The Grinning Hollow

I was eleven the summer we moved to my grandfather’s farm, a place trapped between the dry bones of the prairie and the endless, chattering wind. We kept a few dozen sheep, and every autumn, before the first hard frost, we’d choose one for the freezer. I didn’t like it, but I understood it, the way you understand the sky will go dark before a storm. My grandfather, a man of few words and tobacco-stained fingers, taught me to sharpen the knives and to hold the animal steady, whispering that it would not feel a thing. But on that particular October day, the air was wrong—thick with the smell of iron and old dust, and the sheep bleated as if they knew something we didn’t.

We finished the butchering just as the sun dipped behind the granary, and my grandfather decided to walk the leftover scraps—the head, the hooves, the organs—to the gully behind the north pasture. A shallow, rocky scar in the earth where the summer’s last wildflowers had all turned black. He loaded a rusted wheelbarrow with the remains, steam still rising from them, and I followed, not because I wanted to, but because the house felt suddenly too silent, too watchful. He parked the wheelbarrow at the edge of the gully, the barbed wire fence gleaming with dew, and began to toss the pieces into the shadows below. I hung back, sitting on the tailgate of his old pickup, the doors open because my grandpa always kept them open in case he needed to make a quick run for the house.

And then I saw them. Rising from the gully, not like fog, but like smoke that had forgotten to burn. They were three, and they were see-through, their bodies made of something that wasn’t quite light, wasn’t quite shadow. They drifted upward, their bones glowing faintly as if lit from inside by a cold fire. The one in front was taller, with a smooth skull and empty eye sockets that somehow turned to face me. She smiled. It was not a human smile; it was a slow, deliberate widening of the jaw, as if she were trying to show me every tooth she didn’t have. And then she waved. Not a friendly wave, but the kind you might give to someone you plan to meet again, a promise. The two behind her just stared, their heads cocked at unnatural angles, their rib cages heaving as if taking in the scent of my fear.

I wanted to scream, to run, to tell my grandfather, but my tongue was a dead weight. I watched them for what felt like an eternity, and then, as if bored, they began to sink back into the ground, the girl’s grin the last thing to disappear, like the Cheshire Cat if he were made of frost and malice. Just as they vanished, my grandfather grunted. He had been reaching through the barbed wire to hurl the last bucket of offal, and the top wire had sliced into his arm, right through the sleeve of his flannel shirt, drawing a thin line of blood that beaded and dripped down to his knuckles. He cursed, dropped the bucket, and clamped his hand over the wound. I looked at him, then back at the spot where the figures had been, and a cold certainty settled into my bones: they had done that. They had marked him.

That night, my grandfather didn’t come in for supper. I found him in the barn, standing in the dark, holding a hand sickle. His eyes were wide and unblinking, fixed on a spot in the hayloft. ‘They’re waiting,’ he said, his voice hoarse, as if he’d been shouting for hours. ‘They’ve been waiting for me since I was a boy, but they said they wanted you now.’ I tried to shake him, but he wouldn’t move. The next morning, he was gone. The police found his truck parked at the edge of the gully, the doors open, and his boots on the seat. They never found him. But I knew where he was. I felt it when I walked past the gully—a cold draft that smelled of old blood and lilies.

I am forty now, and I have never spoken of that day out loud. But I’ve seen them again. Not in the gully, but in the corner of my bedroom when I can’t sleep, in the reflection of a window when I’m driving at night, in the space between breaths when I’m alone. They never come fully into focus, but I always see her—the one who smiled and waved. And every time, she points at the ring on her finger, a ring made of bone and rusty wire, and I know that my grandfather wasn’t the only one they marked. They have been waiting for me to take his place, to slip out of my skin and join them in that hollow beneath the earth where the grass never grows. I’ve started to hear my own voice whispering at the edge of my thoughts, telling me to go to the pasture, to climb over the barbed wire, to sink down into the cool dark where she waits with her smile and her wave. I don’t know how much longer I can say no.