It was too overcast to see the sky, too dark to even see what obscured the sky. Probably nothing so normal as clouds, Jane figured, given she was surrounded by stalks of pink flesh taller than her head, with heart-like muscles dotting each stalk, bleeding scarlet and pulsing in some rhythm.

"Welcome to the heartland," the creepy farmer man had said. He’d given her a pitchfork, which for some reason she’d so far hung onto. Then she’d gone on and ended up here.

She noticed a pattern in the heartbeats around her. Like it was a wave, flowing out from someplace. Lacking any other direction, she walked toward the source.

Some time later (how much? did the sun even move here?) she stood before a car-sized heart on a vine, like a fleshy mockery of a prize-winning pumpkin. Its heartbeats shook the ground and rippled away through the heartstalks.

"Now what?" she yelled. "If I destroy this, do I go home?" She still had the creepy man’s pitchfork. "Is this a metaphor?" she screamed. "Am I having a heart attack? Are these my bottled up emotions?"

She stood under the strange-darkened sky and contemplated the heart, pitchfork in her hand.