlight in the movies, and I was also able to see many thin lines of
green lights, similar to laser lights at concerts, but also not all that
bright. No points of light on the ground or on the wheat around
me."
"Then what."
"This is the fucked-up part."
"Ok."
"It lasts maybe. I don't know. I
want to say the lights last about three minutes. But when it is
gone I try to sit up and my ankles and wrists are wrapped in sheaves of
wheat grass and my pants are off. I pull off a bunch of the
wheat. Rip it. Tear it. Kick stalks out of the
ground. I get up, partly. I'm so weirded out and confused
and can't figure out how any of this is possible. I wonder if I'm
dreaming. I'm definitely talking to myself. I pull up my
loose panties from my thighs and struggle up on my feet; oh yea, my
socks are gone. So I'm looking for clothes and I trip and
fall. And. and... I think the field of wheat.
This sounds crazy out-loud. The wheat . . ."
"Raped you?"
"Well . . . that's not possible. The
wheat assaulted every part of me, though. It moved. Well it
had to move. But I never saw it moving. Not really. I
would look and it would be wrapped around my wrist and I would pull it
off, and then look and it would be completely wrapped around both my
ankles. I would focus on kicking it off and would realize it was
around my neck. I would grab it. When it was in my hand it
never moved. It was just leaves or stalks or stems or seeds of
grain. But eventually. Yea. I fought and struggled
for... seemed like thirty minutes. But it wrapped me
completely. Entered everywhere. My ears. Plugged my
nose. I bit and chewed and it never got beyond my teeth. It
entered my vagina, my anus, and my urethra. That burned like
fire."
"Your eyes? Did you scream?"
"Right. Once it covered my face I closed
my eyes. It pushed into everywhere, but it never was able to force
my eyelids. It felt like a thousand pricks of grass pushing into
me. Grass. Bendy grass. Not like sticks. Not
cutting. Just that when it was able to get inside me, it was
immediately followed by as many blades of grass that would fit.
And I think I got a couple screams out before I realized it was better
to clamp my teeth together so I could breathe."
"I assume you went to a doctor?"
"Yea. I told her I thought I'd been drugged
or poisoned and indecently assaulted the night before. She found
nothing pharmacological, but told me—I never told her about the wheat—that she found spores and suggested that whoever dosed me might have
made some type of hallucinogen out of the fungus found on wheat,
called Ergot."
"You were? This would have been
hallucination? I'm... Shit, this blows my mind.
Explain how long it was until it was over and what you did at that
point."
"Like I said, it was at least a half-hour of biting
off and swallowing pieces of grass that pushed through my pursed lips
and then it just stopped. I sat up, pulled fibers out of my sinus,
colon, cervix, and bladder. Got dressed, found my equipment.
I wasn't dizzy anymore, so I walked to my car. I was out of it for
maybe an hour and a half or two hours."
"And you are headed back out there tonight?"
"Like I said, the conditions are perfect and
I've added items to my equipment bag."
"Oh?"
"I have an industrial mask to prevent Ergot
re-infection."
"Ergo, Ergot—sorry, I couldn't resist—but, what if you weren't hallucinating?"
"I've got an infrared body-camera for the UFO and a
Tesla flamethrower for the wheat."
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