Young Tippy Glurn
Tippy and his usual band of more or less "Friends", are taking a shortcut home from school across the fields. The main field between these kids and their homes was a huge communal cornfield. Everyone in the town who wanted a share of the harvest had to spend some time working it. Tippy's little brother Bill was with them. Two years younger, a tag on burden, that was Bill. Tag-along Bill was skinny, short for his age, yet fast and he almost always kept up with the big boys. He always had a traumatized look on his pasty sickly face. The great, circular cornfield. Much more than enough corn for the village, mounds of it shipped out for sell in the elsewhere. And this corn was really savory! Human sacrifice makes it strong and it freshness lasts long. So succulent, its own juices make a sorta butter that is so good that some buy it in bulk to extract. The God of the cornfield. He who walks behind the rows is said to live in the center of the field. the corn grows seven foot high here. Like trees to the kids. Everyone worked the fields, all can take what they need from it. Many have family members who have died for it. This was near the end of flood season. Mud puddles dotted the field and they have to step around the low areas, or risk sinking in ankle deep. In the center of the field was last years "Scarecrow". It was Tim Bensen that year. A drunken hell raiser who won the honor of being ritually killed to assist the fertility of the corn. It is odd that almost every "randomly selected" sacrifice turned out to be someone of bad reputation or a financial competitor of the wise and rich town elders. Tippy still remembered the shock and scandal three years earlier when someone stole the skull off a sacrifice victim whose body had hung for ten months. The festival was in shambles that year. Tippy turned ten last year, so he was made to watch Bensen die. A horrible experience that still haunts his nightmares. In Tippy's nightmares, it's him being selected to die all screaming and bloody like that. The green heart field the townsfolk call it. But, for something so sacred, it gave Tippy the creeps. Kids were not allowed to play in or cross these fields, this is the town's corn, not a stalk should be damaged. But, of course, the kids took shortcuts through it. Tippy and the kids his age group trying to stay ahead of that annoying little Billy, Tippy's brat-faced little brother who always wants to tag along. The older boys cut through the center of the cornfield because that is where last year's sacrifice is now a scarecrow. They now his little brother is frightend of that corpse, chest open ,rib out out. Death shriek still splitting the jaw on the skull wide.
The old abandoned two-story house a short walk from here. The local kids used to walk by it. Tippy even went inside with party aged relatives. A no running water no electricity party house. Beer and dart damaged rock and roll posters with down folding corners nailed to the walls. A place for locals to go and drink. Intoxicating plants growing in the windows. Tippy's cousin Teldo once went in the house by himself on a Sunday afternoon. He snuck through the shelter belt to help hide from passing cars. He found a couple unopened bottles of beer that he took and hid in the shelter belt. He was only nine at the time, a year older then Tippy was and he drank the beers that next evening and he got drunk for the eighth time of his life. A few months later bulldozes raised the old house down and many truckloads later the bulk was hauled away. Tippy walked to the site one-time shortly after this. Amongst the debris Tippy found a bent up tarot card and a scented candle. He took these treasures home but his brother on one of his "contraband raids", found these items while Tippy was riding the school bus home. The objects joined a gallery of items that vanished when he was away. Between his mother, and siblings, nothing seemed to survive long in any place of hiding. Tippy would hide random things just to mess with them. Things like a box of clipped out hamburger pics from the newspaper.
Tippy ran behind his two older cousins. Hair like corn silk, jeans are worn down to a sad state, shoes clotted with mud. His cousins are six years older and they don't dig the likes of some little kid hanging with them. They soon outrun him and are gone from sight. Tippy walks along the dirt road looking down for arrowheads or dollar bills. He finds a dollar and a while later, he finds a little clay ankh that must have come off someone's necklace.He was excited! Anything in the style of the ancient world was exciting to him, he had seen history shows about Egypt. He showed it to all his older cousins. They found it mildly interesting but not super cool by any means. Then his older brother Bible Glurn showed up and asked to see it. Tippy suspected his uber-Christian brother would break it on purpose and claim it was an accident. So he just held it up pitched between fingers. A think gray clack ankh, with crude lines crossing the bottom shaft of it and some other tribal looking squiggles that meant who knows what. "No, let me hold it, so I can get a good look at it". "You plan to break it I'm not handing it over", Tippy said. His older brother, already good at psychological warfare and manipulation then proceded to lay on buckets of shame to weigh Tippy's resolve down. So, with a bad feeling Tippy hands the ankh to his brother, who instantly closes his palm over it, snapping it in half. Of course, he broke it. Turns out it's Tippy who is morally wrong for being a sucker and trusting him. Shame on Tippy. According to his right with the Lord brother. Tippy learned to feel that shaming is a tool for sociopaths to control others and he had a big chip on his narrow shoulders about it.
Tippy chases his older cousins and they get away in the cornfield. But instead of continuing to run they hide among the rows to play an ancient game. Tippy sprints through, a last desperate attempt to catch up with them and not be bored for awhile. But now strange animal calls sound. Calls that seem to answer each other from some unseen location either side of the field. Thick tall stalks of corn hide whatever is making the sound. Tippy retreats out of the field and the calls seem to be closer. An unseen cousin's chilling roar sounds from not too far away and a dead rabbit he had found is flung. It lands ten feet ahead of Tippy in a dead flop. Tippy is running now. Not long after that, the cousins get cars, and they begin underage driving on country roads. Tippy is not around them long enough to chase them anymore. In time, Tippy learns to keep his arrowheads and other finds a secret. The older cousins had by now stolen his better finds. What good is it that such a little kid has a cool arrowhead? It doesn't matter that he spends hours searching for these artifacts. He is a kid, he doesn't deserve such treasures. And he only finds them, because he has nothing to do and he walks about fifteen hours a week. If his cousins bothered to look for as many hours a week they would find the stuff too. But fuck that, they have lives.
Tippy's family celebrated an odd amount of Holidays. They went to the "Other church". An upstart church that had only been in the town for 27 years! He celebrated a lot of "Transition holidays that are no longer on the map. Memories of green and blue tinsel waving over a chocolate cake iced with strange symbols. Memories of the kids hiding painted eggs for the parents to find and shoot with handguns. Mornings of naked family gatherings. Of eating moon and star shaped sugar cookies caked with yellow icing and glittering sprinkles of bright candies curled in thin, fragile mysterious glyphs. Memories of staying in bed all day staring at a single sickly green candle. That church is not there anymore city town rules had it torn down. Tippy stole a few shattered pieces of brick and wood from the ruins. He hid the bits under the bridge in front of his house. He had the bits stacked like a tiny mock church. He made paper dolls that worshipped there. A library stood for 17 years but its a used brick brack store now. The kind of place run by gossip heavy lonely old Women trying to find a way to connect with the town they grew up in. A town now cold to them. There is no sign today of the strange holidays. They have gone away, and we speak of them not. Just like there is no sign of the beautiful Elvin village that once stood here. A village of open-air tents without walls. Of stone mounds and irrigation systems. Not even a stone remains. Just like the Elves left nothing of the frog-people's temples when they took these lands by force some thirty-thousand years ago. But these holidays are not gone in the dim memories of Tippy, even into his adult years. And the strange holidays burn brightly in his dreams. Surprising details come back and he writes these details down in his journal. It's still illegal to do this, but transgressions are rarely punished being few take it seriously anymore. In his youth, it was considered a very real threat to the local people's ill-conceived lifestyles. Hell, Tippy has gotten a little information about it from websites that post urban legends from across the country. His plan is to celebrate the old lost holidays. It's not an impossible code to unlock, for Mankind had celebrated them for so long that it's in the DNA. In the future, Tippy's blog on the banned holidays will help get him selected for this year's corn sacrifice. That's what happens when you step out of line. The natural order of things.
Things were not going well in town. Tippy got arrested for speeding and drunk driving and they found a mostly empty bag of weed on him. His rep, low to start with hit bottom. He was now the kind of "Random person", chosen to be the town's yearly human sacrifice. Tippy had nightmares about it. Then things took a much worse turn when the granddaughter of a town elder falsely accused Tippy of touching her butt at the town fair. It don't matter that he didn't he was beaten down and he lost a couple teeth that night. And she got to bask in all the attention and sympathy. Tippy was sure he would be chosen now, and he began planning his escape. While the grandaughter basked in sympathy gifts, had some victory sex with her boyfriend, the son of another of the town elders. Yes deep in their insides townsfolk knew the sacrifices are not really random. But thats part of the secret doctrine. If you know you pretend not to know, thats the safe way to go.
Remembering Tippy. Most people never knew he died, he was already out of heart and mind. A few family members, cousins and nieces and such had an average of four minutes of thinking about Tippy after he was gone. That pretty much sums it up. No remaining relatives would pony up on funeral/burial money. So his body was cremated and buried in a tiny box among a few thousand other unloved dead. All this at the expense of the state.