Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Harvest Queen Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

HARVEST QUEEN

“Oh, so you actually live in the suburbs?” Dennis asked. He was fidgety and shy. This woman was so, so beautiful and for some reason, she’d swiped right on his profile.

“Not quite. I’m a country girl,” Maggie said.

“Oh, like on a farm?”

Maggie was so utterly perfect that was difficult to focus.

“Only way to be truly country, if you ask me.”

Dennis smiled with his entire expression, inhaling deeply of the coffee scents in the nearly vacant and rundown Starbucks Maggie had chosen, and the sweet perfume, or hair product, or lip gloss she wore that smelled faintly of cola.

“I’m a city boy, through and through. Closest I’ve been to a farm was a pumpkin patch and haunted house, oh, must’ve been fifteen years ago.”

Maggie tilted her head some, her slender fingers finding his lower thigh, just above the knee, beneath the table. She squinted, her left eyebrow raising. “You don’t have kids though?”

Her hand was completely unexpected, and he had to fight off a gasp. The cola smell was everywhere now and his head began to swim. “No, no kids. Only an ex-wife.”

He’d said this because it felt like what she wanted to hear—he had two daughters, one 17 and one 18. Dennis would tell Maggie any old thing in the world. She was so far out of his league they weren’t even playing the same sport.

“What’s say you and I go for a little walk? Find someplace private to chat,” Maggie said as her hand rose high enough that she played the top of her middle fingernail against the bulge of his jeans—the bulge at the crotch as opposed to the love handle/gut bulge circling his middle at the beltline.

“Hey, sure.” Dennis fought off a nervous giggle. He hadn’t been laid in more than a year and a half, had cringed at how his now ex-wife had cringed whenever he’d brought up the topic during those final years of their relationship. Was this beautiful woman really going to let him…?

“What’s the end game here, missy?” he said and pushed her hand away. He was overweight, he was broke, he was laid off, and the hair on his chest and back was thicker than the hair on his head. Something was up.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Maggie said. “Forgive me.” She put her hands up to her face. “I’m so embarrassed.”

Dennis spied her, mostly buying what she was selling.

“I just…” She tittered and shook her head.

“What?” he said.

She waved him off, still covering her face with her left hand.

“No, what?” he said.

She spread her fingers and looked at him, smiling around her palm. “It’s a country girl thing.”

“What is?”

“Big men.”

“Big men what?” he said, now grinning himself.

“Big men make me horny.” Maggie covered her face again. “I’m sorry, most guys—and I’m not saying I’ve done this more than four times, because that’s how many dates I’ve gone on here in the city—want to get into my pants. I just kind of assumed.”

Dennis swallowed an invisible golf ball before reaching out for her skinny leg. Still covering her face, she slid down the chair to meet his hand, to push her sensible jean skirt up high enough to give him flesh access at her thigh.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

—

The heat was thick on the air and the air-conditioner inside the Freightliner was pulling major duty. Maggie was up in the sleeper behind her uncle at the wheel. This was the second time she’d gone with him to the city. Last year was fun because it was different and exciting, but this year had gotten old pretty damned fast.

They pulled into the border crossing line and waited. They wouldn’t get to chance it like the others looking to cross in their sedans and pick-ups—they had no choice but to get out of the truck and let the dogs sniff away.

The Mack ahead of them pulled into a stall. “You think you’ll do a three-peat?”

“A ‘three-peat,’ what…oh. No. I’m not in the running this year, two years is enough. I’m going to college,” Maggie said.

“You’re not leaving us for good, though?” her uncle asked, looking into the rearview mirror.

“No. I couldn’t leave home. I just…Harvest Queen’s a lot of bother and it means more to the younger girls. On that side, I’d feel like a jerk if I won three times.”

“Not sure there’s a right girl to replace you. And what’s the other side?” Her uncle let off the brakes and pulled into a customs stall. All the necessary paperwork for the 41 head of Texas longhorns he’d purchased down in Nebraska were in a file at the ready.

Maggie covered her face in an act that looked a bit like what she’d done in the Starbucks, sitting next to a man named Dennis, but it was for a wholly different emotion. “You know.”

Maggie’s uncle had been bringing livestock across the border for decades. He turned in his seat to look at her head on. “Don’t ever be ashamed of who you are or where you come from.”

A knock landed against the driver’s door. Maggie’s uncle shifted and killed the engine, gave a wave down to the little woman in a customs official uniform holding a clipboard, and grabbed the paperwork.

“Come on now,” he said to Maggie as he pushed open the door.

Maggie grabbed her purse and located her passport within.

—

The sisters couldn’t be more different than they were, not while being only a year apart and having the same parents. They’d lived in the same household, they’d eaten the same food, and their parents had shopped for them at the same stores. Trudy was eighteen. Raven was seventeen.

“He probably killed himself,” Raven said, her eyes on the screen of her cellphone as she scrolled the accounts of the beautiful and the famous.

“Jesus. What’s wrong with you?” Trudy said.

They were in their father’s crummy bachelor pad apartment. It was just like on TV: pastel paint on the walls, cramped rooms, ancient furniture, walkways to everywhere, and a funky pool down below next to a ratty patio set and a dirty barbeque. His car was in his parking space and his wallet was on the coffee table, but he was missing.

“What? Probably found out Mom’s dating Jimmy and then found himself a cliff to jump off.”

Trudy shook her head. Raven was cold, flippant, and wildly selfish. Always had been. And when she’d turned 16, she grew into her body, was suddenly the girl every cool person wanted to be near. Had a million dates. Had a million friends.

Trudy bent to rifle the junk mail that had been pushed through the slot on the door. No real mail, no hints as to where he’d gone. She dropped the small stack and straightened, pulling her jeans up. She had love handles and no ass—was in fact shaped very much like her father, Dennis.

“Maybe a neighbor knows?” Trudy said.

“Maybe a neighbor knows which cliff he jumped off of?”

“Ugh, don’t be so damned horrible all the time,” Trudy said and stepped outside.

She looked to her left and then right, deciding on room 219 to her left. The door seemed more inviting, despite being nearly identical to the door of the apartment to the right of her father’s; the seven was made of janky yellowed plastic rather than the faux gold of the rest of the numbers. It was just a little weird. A little off-putting. Trudy knocked on 219.

A man wearing an off-white undershirt with large hairy breasts and a bulging gut answered. He held a bag of Vermis brand pork rinds in his hand. “Yeah?” he said around a mouthful.

Trudy leaned away some. “Um, sorry to bother you, but my father lives next-door, and nobody’s heard from him in days.”

“How many?” the man said.

“How many what?”

“Days.”

“Oh, at least a week,” Trudy said.

The man shoveled a handful of greasy pork rinds into his mouth and crumbs drifted down like snow to settle in the pelt between his cleavage. “Oh, ‘bout a week ago he had him a hooker over. He said she matched him on Tinder, was all proud about it. Like I believed that.”

“Believed what?” Raven said, stepping out onto the connected balcony that ran to all the rooms on the second floor.

“A woman, pretty as you and just about as young, matched your fat old dad on Tinder,” the man said and then began sucking the tips of his fingers, one at a time.

“Look who’s calling someone fat,” Raven said, nodding at the man’s protruding belly.

“Being fat don’t preclude me from recognizing fat. Don’t preclude me from recognizing a high-priced hooker. One of them ones that plays a gag. She was dressed like a church girl,” the man said. He rolled the remainder of the bag and pulled a red elastic band from his wrist to bound it closed.

“He showed you his Tinder?” Trudy said. “Dad was on Tinder?”

“Sure. Just about everyone here’s on Tinder.” The big man began tonguing at one of his eye teeth.

“Can you show me the profile?” Trudy said.

“Dad would get a hooker,” Raven said and stepped back into their father’s apartment.

“No, I’m not on Tinder,” the man said.

“But you said—”

“I’m on Grindr.” The man waggled his eyebrows but quit quickly; Trudy didn’t seem impressed. “They went to the Starbucks on Wilson. He told me that, too. She wanted to go to that one specifically, even though it’s got to be the oldest in the city.”

—

“Not a prostitute, no,” the Starbucks barista said. She remembered the overweight middle-aged man and the beautiful young woman from eight nights ago, recognized Dennis from the picture Trudy had shown. “I think she was a famous lookalike, but I don’t know who. Know what I mean? That’s why I remember her at all.”

“Maybe. Is she on here?” Trudy held out her cellphone, the phony Tinder profile she made with her father’s photo was open on all the available women in the area.

“Could be she does commercials?” the barista said as she swiped by woman after woman. “You know? Not for real famous, but famous-ish?”

“Maybe?” Trudy looked at the vacant table where the barista had seen her father sitting and wondered why this beautiful woman had chosen him and what she’d done with him, if the two things were indeed connected.

“Oop, there she is.”

Trudy snatched the cellphone and studied the little photo on her screen. The woman was totally as beautiful as the neighbor, and now the barista, had said. Her profile said she was from the city, but she didn’t dress like it. She had on a plaid shirt and a jean skirt that was long enough that the hem didn’t make it into any of the pictures. And in all three photos of this woman—Maggie V.—she wore that same plaid shirt and jean skirt. In the final one, she stood in front of a big red barn, behind her were the letters MIS, the remainder of whatever that word was had been cut off.

“I know I know her from somewhere,” the barista said, snapping the fingers of her right hand in front of her face. “Pretty sure it’s a commercial.”

Trudy exhaled enough air to puff out her cheeks. She swiped right.

“Can I get you anything?” the barista finally asked.

—

The burner phone had beeped fairly steadily with Tinder notifications. Maggie liked to see who wanted to meet her, even if they meant nothing and would never, ever meet her. Though, this last one had her frowning. She and her mother were on a short trip to town for party supplies when the notification that a man she’d already met swiped right with a new account.

Impossible.

It couldn’t be the man called Dennis.

But it was freaky enough that she put down her window and let the phone drop from her hand. It bounced three times against asphalt before falling into a swampy ditch. Crises averted.

—

Trudy returned to her father’s apartment to find Raven and the neighbor sitting on the couch, eating chips, and watching a movie on cable. On the screen, Arnold Schwarzenegger grabbed Michael Ironside’s arms and yanked him higher on the moving platform he dangled from a moment before his head and shoulders were separated after meeting the underside of something immoveable, a floor, a wall, didn’t matter. Arnold then cast away the severed limbs and said, “See you at the party, Richter!”

“What are you watching?” Trudy said as she stepped into the apartment.

“Total Recall,” the neighbor said.

“The remote’s glued to the table. Like at a hotel,” Raven said, yanking on the boxy remote that belonged to the boxy Zenith on the chintzy TV stand.

“I used Goo Gone to get mine off,” the neighbor said.

“Fight the power,” Raven said and reached into the chip bag.

“I found her. Sort of. The barista thought she was famous or did commercials, and was not a prostitute,” Trudy said.

The neighbor shrugged. “Way out of his league.”

“Well, yeah,” Trudy said. “Was this who you saw?” She handed over the phone.

The neighbor watched the TV for ten more seconds until a commercial disrupted the movie and he accepted the phone. “That’s her. Maggie, I bet that’s her real name. She looks like a Maggie.”

“And you saw her here? What time?” Trudy said.

“Around midnight. Same night he had his big date,” the neighbor said, crunching through a mouthful of chips—same brand as the pork rinds.

“We asked our friends coast-to-coast to try our new kettle chips,” Raven said along with the commercial and then crunched a chip.

“Vermis, Vermis, Vermis, the snacks for a brighter world,” the neighbor said, continuing with the ad dialogue, a little hum in his words.

“Did you see him, or just her?” Trudy said.

On the screen, about 100 hicks waved, standing in front of a big red barn with the word VERMIS in white, white letters across the front. An ad for Stay Free Mini-Pads began then; none of them spoke along.

“Just her. She was leaving. All the lights were off. I heard her come up and went out to snoop. I have these cigarettes from a…I don’t smoke, but I lit one and I watched her. I think she’s a hooker. Way too hot for your fat dad,” the neighbor said.

Trudy couldn’t argue. She had gotten all her dad’s fat genes and anything above a six was a very tough pull. Maggie was an eleven.

—

“Hey, if the guys can spend all day and night in the fields, I can do a few hours helping with the decorations,” Maggie said to her great-great grandfather. She was in a straw hat, a tank top, and cutoff jean shorts. She was clipping stems off flowers she and the Harvest Queen hopefuls had gathered and gluing them onto a hay wagon that would be used as a parade float in two days.

“Shame you won’t do a third year,” he said.

“Two’s enough for me.”

“And you’re leaving us.”

“Only during the school year. It’s not like I’m never coming back.”

The centenarian sighed. He withdrew his pipe and a plastic sack of tobacco from his pocket. “None of those girls is right for it,” he said, yellowed dentures clamped around the stem as he dropped a match into the bowl.

“Sure, they are,” Maggie said.

“Who?”

Maggie sat silently, her knees tucked beneath her and flowers in her hands. None of them were, really, and everybody knew it. They were all too soft and too thoughtful. None knew the whole truth of the position or its difficult nature. It took a specific type of woman, or a woman willing to play that specific and difficult part. Also, none of the hopefuls were nearly as beautiful as Maggie.

—

In the middle of the night, Trudy couldn’t sleep, thinking about her father and the woman from Tinder. She went to the pantry and grabbed a packet of vanilla cinnamon sticks. She opened the bag and inhaled the scent. So much like cola.

“Whether its salty or sweet, Vermis is the treat that can’t be beat,” she mumbled around a chewed stick. She huffed at herself then. That advertisement hadn’t been on air for a few years now. “Vermis, Vermis, Vermis, snacks for a brighter…” She trailed in thought. She stood still in the kitchen, gazing blankly at the baker’s rack beyond the cutting board island. Her mother and Jimmy, the boy toy, were away for the weekend and had left behind the keys to the car and a debit card.

“Vermis can’t be…” Trudy trailed again. She pulled her phone from the pocket of her pajama shorts. She brought up the longer shot of the Maggie person. That big red building behind her, there was something about it.

MIS; were the cutoff letters VER?

And that building, was it the one…?

She quickly searched Google, landed on YouTube, and watched the Vermis Kettle Chips advertisement. She paused it. That building was a Vermis barn. She had no doubts. Blindly, she shuffled out of the kitchen and into the connected living room. She plopped down on the couch and read about the company.

—

“What’re you doing?” Raven said. She was eating a congealed slice of cold pizza from the night before.

Trudy looked around. She’d fallen asleep on the couch with one hand in the Vermis Cinni Stix bag and the other on her phone. There was a bay window in the living room that faced west, and the light was entering in a way that suggested both she and her sister had slept in until after the noon hour.

“I figured it out. That woman with Dad, it was Maggie Venandi.”

“Who’s Maggie Venandi?”

“Venandi, Pastor, Belator, and Agricola, those are the four families who own Vermis.” Trudy lifted her hand, raising the snack baggy. “Maggie Venandi is from a billionaire family.”

“Bull,” Raven said. She was on her way to the fridge for another slice; she could eat anything she wanted and she never gained a pound.

“No, look.” Trudy opened the Wikipedia page on Maggie Venandi. Someone had used the entire picture that Maggie had cut off for one of the Tinder profile pics. It was of Maggie and another young woman. Also cropped from the Tinder pic were their feet and the sign written in flowers: HARVEST QUEEN.

“But why?” Raven said.

“That’s what we’re going to find out. We’re going to confront the bitch,” Trudy said.

“What?”

“In Manitoba.”

“Canada? Can’t you just call?”

Trudy shook her head. “Can’t you feel it? Dad’s in real danger. We have to do this.”

—

“What purpose do you have for entering Canada?” the boarder agent had asked twice, and Trudy froze. “It’s a simple—”

“Hey, hi.” Raven leaned over the center console. She smiled a set of perfect teeth, head tilted slightly. “Hey, sorry. My sister has these panic things.”

The border agent began nodding, mouth slightly agape. He was in his 40s and trim, even handsome. In an older man kind of way.

Raven moved her left arm, which was beneath her, and pushed her breasts higher in the loose tank top she wore. “You know how girls can be.” She shook her head playfully, her curly locks dancing upon her shoulders. “We’re going up to sightsee. Winnipeg, Riding Mountain National Park, maybe fly up to Churchill to see the polar bears.” Out of boredom, she’d studied Google Maps as they drove. “To begin, we’re staying at an Airbnb in this little town just outside Brandon. Cheaper than staying in the city, right?”

Trudy and the border agent nodded. Trudy wasn’t hypnotized by her sister’s breasts like the border agent however, she was just freaking out.

“Have a nice trip,” the agent mumbled and through they drove.

“Must be nice to do that whenever you want,” Trudy said.

“Pfft, that was nothing. I bet I could’ve borrowed a fifty from him. A little time and he’d take me on a shopping spree,” Raven said. “Probably not even illegal here. Canadians are perverts about the age of consent; about everything.”

Trudy looked at her sister. “What is wrong with you?”

Raven stuck out her tongue.

—

“You’re sure we can’t convince you?”

Maggie looked at her uncles and aunts. Behind her, the hopefuls all had their heads downturned as if ashamed that they weren’t good enough but were still willing to run.

“No, tonight’s my last night as Harvest Queen. I can’t. I just can’t, okay?” Maggie said, biting back tears.

They were about to begin the annual Harvest Parade that would run from the edge of the community to the center of the first field the families had planted when they’d settled some 200 years ago. There was no turning back now. Life went on, and if that meant their prosperous community might falter one year, she couldn’t be held accountable.

“Fine. Everybody! Take your spots,” a gnarly old woman shouted—Maggie’s great-great-great aunt.

—

“And just how are we supposed to find this chick?” Raven said. They’d pulled off the main highway half an hour ago and according to her phone, were coming up on Domum, a county settlement rather than a town, and home of Vermis Snack Foods. “How do you know she isn’t off in Paris or something?”

Trudy had been thinking about that possibility a lot on the trek, but she needed to confront somebody, anybody who might know what happened to their father. Even if he was a rather mediocre Dad most of the time.

“Think she’s going to be in the middle of the road, just waving at…” Raven trailed.

They’d come to an intersection where the asphalt ended and gravel began. A sign warned that the land was not incorporated by the province. On the same post was the word DOMUM. Beneath that, HOME OF VERMIS. Crossing by them on another gravel road was a tractor pulling a parade float and Maggie Venandi in a huge flower crown, sitting on a raised platform above several young women and girls wearing smaller flower crowns. Behind the passing float were dozens of men and women in plaid shirts, blue jeans, and well-worn work boots.

“That’s her, right?” Trudy said.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Raven said.

The marchers in the parade eyed the idling Toyota sedan with North Dakota plates. Another tractor and wagon appeared, following the procession. It featured two-dozen large cages. Naked men had been cramped into those cages and were smeared with dirt or shit, and blood. Steadily, the men reached through gaps in the wiring to snatch at snack food items littering the floor of the wagon.

“Was that Dad?” Raven said, pointing to the second wagon.

Trudy had already kicked open her door, though hadn’t stepped out. More men and women, followed by children, trailed along behind the parade.

“Get back in the car,” Raven said.

“What’ll we do?” Trudy said.

“Uh, get the hell out of here?”

“No, but, Dad?”

“We can call the cops and they can come.” Raven made a show of holding up her phone before dialing.

Trudy climbed back into the car. The parade was by them now.

“Hey, yeah, so these people kidnapped my dad and beat him up and stuff. I just saw them go by.” Raven listened. “In this place called Domum.” Raven listened some more. “Oh, okay. See you then, I guess.”

“Well?” Trudy said.

Raven lowered her phone. “Thirty-five minutes.”

“But what if they’re doing something to him?”

“I don’t—” Raven shook her head. “He should’ve known. That chick is way too hot for him!”

“So, we just let them do whatever?” Trudy’s whole face scrunched into an angry ball. “No, fuck that.” She threw the shifter into drive and followed the parade route.

“For the record, I’m not getting out of the car.”

“Why are you like this?”

“Like I don’t want to get caged up by Canadian hillbillies?”

The parade had detoured from the road and was stalled in a field. Most of the locals had joined hands in a semi-circle that opened onto a dirt mound. The men from the cages were on the ground, moving on hands and knees toward the dirt mound.

Trudy winced at the pendulous sway of her father’s belly and his shrunken genitals, his hairy ass and back and shoulders. “Daddy,” she moaned and parked. She then snatched the keys and got out.

“Hey!” Raven said.

Trudy approached quickly. The locals didn’t hear her as she put a broad shoulder down and ran through a pair of kids holding hands in the circle. They tumbled and she kept on, burning a line to her father.

“Dad! It’s me! I’ve got you!”

She reached him and dropped to her knees. She hugged tightly around his neck with both arms. He smelled terrible, mostly like feces.

“Dad, come on,” she said, leaning away to look at him.

His eyes were two milk-white orbs. Green and purple bruises haloed his temples. Many of his teeth had been broken and were jagged little chunks. Cheese Doodle crumbs rimmed his mouth like clown paint.

“What have they done to you?”

A shadow loomed over Trudy, and she turned. A big man was approaching, he wore blood-stained overalls and carried a black baton prod.

“No, wait!” Trudy put up her arms to shield her head.

The man swung the baton, pressing the trigger as he did. The strike to her elbow hurt. The electricity coursing through her made her convulse. The second strike nailed her temple and the world went black. Another man helped the one with the baton strip Trudy naked and then drape her over her father’s back. The procession of naked men continued until it reached the dirt mound.

From her seat on high, Maggie said, “Our Lord, our God, dear Vermis, please accept these gifts as a show of our gratitude!”

The dirt mound burst outward and a round face with no nose or eyes, and a mouth full of tiny teeth rose to the surface. It wriggled ten feet of its soft, rubbery body topside before stretching a long grey tongue out to the first naked man. It reeled him in and began chewing, rending the flesh and bones and blood into a pink slurry. The procession moved forward.

One by one, the great worm ate, until it took Trudy and Dennis into its mouth at once. The worm shivered, perhaps in delight, perhaps in disgust that it fed on a woman. They wouldn’t know until next year’s harvest.

—

“I won’t say a word. I mean they were family, but I’m looking out for number one here. Know what I mean?” Raven said.

A group of very old people and Maggie surrounded her after pulling her from the car. The worm remained partially out of the ground, licking blood from the grass. The rest of the locals formed a distant circle, sitting in the harvested hay field, watching—including the Harvest Queen Hopefuls in their little flower crowns, knowing tears playing down their cheeks.

“Your presence is no mistake,” an old, old man said.

The other elders shook their heads.

“She’s perfect,” Maggie said and stepped forward. “How would you like a position with the Vermis Snack Food company?”

“Uh, what?” Raven said.

Maggie lifted her large crown and set it on Raven’s confused and terrified head.

“Harvest Queen comes with many benefits, your highness.” Maggie bent to take a knee, as did the fogeys surrounding them. “We’re a multi-billion-dollar organization.”

“Benefits?” Raven said, a grin creeping onto the left side of her mouth. “Like, what Kind?”

XX