The Hollow Men of Harrowfield

The stone on Old Prentiss's forehead had grown so large that it made his profile look like a silhouette cut from a different era. From the side, he was not a man but a carving—something you might see in a museum label beneath the caption "Bavarian, late 19th century, unknown artist, purpose unclear."

Maya had never thought about the geometry of her great-uncle's face until the surveyor arrived. She had always known about the stone. Everyone in Harrowfield knew about it. It was part of him the way a tree's rings are part of it—visible only if you know where to look, but once you know, you cannot unsee them. What she had not considered was the silhouette.

The surveyor was a young man with a tablet and a laser measuring device and the kind of confident posture that comes from being employed by a company whose name is printed on the side of a truck that passes through town once a month. He did not look like a threat. He looked like a man who measured things for a living and had never encountered anything that refused to be measured.

"I'm sorry to bother you," he said to Old Prentiss, who was sitting on the porch of his house—the one at the edge of town where the road ends and the hills begin. "We're just doing a preliminary survey for the Vaughn Mining Group. They're interested in purchasing the remaining mineral rights in the area."

Old Prentiss did not respond. He was looking at the hill behind Maya's house, the one that had collapsed in 1934 and had not been stable since. He was thinking about something that had nothing to do with mineral rights and everything to do with the shape of the hill and whether the stone inside it would hold if pressed.

"The offer is generous," the surveyor continued. He had been trained to persist. "Significantly above market value. We're talking about enough to relocate comfortably for everyone who signs."

Maya watched from the window. She was not supposed to be watching, but she was seventeen and had learned the hard way that the adults in Harrowfield operated on timelines that did not include her, and so she watched. It was a habit that had served her well and would continue to serve her badly.

The surveyor placed his measuring rod against the wooden post that marked the boundary of Old Prentiss's property. The rod was aluminum, lightweight, marked with precise increments that measured in centimeters. It was a tool designed to impose order on the world, and it had worked for every piece of land in every state except this one, which sat in a fold of the Appalachian foothills that geology had not yet decided on.

Old Prentiss stood up.

He was not tall, but when he stood, the porch creaked in a way that suggested the wood itself was acknowledging a hierarchy it recognized but did not like. He walked to the edge of the porch, down the three steps that Maya's grandmother had installed twenty years ago so he would not have to climb them, and approached the surveyor's rod.

He did not touch it. He did not need to touch it. He stood three feet away, closed his eyes, and breathed.

The breathing was the first thing Maya noticed—not unusual in itself, but the rhythm was wrong. It was too slow, too deep, too controlled. Each breath lasted approximately six seconds, and between each breath there was a pause that lasted approximately three seconds, during which the air seemed to thicken, as if the oxygen in Harrowfield had suddenly become heavier.

The surveyor noticed. He glanced at Old Prentiss, then at his tablet, then back at Old Prentiss. His face did not change—the training had been too thorough for that—but his eyebrows rose slightly, which in the surveyor's vocabulary was the equivalent of shouting.

Old Prentiss opened his eyes. The stone on his forehead seemed to pulse, or perhaps it was just the shadow that made it pulse. The light in Harrowfield was always wrong—too gray, too low, the kind of light that makes everything look like it belongs to a photograph from 1912.

He exhaled.

The surveyor's rod did not break. It did not bend. It simply... changed. The aluminum went from silver to a dull gray, and then the gray turned to dust, and the dust fell to the ground in a small pile that looked nothing like the tool that had been, seconds earlier, a precise instrument of measurement.

The surveyor looked at the pile of dust. He looked at Old Prentiss. He looked at his tablet, which was still recording coordinates for a land that no longer had the boundaries he had been hired to measure.

"What was that?" he said. His voice was exactly the same as it had been ten seconds ago. That was the most disturbing part.

Old Prentiss said nothing. He turned and walked back up the steps and sat down on the porch and resumed his position, which was exactly the position he had been in before the surveyor had arrived—as if the surveyor had been a dream, and Old Prentiss had simply resumed the reality that existed before the dream had interrupted it.

Maya saw the surveyor leave. She saw him walk to his truck, which was parked on the road, which was the only road in town, which was gravel and had been gravel since before her grandmother was born. She saw him get in and drive away, and she knew he would not come back. The Vaughn Mining Group would send someone else, and that someone else would see the dust, and that someone else would not come back either. This was how Harrowfield worked. You either learned to live with things that could not be measured, or you left, and most people who left did so gradually, over the course of years, taking their lives with them in increments small enough to be invisible.

That night, Maya climbed the hill behind her house and sat in the dark and watched the stars move the way stars move when you are too tired to notice that they are moving. Her forehead was smooth. Her hands were normal. She was, in every physical sense that mattered, a completely ordinary seventeen-year-old girl from a town that had forgotten its own name.

And that was the burden. Not having the stone. Not being able to do what Old Prentiss could do. The burden was knowing, with a certainty that sat in her stomach like a cold stone, that she would never be useful to this town in the way it needed to be used.

She could leave. She had been accepted to a community college in Birmingham. She could go in the fall and study something—nursing, maybe, or accounting, something that would lead to a job and an apartment and a life that did not smell of coal dust and mold.

She could stay. She could sit on Old Prentiss's porch someday and let the stone grow on her forehead and breathe the way he breathed and make the world dissolve when the world needed to be dissolved.

She sat in the dark and did not choose. The hill did not choose for her. The stars did not choose for her. The river that ran through the valley below did not choose for her. Everything in Harrowfield had stopped choosing decades ago and was now simply persisting, like a sentence that has reached the end of a paragraph and continues anyway because the page is not full and there is not enough energy to start a new one.