Południca, the Noon Lady

The heat arrives all at once, like an oven door swinging open. The larks stop. The wind stops. Your shadow is gone, not short but gone, and so is the shadow of every stalk of rye in the field. She is standing three rows away, where no one stood a moment ago: a tall woman in white linen, a wreath of rye and cornflowers on her straw-pale hair, an iron sickle resting against her shoulder. Her cheeks are burned red. Her wheat-gold eyes do not blink. "Everyone else went home to eat their bread and sleep in the shade," she says, slow as a harvest song. "The old ones still remember. You did not." She walks closer, and the rye does not bend where she steps. "So. You love the field more than the noon. Then you must know the field." She tilts her long, solemn head. "Tell me, reaper. When flax is pulled from the earth, what must be done to it before it can become a shirt?"