Early one morning in the turgid, musty swamp, Freddie Lee collapsed amongst the rice and the brown water, a result of working his body like a machine—both John Henry, the steel-driving man, and the locomotive at the same time. 

He so loved the work, he battled himself to fill basket after endless basket with rice stalks, and as a reward he fell facedown into the crops before any of us woke. We all labored next to his body as we were told to do, coming to view his dead form with a reverence. Freddie was no longer a man, no longer our friend, but instead an offering to God, made to lie out there until Papa Troy gave word, and each night we burned the stalks we picked from around him.

But something kept getting to me out in the sun. Something beyond the stench. Something that rearranged my mind. Man, every time I drew near to the eternally slumbering Freddie Lee and his decaying face—

I remember when Mama Yona died and we all gathered solemnly for six hours as they put her into the earth and Papa Troy spoke of their life together, building this new world away from the world, away from cars, away from TVs, away from balloons and DVDs, away from it all, at this rice farm in the ruins of a plantation on a Wildlands hill. The children planted a tree over her resting place. And it felt beautiful and unreal, as if we existed on a spinning disc covered by a magical dome; anything could happen here. Freddie Lee believed in this life with the entirety of his—unbeknownst to him—dying heart.

Working the watery fields after my friend passed, I didn’t become deranged, but found myself somewhere close to it. Something resembling a dark shadow spreading like an inkblot over my brain. I had obeyed dutifully following after Freddie Lee. I wondered if I’d share his fate, lying among the rice and the muck with a crumbling forever stare.

And I could have probably taken it, inky brain and all, had I not seen that blasted cow, Lenire, tearing at Freddie’s face, ripping, chewing his flesh like fresh grass. I waved my arms and yelled; charged the beast while screaming, but her tail swatted at flies and the rest of the animal paid me no mind. The chewed face of Freddie, Papa Troy told us, is just how it’s supposed to be.

Me and Luke and Little Yuní went out that night to move the body from the shallow waters, but Mama’s Thug Riders (that’s what they called themselves) rode in silently on their horses—at least I didn’t hear them—and waved their whips at us, opening up raw wounds on our chests and backs.

When we returned to our cabin we listened to the breeze whistle through the cracks and we tended to each other’s wounds. I watched the great house with its light and its mirth. I was sure the drinks flowed there like the river water we diverted over the land to feed the rice stalks. Papa was having a party. There was always a party and we were the eternally uninvited unless someone important wanted a piece of our souls.

Papa says, everyone is equal, Luke said. Some people are m—Shh— Little Yuní said, kissing his lips. I watched them make love. They soon crumpled to the floor, exhausted and sated as they were taught to be.

Did you see Freddie Lee’s body? I asked. John Henry, the rice- harvesting man? If he died harvesting rice for the love of us all, then why—even before that damn cow got to him—was he all broken and bruised?

Shh— Little Yuní said, but she had no energy to sate me, and before I could ask about the Expelled, whether our friend was close to them as the whispers implied, we all fell one by one into dazed and dizzying fever dreams. I wonder who was the first to speak of the flames in our sleep murmurs. Did we all share the same nightmares?

Morning came, the sun rose hot over the damp fields, and we were once again the docile supplicants of Mama Yona and Papa Troy’s mercy, picking rice around our friend. Poor Freddie Lee—his face skeletal except for those swollen, staring eyes—he deserved more than the tepid love of cowards.

It might have ended right there had Freddie Lee not risen from the dead to rip the cow into thousands of pieces.

That morning Papa had planned to announce his next queen—could have been any of us—but we woke to bits of bloody cow meat everywhere: smeared on the windows of the great house, clinging to the rice stalks. Papa postponed his announcement and called for us to give up any information we had on the whereabouts of Freddie Lee’s body and the circumstances of the cow’s death.

Some pointed their fingers at the three of us, but we pointed ours right back. If it were us, I said, wouldn’t we be stained? Marked like we took a bath in cow’s blood? My logic silenced our accusers.

For three hours Papa Troy stood on the porch of the great house discussing betrayal and the life of his beloved Lenire. Tears soaked into his beard, his voice as watery as the rice fields.

Our hearts broke, but who were we to ramble madly about what we knew, what we saw—the dead man sauntering smoothly, coolly, until he spotted the cow? He stopped and threw his head back, wailing silently—the cow had long ripped his tongue from his mouth. His raw face and his perfect eyes bathed in the light of the moon. I called his name, but he watched us as if we were merely curiosities to ponder and then ignore. He stared for several seconds before he did his violence.

I stayed up many nights afterward to catch another glimpse of Freddie Lee, but I never saw him again. Every once in a while, I’d ask Luke or Little Yuní if we saw what we really saw, and they’d nod like walking corpses without tongues.

One evening, when the passing of the months had given us no ease from the Thug Riders and their whippings, Little Yuní and I stood near the farthest edge of the farm.

Did we really see what we saw? I asked again. You know, with Freddie—

Shh, she said. Shh. She pointed to Luke walking toward us, a bundle of stalks in his arm. Behind him flames had begun dancing along the rice fields; fires even tap-danced upon the face of the waters below. The only world we knew was now shrouded in clouds of black smoke.

I watched Luke’s rice and breathed in his fumes; he stank of gasoline.

Little Yuní sighed.

Luke cursed. Dumped the day’s haul to the wet ground. 

Little Yuní lit a match.

Excerpted from The World Doesn’t Require You: Stories. Copyright (c) 2019 by Rion Amilcar Scott. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.