Fiction | Short Story | Horror | Fascinate Me Fiction

Turnip Meadow

You are what you…play?

Bloop, click, click! Tap, tap, tap. Bloop!

“Ah! Not again!” Howard’s outburst makes his mom jump out of her skin. She swerves unintentionally, narrowly missing a dog sitting on the shoulder.

“Howard! Not while I’m driving, son! Please!” She exhales loudly as she checks her mirrors.

“Sorry, mom,” Howard mutters under his breath. “But it keeps happening!”

“What keeps happening?” Howard hears the edge to his mother’s voice, but decides not to notice.

“The farmer keeps hitting me with the turnips! I can’t avoid it!”

“Well, maybe try a different game for a while? Give the turnips a break?”

Howard sighs heavily. “I don’t want to try another game. I want to play this one!”

Howard loves playing Turnip Meadow, his favorite mobile app game. The premise is shockingly simple. You can choose either of two different roles: be the farmer and hit the people standing in your meadow with as many turnips as you can within a time limit, or avoid getting hit by the angry farmer as one of the denizens of the empty stretch of grass. The second choice has no time limit, but it’s extremely hard to avoid the farmer.

Howard already played as the farmer multiple times. He’s great at pummeling people. He can get up to just a little over a hundred within the 30 second time limit, obliterating each tiny stick figure person as they pop up one at a time like gophers. He’s not so great at avoiding the turnips himself.

“It doesn’t let me move the person fast enough for some reason!”

Howard and his mom pull up to their house. “Help me bring in the groceries, please Howard. I need to hurry and get dinner on the table.”

Another sigh from Howard as he swings his body out of the car. He grabs as many bags as he can carry without his arms buckling, and hurries into the kitchen.

“Howard! Be careful with those! One of those bags has the eggs!” Howard barely hears his mom call after him. He deposits the bags on the kitchen floor and runs to his bedroom. Howard is sure his mom couldn’t possibly expect him to help any more than that. He probably even broke some bag-carrying world records just now. Howard flops onto his bed and continues his game.

An hour or so later, Howard hears his mom call his name.

“Howard! Dinner time!”

His dad’s home now, and his sisters are both sitting at the table when he finally walks into the kitchen. “It’s about time,” his mom greets him. “Come eat with us.” His family had already dug in: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and mac and cheese only clung to existence in small lumps on everyone else’s plates.

“You started without me?”

“Your mother called you more than once,” his dad says sternly. “Did you not hear her, or were you too immersed in your game?”

Howard doesn’t say anything. He pulls up to the table and starts eating.

“Oh, and you broke almost all my eggs earlier when you brought the groceries in. I told you to be careful, didn’t I?” Howard’s mom looks at him, pointedly.

Howard nods and swallows. “Sorry.”

The talk progresses to focus on his sisters, as it usually does. All the wonderful things they accomplished today at school, what after-school programs they want to try, updates on the cute kid in their class always making jokes…blah, blah, blah. Howard eats quickly. While everyone is laughing hard at Dad’s jokes, Howard slips away to hurry back to his room before anyone notices he’s gone.

The game is really starting to annoy Howard now. He thought he finally learned the rhythm of the turnip drops, but as soon as he started progressing, the rhythm changed. The turnips are inexplicably hitting him again. Every time the game restarts, he fumes. Howard knows he could figure it out, though. He’s played harder games, and he’s dying to know what happens if he can only get past the first 30 seconds of gameplay.

When you play as the farmer, every time you beat your own score, you earn tokens that can be saved up to buy digital merchandise for your farmer. At a certain point, Howard stopped being able to improve, so he lost interest. He thought maybe switching things up to play as the person in the field would gather more rewards, or at least get him further in the game. But by now, it’s been hours, and he still hasn’t been able to last longer than 15 seconds in Turnip Meadow. Howard’s eyes are burning. He heard his parents go to bed hours ago. Though he doesn’t feel motivated to look at the time, he knows instinctively it’s very late. Just one more try, one more round, and then he’ll go to sleep….

The grass tickles as Howard rubs his eyes. He rolls onto his back and reaches for his blankets to pull them back up to his chin. He always kicks them off when he gets hot in the middle of the night.

Howard sits up in surprise. His blankets aren’t there. He isn’t in bed anymore. Howard’s outside, in the middle of a giant field. No houses or anything familiar within sight. Actually, the thought occurs to him slowly the field does seem vaguely familiar, almost like he was remembering it from a dream. Howard ruminates as he tries to understand where he is and how he got here.

Suddenly, a shadow blocks out the sunlight. Howard looks up as a giant neon purple boulder comes hurtling toward him. Howard reacts quickly and throws himself out of the way. The boulder narrowly misses him and hits the grass nearby with a profound thump that shakes the ground. The boulder rolls away for a few feet, flattening the grass before settling into place. The massive lump lays on the soft, intensely green grass for a moment before blinking and vanishing out of existence. All that’s left to remind Howard it was there at all are some mounds of dirt where it made contact, and some flat grass. Howard’s eyes widen in shock.

Before he can have another thought, Howard looks up as a second boulder is thrown at him from somewhere he can’t see, identical in size and shape but this time bright blue. Howard shields his head and runs away. There’s nothing around to offer shelter. No trees, no buildings, not even any ditches to fall into. He picks a direction and runs, hoping he’ll find people or …. something. Anything.

Howard again narrowly escapes the boulder. He stares at the thing as it bleeps out of existence like the one before. But before it disappears, he notices something. It’s not a boulder. It’s a turnip. A very large, familiar-looking turnip.

“I’m in Turnip Meadow!” He yells as the realization hits him like a blast of cold wind. “I’m in the game!”

Howard looks around him, the wide stretch of neon green grass, the blank blue sky, the hint of a colorful playground or amusement park off in the distance. How can that be? How can he be in a game? Is this a nightmare? He’s never had a dream so real before. He pinches and slaps his face in an effort to wake up.

“Help me!” Howard screams. No one answers. Maybe he should make a run for the amusement park/playground? There’s bound to be people over there somewhere. Howard decides to try, but no matter how much he runs, he doesn’t seem to be getting any closer. It almost feels to Howard like he’s running in place. The terrain doesn’t change. Nothing new pops up on the horizon, the edge of the field does not reveal itself. Just green grass, blue sky, and another dark shadow widening above him.

Howard manages to roll away, but the impact is closer this time. He doesn’t know how much longer he can keep this up.

“Stop! Stop it!” Howard wails at no one. Who is hurling the turnips at him? The farmer? A cold chill runs down his spine. A kid playing as the farmer? Maybe if he does something really out of character from the game, he can alert the player and they can help somehow. Howard jumps up and waves his arms at the direction he thinks the turnips are coming from. “Help! You have to help me! Stop playing! Get me out of here!” He screams and yells, hopping up and down, trying to make himself as unignorable as possible.

For a moment, Howard feels hopeful. There seems to be a cessation of falling turnips. But then suddenly another black shadow materializes above his head. Howard looks up, screams and jumps away yet again before a bright yellow monstrosity nearly flattens him. He punches the ground in frustration as tears stream down his face. What was he going to do? What would he do if he were the player? Howard suddenly realizes that he’s actually lasting longer in the game as a real person than when he was playing on his phone. He’s already avoided four turnips, and he’s only made it that far in the game a handful of times. Maybe he could last long enough to see the end of the game? The immediate question before him is, could he miss a fifth turnip?

A bright red turnip shades Howard’s face from the ethereal sunlight as if in answer to his thoughts. Howard clenches up his body in preparation, and flings himself as far as he can in a direction away from the shadow. His knees hit the ground hard this time, and he winces in pain as his torso hits the ground. Howard rolls a few times before landing on his back. The turnip hits the space where he had been standing only a moment ago. A great boom slaps his face and sets off ringing in his ears.

Howard sits up slowly. His lower back and knees are really hurting him now. He examines his legs. Blood appears through a tear in the fabric of his pajama pants. The horror of his situation fully comes crashing down on Howard with heavy force. He can’t keep running forever. He’s hurt now, and he’s probably going to get hurt again. This is most definitely not a nightmare he can wake up from.

Yet another shadow darkens the sky, as Howard hugs his injured knees. He bows his head as he waits for the inevitable. In his last seconds, Howard notices a figure appear, lying down in the grass a few yards away. The sleeping figure is wearing pajamas the same color as Howard’s…. The dark thought forming in his mind doesn’t have time to materialize before Howard’s world goes black.

This story counts toward my November 2023 NaNoWriMo goal to write 50,000 words worth of short stories for Medium. Follow me to see if I can finish!

My word count total after this story is 6,387.

I realize I’m not going to make it, but at least I haven’t stopped!

Fascinate Me Fiction is a Medium publication created and edited by Meghan E. Gattignolo. For more from Meghan, follow her on Medium. Meghan also writes for The Customs House Museum & Cultural Center, and you can find her on Twitter and Instagram as Meggiebeth_Writes.