Corn. He knew that was what it was called. He knew its shivering shape from shaky-cam livestreams he had watched from time to time of the distant land of America. He knew it was one of the United States number 1 agricultural exports. One in a number of facts he had memorised about the country. Sites of cultural importance. Number of military bases located outside its own non-contiguous borders. Governments overthrown. Depleted uranium rounds. Population densities of major metropolitan centuries. All these things were ground into his memory but he had almost no recollection of the events in the preceding days. He remembered warmth and heat and that big sunset in the Horn of Africa that was like nowhere else in the world. His father had once told him it was a sign of their place among God’s chosen people. The sun…

Something was wrong with this corn. In all the images he had seen from the strangely named flatlands of America the corn had been illuminated at all times by the sun, its swaying stalks and beaded growths lit up from behind like a cash-crop movie stars. But there was no sun in this place to glint off the corn. There was only an ashen, slate-grey miasma that seemed to hang over and choke everything. The corn went on forever in all directions all around him. There was no comforting dip of a road of freeway like he had seen in the footage of the United States. There was no heartening blemish of humanity in this place. Only the endless corn blotching the dark around it. He looked up. No stars winked in the skies. He breathed out and the coldness of the place made him expect wisps of steam but there were none. He held his hand a short distance from his face. Had he gotten to the point of breathing on it, as he intended, he would have detected no moisture or wetness or warmth in his breath. But the hand he saw precluded any experimentation.

His hand was a thing of pure and solid blackness. His skin was dark certainly, a fact the world in which he lived and cause he had given himself to and his mother’s fate in that far off land would never allow him to forget, but this was something else. This was a darkness like the sky that hung above him. It was wrinkleless, blemishless, featureless and whole. His very body was a void. As he felt his mind pick at an entrée in the meal of madness he was rescued by the greater certainty of immediate danger.

The corn was rustling. First only in a spot immediately behind him, which he swivelled to face, but then in more directions than he could spin his void-body to see. Little pale forms emerged from between the spears of corn. Children. All of them were identical. Little boys, no older than 10, with the same bright red baseball cap perched above their white moon faces. The same burnt-orange t-shirt without any identifying marks. The same jeans irregularly sliced at the knee to produce make-shift shorts. The last thing all of the figures had in common baffled him. Above each of their heads floated an almost translucent blue box. It bounced along with their steps, more rigid and purposeful than that of any young child he had ever known. The same two words sat in each child’s floating box:

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He had no idea what it meant. The children came streaming out of the corn in an avalanche of pale expressive faces and they strode towards him with the same confident steps. As they drew near to their arms outstretched and he raised his fists to defend himself. His sense of disorientation and fright had overcome any reservations he might have had about hitting a child. But he was shocked to see his black fist phase right through the child and emerge on the other end without the satisfaction of contact. A blue flash overwhelmed his vision and a blue box of text took over his field of view

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The smal hands of the children restrained with eyes. He was pinned to the ground, one sitting on his hands and feet respectively and four others pinning down each arm and leg. The remain dug soil with their hands and heaped it up in their outstrecthed palms. In all his fear his mind stopped to notice something unusually. He could not make out individual clods of dirt in the piles. No errant specks tumbled between fingers or rearranged themselves with movement. The dirt was one solid mass of darkness, not unlike his new body.

And then their little hands began to shovel the dirt into his mouth.

The dirt had none of the visceral grit he had expected. It carried in it no hint of anything but itself; no stray stone or twig or shaving of a leaf. It did not dry his mouth as it was packing in their and beginning to shunt down his throat. It was one and whole and blocking up his airways. He began to writhe and thrash as he could feel the mounds of dirt swallowing his breath. His chest convulsed unseen as little fingers prodded and plucked more and more dirt until he could feel it sitting heavy in his stomach and stinging in his struggling lungs. His bucking and rolling proved no use as the many little hands kept him prone. Before the final blue screen appeared floating in front of his vision he felt something drop from his body with a clunk but his eyes cast to the sky could not see what it was. Words in a box sat against the sky in place of stars as his body went limp.

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