It takes a farmer to understand the Rapture.
I was in the field at dawn, knees deep in wet cucumber rows, when the rain started, soft and steady, like a whispered warning. The patter on the leaves reminded me of a lullaby. But today it carried something else, as if nature herself were signaling something amiss.
Around me, the fields lay quiet under a slate sky. The drizzle blurred the rows, softening the world into watercolor. The cucumbers, heavy with moisture, seemed to sag in anticipation, like they already knew what was coming.
I’d spent my life learning the land’s language, reading its moods, its signs, its silences. Harvest days were sacred. The moment where growth surrendered to purpose. But sometimes, like this morning, I took what wasn’t quite ready. A forced picking. Not because I wanted to, but because I knew what the rain would do to them if I didn’t.
I’d done the same with peaches once, gathering them just before a flood swelled them past ripeness, before they burst and spoiled on the branch. I remember walking the orchard with a dull ache in my chest, knowing I was saving what I could, sacrificing tomorrow for the sake of what might still be good today.
That memory came back to me now, clear and sudden, as I watched the sky split, not with lightning, but with something steadier. A thin beam of light, low on the horizon, cut across the treetops with eerie precision. It didn’t flicker. It didn’t burn. It simply… selected.
They said it was the Rapture.
One gone, one left. Neighbors vanished mid-sentence. Mothers turning around to find their children missing from the garden. People clung to scripture, said the time had come. The faithful had been chosen.
But I’m a farmer. I know a harvest when I see one.
This wasn’t divine. It was deliberate. Measured. Clinical.
The way I picked cucumbers.
The way I’d picked peaches, just before the rain ruined them.
It made sense in a way I couldn’t explain to the church folk. The aliens, if that’s what they are, aren’t conquerors. They’re cultivators. They’re not growing crops, they’re growing consciousness. Our experiences, our thoughts, our lives, they’re what matters. To them, we’re not the center of the story. We’re vegetables in a field.
And the harvest had come.
I saw it in the patterns, the timing, the precision, the lack of ceremony. Not judgment. Just yield.
I stood by the edge of the cucumber row, watching the light retract into the clouds like a hand returning to a pocket. The air smelled charged, not with ozone but with absence. A kind of cosmic vacancy. Like something had passed through and taken more than just bodies with it.
That’s what no one talks about. The emptiness that follows. The way the silence feels hollowed out, like a barn after the last bale’s been hauled. You start to question if the people who vanished were ever really here at all.
I remembered the rumors, the stories of abductions, of clinical procedures, of being treated like cattle. People thought it was cruelty. That they were being harvested for experimentation or worse, as food. But that fear came from our own reflection. From how we treat what we raise. It’s the only lens we know.
Maybe that’s why we imagined they’d devour us.
But maybe they’re just doing what we’ve always done. Taking what’s ready. Leaving what’s not.
Sometimes they come in the middle of a cycle, when the world is half-baked and teetering. Like now. Maybe they saw the coming storm. Knew the rest of us might not make it. And so they took what they could. Not the perfect ones. Just the ones close enough to being whole.
There’s a strange mercy in that.
I passed an old fence line on my way back to the farmhouse, the wood splintered and leaning like a tired old man. I paused. The fields around me glistened in the rain, quiet and waiting. Not expectant. Just… resigned.
I thought about the next season, the next cycle. The next planting. Whether there would even be one. Whether the soil had the will to start again.
Maybe the rest of us were left behind to finish something. Or to learn something. Or maybe we were just green fruit, not yet sweet enough to be taken.
Either way, I understood now.
It was never the Rapture.
It was always the Harvest.
I wrote this on a farm in Massachusetts while harvesting cucumbers in the rain, thinking about cycles, endings, and what it means to be taken before you’re ready. – Cleanshave