The seed came in a brown paper bag with no label. Arthur found it in the back of the feed store, behind a row of rusted plough blades and a stack of cracked buckets. The farmer who ran the store, a man named Hensley with teeth like broken fence posts, didn't even look up when Arthur picked it up.

"What's this?" Arthur asked.

Hensley shrugged. "Somebody left it. Don't know what it is. Doesn't look like corn. Doesn't look like anything, really."

The seed was small and dark, almost black, with a hard shell that cracked between Arthur's thumb and forefinger to reveal something pale and oily inside. He put it in his pocket and went home.

Arthur was sixty-one years old and tired. He had been tired for a long time. His farm in central Illinois was small—thirty acres of mostly dead soil—and his bank account was a number that went down every month and never came back up. He lived alone in a house with one working light bulb and a refrigerator that made a noise like a dying animal.

He planted the seed in a small patch behind his house, because what did he have to lose? He watered it, the way you water anything when you have nothing else to give it.

It grew fast. Faster than anything Arthur had ever seen. In two weeks it was knee-high. In three weeks it was waist-high. In four weeks it was tall as Arthur, with broad green leaves and a thick stalk that felt almost fleshy under his fingers.

He harvested it in the summer and ground the grain between two stones, the way his grandmother had taught him when he was a boy. The flour was white and fine. He baked a loaf of bread and ate it for breakfast the next morning.

It was the best bread he had ever eaten.

He ate it every day for a month. The bread was always perfect—soft, sweet, with a flavour that made him close his eyes when he took the first bite. He began to feel stronger. His back stopped aching. His hands stopped shaking. He slept through the night for the first time in years.

Then his neighbour's dog started vomiting.

The dog belonged to a woman named Peters, who lived half a mile down the road. Arthur heard her shouting from his porch and went to see what was wrong. The dog was on its side, convulsing, foam at its mouth. Peters was crying and kicking at it, not hard, but with that frantic helpless energy of someone who doesn't know what to do.

Arthur knelt beside the dog. It was bad—really bad. He put two fingers in its mouth and felt its tongue. Blue around the edges. Poison, he thought. But of what?

The dog died an hour later. Peters stood in the yard and watched Arthur close its eyes, and she said nothing, but her eyes said everything: what did you give this animal?

Arthur didn't answer. He went home and looked at his bread. It looked the same as always—golden crust, soft white interior, the smell of something wholesome and good. But something had shifted inside him, a small doubt that grew into a larger doubt that grew into a certainty he could not unsee.

He tested the flour. He didn't have a laboratory—he had a knife and a spoon and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the medicine cabinet—but he did what he could. The peroxide turned brown when it touched the flour. That was not right. Flour should not turn brown when you touch it with peroxide.

He stopped eating the bread. He threw it all away—every loaf, every crumb—and burned the rest of the seed in the stove, watching it curl and blacken and release a smell that was sweet and wrong, like flowers growing in a cemetery.

But the damage was done. He had eaten the bread for a month. His body had taken in whatever was in that flour, and though he felt fine now—better than fine, actually—he knew it was only a matter of time.

He went to the doctor. The doctor ran tests. The doctor's face did something Arthur had not seen on a doctor's face before—not fear, exactly, but the kind of careful neutrality that comes from knowing something bad and trying not to say it out loud.

"Your liver," the doctor said. "It's... unusual. There are compounds in your blood that I haven't seen before. I'll need to run more tests."

Arthur nodded. He went home and sat on his porch and watched the empty field where the plant had grown. He thought about the seed in the brown paper bag, found behind a row of rusted plough blades, left by nobody knew whom, for nobody knew what reason.

He had been so tired. So tired of being poor, and tired of being alone, and tired of a life that offered nothing and expected everything. And the seed had offered him something—bread that tasted like heaven, a body that felt strong for the first time in years, sleep that came without dreams.

He had known, somewhere in the back of his mind, that it was too good to be true. But knowing and seeing are different things, and Arthur had been tired.

The doctor called a week later. There were more tests to run. More specialists to consult. More waiting. Arthur listened to the doctor talk in that careful neutral voice and thought about the bread, and how good it had been, and how he would never taste anything that good again.

He hung up the phone and sat on his porch until dark. The field was quiet. The wind moved through the dead stalks of last year's corn, making a sound like whispering. Arthur closed his eyes and listened to it, and wondered if the poison in his blood was the price of a month of perfect bread, or if it was the price of hope itself.