What the Corn Keeps

Every October, Circleville, Ohio builds scarecrows. One of them, the oldest one, has stood in the Harlan family's back field for as long as anyone can remember. It has one unspoken rule: nobody takes the old scarecrow down after October 31. This year, on Halloween night, sixteen-year-old Ben Ellison takes it down on a dare. What follows is not a haunting in the noisy sense. Circleville begins to forget. Ben's best friend stops coming to school, and his own mother looks blankly at Mara and asks which friend she means. Something is moving through the fields toward town, a little closer every night, and it is counting houses. Mara Ellison, a school bus driver with a dead sister the town refuses to remember, starts keeping a list of the things that go missing, because she has learned the one thing nobody else seems to know: the corn does not take people. It takes the memory of people. And it only takes what the town has already agreed to forget.