The Gnats had been back again.
Stanley had found out himself.
His family owned a pea farm somewhere out in the country. It would have been corn, but the only corn there (1) got eaten, and (2) mutated. Into peas. So peas it was, and the Howler family had been happy to keep growing them, only because there was really nothing else.
Sometimes, the peas spoke to him. It was stupid, but…when he was laying in bed, he would hear gentle whispers, and when he looked out the window above his bed, he could see nothing but the dark sky and endless rows of gently dancing, swaying pea plants. The whispers stayed just on the edge of his hearing, and, as far as he could tell, were a constant soft song, about growing and dying and reaching the sky.
And there were the Gnats. They came back every year. They were, as far as Stanley's parents could tell, not normal gnats, hence the capital letter. They ate corn and…flesh. The cows, for example, had been found by Stanley himself, and they had been nothing but skeletons and slippery bits, and Stanley had had what his mother affectionately called a 'Little Moment'. They returned every year, the Gnats, even when there was nothing to eat. When the Howlers saw a dark cloud on the horizon, off they went into the house.
They made sure to keep all the doors and windows locked, and all the holes sealed up, and to keep Stanley calm. They even gave him a little book of rules to follow, and Stanley was good at following rules. They made much more sense than anything else. In Stanley's little world, rules were something to be followed, every time.
But one night, they forgot to close a window. It was a little window, almost at the ceiling in Stanley's parent's room, but Gnats could come in easily. And they did. When Stanley came in to check on his parents that morning, he almost had a Little Moment. But he didn't, because the first rule was 'remain calm'. And then he could stare at the…pieces of his parents with calmness, because the rules told him to.
He could go outside, though. Because the rules said that if his parents didn't say he couldn't, he could go outside. So Stanley walked down the stairs to the front door with a sort of numbness, a feeling that he was detached from the world around him. But it was safe in his little, rule-abiding world, so there he stayed.
He reached up and opened the door, then walked out into the pea fields. It was wet from the rain, and the sky was still dark and pregnant with watery clouds. He stared upwards, wishing that his parents would tell him that the Gnats were gone, that he could have a Little Moment, that it was okay.
Stanley dropped to his knees in front of the endless rows of plants, feeling the dampness of the earth soak into his clothes. He could hear the peas whispering again, singing their endless songs.
And Stanley watched the peas grow.