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Chapter 3. Uploaded Monday November 22, 9:10 PM.

Two days later, Dawn was more concerned with her towels than she was with her father's cornfield. They were bright yellow towels, the color of an enraged yellowjacket in mating season, and smelled heavily of lemons. Dawn was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, holding a towel to her nose, taking deep breaths of the ungodly scent. It was terrible. She'd read in Cosmopolitan about how teenage boys were twenty percent less likely to have sex with you if you didn't keep a consistent aroma.

Her towels smelled like gummy bears a week ago. Now they smelled like lemons. This was not consistent.

“Dad,” she said, plodding downstairs, “Why do the towels smell like lemons?”

Surprisingly, he wasn't sitting on the living room couch, drinking beer and watching television. Nor was he doing this in the kitchen. Dawn eventually found him outside, standing with his hands on his hips and speaking to some men in suits. There was a news van in the driveway.

“Well,” he said, “I decided to take my daughters on a trip to Gatlinburg around the end of May... and... uh... we did that. Now, I left the farm in the hands of... um... Ed Careymore. Ed Careymore the first, that is. Yeah. And he didn't tell me nothin' til I got back here.”

“And where might we find this 'Ed Careymore?'”

Alex scratched his head. “Lemme think... head out on 222 �" the north part, not the south part �" then drive about two miles until you get to Caldwell Road, and... uh... he's the first house on the right.” The two men in suits nodded carefully as he said this, their eyes wide and staring him straight in the eye. He gave them a perplexed, disturbed look in response.

“Thank you for your time, sir,” the man on the left said. Alex grunted in response. Folding up a notepad and cramming it into his pocket, he muttered something to his companion and they walked back to the van, staring open-mouthed at the corn.

“You'd think a goddamn alien landed in the field.”

“Maybe one did.”

It was later on in the evening, the living sun afflicted with necrosis. Dawn was uncomfortable in the sudden darkness, and asked, for the fourth time that day, “Dad, what happened to the towels?”

“I needed a change in detergent.”

“Why?”

“The old one smelled like f*****g gummy bears.”

Dawn closed her eyes. “But gummy bears are tasty...”

Her father glowered at her momentarily, then looked back at the television. His eyes narrowed as he saw his house on the news, the cameras panning over the cornfield. “They just can't leave us alone, can they?” The reporter was talking about “astrological phenomena” and “botanical wonders” and pointing in circular directions at the field. His mouth blabbered on, and Alex changed the channel. Dee jumped at The Jersey Shore. Alex begrudgingly gave in.

The stiffed, stuffed head of a buck rested on the wall, and Dawn kept staring at it. There was something glazed and beautiful about its big, bold eyes, staring into oblivion. And then she saw the TV screen, and realizing what was on, became affixed for several minutes.

The next day, she stepped out of the shower again, smelled the towels, and nearly gagged. She was going insane over this. This detergent was making her detestable return home all the more awful; she needed to get away again. But she was trapped in her own neighborhood, in her own head, in her own body. In a cloak of lemon-scented towels. She kept looking out at the fields, imagining the black beast from her past amidst the journalists and rows of corn, and she couldn't take it. No matter how much she grew up, it was still clear in her head

After Gasolina died (or as her father told her, “disappeared”), they'd gotten a new dog and named it Gasolina too, just to comfort her. Dee never really liked dogs, but was pleasant enough to bear her sister's needs, if only just a little. And so they bought another dog, another German Shepherd. Another Gasolina, to bring peace to Dawn. Of course, she always knew what really happened, how the black beast must've ripped the dog's throat out, or perhaps trampled it to death, or some other horrible thing like that.

All in all, Dawn knew as long as she was within range of that field, she would not be free. She needed a reprieve �" another reprieve. She needed a reprieve from her monotony. Two days in town, and she was already bored. She scratched Gasolina II behind the ears.

“Good girl,” she said

The screen door was open. Outside, her father was talking to some more journalists from the PBS news crew. There were tourists, too: scientific-minded rubberneckers who'd read about the cornfield in the backwaters of online news. They stood on the road and took picture after picture until Alex grabbed his gun and shot at them. Even then, they only moved back a couple paces and continued to photograph their field, a few of them back in their van, taking notes on how the corn looked. How tall it was. How green the leaves were and how yellow the fruit was.

Dawn stopped petting Gasolina II for a moment and looked out the window, folding her arms across her chest when she saw the tourists standing in the road. She hated them with a passion. She couldn't walk around in her underwear with a bunch of nerdy college kids watching her from down the driveway. It was the ultimate bane of every teenager's free, rebellious dream.

She turned around, and saw that Gasolina II was gone. Her heart raced with sudden, unexpected fear, and she rushed out of the house. The screen door was still open, and she shoved it out of the way as she bolted, barefoot, onto the porch.

“Gasolina!”

The PBS reporters glanced over her father's shoulder in the driveway, intrigued. Dawn sprinted over the gravel and into the grass, bracing herself for the corn. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her father shaking his head at her, the reporters staring awkwardly. And then she burst into the corn, and their conversation resumed.

With the sunlight masked by rows and rows of fully grown crops, the field was dark and shady. Despite the blistering summer heat, it seemed cool in the green shade, though Dawn hardly noticed this as she rushed by. The leaves slashed her. The dirt slid beneath her toenails. Her eyes burned from the dust, strangely devoid of moisture, she was kicking up. Her lungs choking on air, she paused only for a moment, turned to the south, and kept running. The corn slit open her cheek, and she tripped, falling face-first into the ground.

“S**t! Gasolina!”

Unable to scramble to her feet, she stayed planted on the ground whilst her cheek poured blood into the soil. She was faint. Lightheaded. Her limbs felt dead, and her heart felt like it might explode from beating so much. At its rate, she was literally pouring blood into the ground, her cheek bleeding like an old man on blood thinners.

“Gasolina...” she choked once again. She groped at a handful of soil, pulling up roots and trying to claw her way to her feet. Surely she'd be sucked dry.

It was Dee, interestingly, who saved her in the end. She went running through the field and found Dawn, lying in a sopping pile of bloody soil, very nearly unconscious. “It was like the dirt was draining her...” she would later say.

“I just wanna get out...” Dawn kept saying.

Her father grunted at her.

Of course, Gasolina II had been in the house the whole time, but that was irrelevant. “You gonna be okay, Dawn?” Dee asked, caught in a rare moment of sympathy.

“I just wanna get out.”

Her cheek was as swollen as her lips.

Author's Note

Tacky. Sentences start to go sour towards the end.