Description: The corn has ears and they are listening, no longer prepared to calm with nature's lulling voice, unafraid of the moons watchful eye as they know she can only observe. She cannot save you. She can only observe. 

Words: 2561

Notes: Before you get to reading, I wanted to tell you a little story (of sorts)/give an explanation as to why I wrote this piece this way. ;D

I have lived in the "mid" Mid-West for nearly the whole of my life; I'm in an area that has plenty of fields and such, but I'm not all that far away from a city. It's given that everyone will learn different things when raised in different environments, and recently I've taken an interest in how a childhood stomping ground can affect the mind and a person's mentality toward urban legends and ~spooky~ things. The American Midwest has a very specific aesthetic and I wanted to shoot my shot and attempt to show that setting in my writing (literally and figuratively)!

I wondered how I could do this in a way where it was blog-relevant, and came to any conclusion that any simple nerd would: Superman. Clark was raised in a very similar environment to my own, despite the obvious differences. But one thing that always bothered me about the Smallville-era stories (that I've read) is that Smallville is what a small town should be. It's full of farms and kind people and it's the perfect little fantasy. That's not very realistic, even for a story about an alien growing up on Earth, so obviously I wanted to both stir the pot a bit. That's what this is: my little Midwestern paradox.

Also, I missed Halloween, so this is my way of making up for that. Love you all, and enjoy!

_

Just on the cusp of fall, when October disappears with the cycles of the moon and November rises in its place, Smallville is at its most dangerous. Well, it's always a little dangerous. Clark never shuts up with the warnings, watch out for those kidnappers if you go into town, and oh, make sure you avoid the highway at night, and—But then something dangerous actually happens and everyone settles back on their heels and forgets.

That's why you've always thought the first week of November was so treacherous... everyone forgot about the fear for a little while. Hid in the safety of Halloween's ending. Your mom liked to joke that we caught the real thinning of the veil a few days short down in Smallville. Maybe, you realize, she's right.

You get the morning to yourself. The kids on your bus are too tired to talk, Clark drives his truck, and you have your old Walkman and the same two cassettes in your bag. Even if your neighbors weren't taking down their Halloween decorations you would know that it's the beginning of November. Not only are the innards of your cassettes torn to shreds, but Clark is on the bus.

He crams his bag between his legs and scoots to make room for you. When you take the offered seat you bus driver cuts a look; past couples on the bus have ruined your chances of getting a grim-curing hug in greeting. Clark settles for entwining your fingers out of sight.

Talking so early in the morning, even in a town of farmers, seems taboo and wrong. Your voice seems to cut through the mist and the motor to catch between the two of you with an edge you did not give it. "Why are you on the bus? Something happen to the truck?"

"Yeah," Clark grouches, "Wouldn't start this morning. I tried to get a look, but I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I'm just gonna tell Pa that took the bus because I missed you or something—I don't want him worrying about trying to fix it himself. How'd you know?"

"Just a feeling," you shrugged. Clark's fingers are warm in an unearthly, beautiful way, an escape from the steadily gaining chill on your back. You're so cold that his palm almost burns.

"You look pretty shaken," he observed. "And cold. You wanna borrow my jacket? You can be all cliche and wear it for the rest of the day."

"Do you want Pete to make fun of me?" Your chuckle is extra dry.

"He won't, I'll make sure of it. Besides—I'd rather face his snark than have you freeze," Clark says, and throws the jacket across your lap. Your fingers dig into the material like a starving man kneading dough. Clark repeats, gently, "You look real shaken."

"You ever had sleep paralysis, Clark?"

"No," Clark says, and the look on his face makes you want to take it back immediately.

Half of it is that sympathy for you and the other is envy's sorrowful cousin, another reminder of how alien Clark is sometimes. He glances out the window at the mist and the hills and the barren fields. You both know it's a little silly to want to be sick or to at least know what it's like, but Clark is just weird like that. His (mortal) curiosity almost inspires a scoff; Clark is human, by every definition except biological—and people can still be physically human and yet a monster in every other way. That's just how the world works.

"Good. It sucks," you said, burying your hands into the cavern of his jacket sleeves. The cocoon swallows you and you enjoy it maybe a little too much. "Hell, thought I was being murdered. Could have sworn someone was choking me or something. Dad said that it was a hallucination."

"I could stay over tonight, if you'd like," he suggests.

He is answered with face in his arm and a thankful sigh of relief. "If I'd like? Hoo boy, understatement of the century."

Clark puts a hand against the glass in an oddly stoic manner. It shudders on wheels that roll over gravel, the corn beyond becoming more frail, the beginnings of frost melting under Clark's warmth in a jealous retreat. It's now that the cold feels most alive. When fall ends, they call it the dead of winter for a reason.

"Hey," he starts, suddenly confused, "It's really dark for daylight savings. I'm used to some fog on an early morning... but shouldn't it be lighter out right now?"

You search the sky for the sun, even a blurred imitation under a dirty mirror, but Clark's right; not even the moon is out. It could be nine at night for all you knew. A part of you wants to attribute it to the sharpening intensity that the feet of November bring. Another wants to shrug, press your face into Clark's shoulder, then get rudely awakened by that useless speed bump in the school parking lot.

Guess which part wins out.

_

Pete's bus has a problem bad enough to keep him out there well into second period, and Lana takes his open chair beside you in your study hall. You tell her about your sleep paralysis. Clark shares his complications with the truck. She opens up and confesses that her dad had to go into their barn with a shotgun that morning; he'd sworn he'd heard something, but he refused to tell Lana what.

She and Clark start talking then because you're taking the time to read something for English. On any other day, this would be perfectly fine and acceptable. Clark and Lana have a couple classes without you and have been friends for a good amount of time. There's no way it's a problem, either, considering that you can't dictate who Clark talks to. It is also too easy to see who is friends and who is more: Lana keeps flicking spitballs at him when he gets distracted by your game of footsie beneath the table.

But all of a sudden, it's not. Lana smiles at Clark and Clark laughs back and your chest burns. It's a sudden, intense feeling, fabricated from nothing apparent, and when you excuse yourself to a bathroom to calm down you swear there aren't trees where trees should be. Where there aren't fields in Smallville there are forests. Where there aren't forests is pale, dead land soon to be laden with snow. This is not the case of the territory surrounding your high school.

You pass it off. The needless fear helps you recover and forget about Lana and Clark, but never just Clark. The warm weight of his jacket is a memory of fingers in your hair and sunny fields and that breathlessness that comes with being high in the air. A fantasy of his hand on your back is enough to smooth the hitch in your breath, but the reality of it is an entire serenity.

"You okay?" Clark murmurs.

"Is Y/N okay?" Pete echoes upon his arrival, "Look at them, man. They look better than okay. Lana, tell me I'm not the only one who is grossed out by how in love Y/N looks."

"I mean, I don't blame them," Lana says and the suggestion that she likes Clark is there, that burning starts to fill your throat, until she playfully diverts, "That book is pretty good."

The burn is swallowed down as you flash the cover at her, "Damn right!"

Clark laughs, eyes crinkling, everything about him clean and perfect in the way that most daydreams are. His sneakers are shy when they hook around your ankles and ravel for warmth. His cheeks are red, and he says something about the cold when Pete tries to pinch them.

"Alright, guys—while I was stuck in hell and freezing my ass off on the side of the road earlier, I had a really good idea," Pete opens. "So, y'know how we were all lazy for Halloween and didn't do anything?"

"Define lazy," Lana interjects.

Pete keeps going, playfully swatting her off. "I say we go into the cornfields behind Clark's house and explore that old farm behind the hill."

"That sounds fun. I think it's going to warm up tonight, too," Lana agreed.

Clark sounds hesitant, but will eventually submit to Pete's wants one way or another. "Depends. Is it really abandoned? Do we know who owns it? I don't want to be trespassing."

You close your book and shake your head, "No way in hell am I going down there. It's Mrs. Dobuse's land, and she keeps saying she's saving it for something, but she's probably just going to let it rot there until she can turn it into a haunted death-trap and lead stupid kids like us there. This is the beginning of a horror story and we all know I'd get murdered first."

"Not even for, like, a naked photo of Clark?" Pete jokes.

"I don't need one, I've got the genuine article right here," you jest in return, and Clark sputters loud enough to turn nearby heads.

Lana wheezes so hard you fear for her lungs. When she recovers, she's pleading, "C'mon, Y/N! Do you see how funny you are? It's gonna suck without you."

You think about Clark and Lana and Pete out alone in that field, and Pete wandering off to try and scare them, leaving Clark and Lana alone... The burn rears its ugly head again. In spite of yourself, regardless of how Clark is and how much you trust him, you give in to the burn.

You give in to the unnameable force, and you say, "Fine. Sure."

_

When picturing Kansas, there is wheat and sunshine and the blissful silence of distant neighbors and wide fields. Only the wind has a voice in the evening. It whispers, raspy and old and gentle, passing stories through the ears of corn, nature speaking to nature in the only way it knows how.

That's how you know this is unnatural. The wind has a voice, it can talk and murmur and shout. November has stolen the sound for itself. Now there is only silence, pressing, ear-popping silence for as far as the fields will stretch and as thin as the moonlight will venture. You cling all too eagerly to the sound of Clark's gentle breaths and Lana's steps on the hard earth.

Lana brushes a stalk too roughly, and Pete jumps like every word he'd ever said about his bravery was a damn lie. Clark laughs and Lana laughs and Pete laughs. When you don't, Clark turns his head and you pretend your fingers aren't itching to fold under his jacket and around his back, soft against muscle that's too hard to be human. To be normal.

It is startling and terrifying in some ways when you finally take a step back, look at him and realize who he is, how strong those hands are and how unusually soft his steps are. It should make you run. It should make you want to leave, just as Clark fears. But there is nothing to fear in him. Only that beautifully wicked smile and the paleness of his sweet eyes and what heartbreak they could bring.

Clark is, by your belief and understanding, as human as a golden sun and the rich fields at harvest time. He is your asylum from the dark.

"Scared?" Clark asks, and though his smile is hard to make out, once it is seen it is undeniable.

"Big time," you snorted, "Or maybe I just love going for nightly strolls to abandoned, haunted barns."

There's a howl and you jerk, instinctively, back toward the direction of the Kent house. Martha left the light on the back porch. A mercy, and you realize how much you love Clark's mother. You are soon to realize the same of Clark. His fingers are impossibly gentle when he offers them to you.

"Coyote," Clark settles. His grin returns: "I think."

He can also be a total asshole. It's cute, somehow.

"Shut up," you swat at his hand, purposefully miss, and rectify it by slipping your knuckles through his.

Every terrifying thought about Smallive rushes toward you like racing boots in the dark. The graveyard in the middle of town, always empty, always old, and always in possession of at least one freshly dug tomb. Roads enclosed by trees. Endless, repetitive, with the same blank-eyed deer and the same blank-faced signs. Summer heat weighing against your throat. It prickles the skin like someone is watching you, choking you with their eyes.

You know the cornfield best from Clark's bedroom window. You see it in your dreams when you share a bed with him, your back to his chest and your eyes to the night sky. It is an unending scene of oddly cut shadows, movement you're too scared to pinpoint, narrated by the voice of something that isn't nature, something calling you into nature, asking you what would happen if you went into the field or what would happen if you stepped off that ledge. The call beckons you into the void.

And you're here. In the field. The corn has ears and they are listening, no longer prepared to calm with nature's lulling voice, unafraid of the moons watchful eye as they know she can only observe. She cannot save you. She can only observe.

"I love you, Clark." Because that is what you are supposed to say before you die.

Clark chuckles. "I love you, too," he tilts his head and keeps walking toward the hill, through the corn. "It's okay to be afraid—but you know the only thing that's going to try and scare you out here is Pete, right?"

"Yeah," you said, and bunched yourself into the corner of his jacket like one would collapse into bed after an experience such as this. "He can try it. I'd kick his ass. You tell me when he's coming so that I can look cool and not-startled."

Another laugh is shocked out of him. "Okay, tough guy."

The stalks are too close and seem to braid together and apart again, revealing new paths and dead ends. You force the vision under the light. Suddenly you're submerged in that same sunrise, the earth dewy under your touch, Clark at your side and watching the sky blush at the planet the moon had given it. He lets you steal his glasses and he kisses the first part of you he can reach.

What I would do for this, every morning, Clark whispers. He closes his eyes and listen to the world as it wakes up. You don't need to look at the heavens to see a true blessing.

Everything unravels and you are here, in the field, once more. Things are not different. There is still something calling to you from the forest over the hill, drawing you in, promising things that may not be true or real or even plausible. 

"I have an idea," Clark says, "It's a little mean. Should I do it?"

Minutes later, Pete and Lana come tearing through the field over the hill, screaming their heads off. Once you've safely made it under the haven of the Kent's porch, Lana retells their terrifying encounter with a flying shadow demon. You try not to grin when she describes exactly how it'd darted for them, a terrifying, hulking mass of death firing red bursts down onto their heads. You do laugh eventually; Pete shrieks when Clark drags himself out from behind the corn and skitters up the dark strip of lawn outside the light's reach.

Yes, it's scary. Yes, it's unnatural. But it's okay to be afraid.

(But still, your mind supplies, don't wander alone into cornfields in November.)