The Harvest

The time to harvest is a sacred period to the people of the small town, Toaumn.
The harvest is seen as something of utmost importance and is their pride.
Their crops are among the best of the world, while their speed of harvest is the best, despite having the largest harvestable area.
When the harvest season starts, the entire town gets into a festive spirit and everyone is seen working on the fields or walking through the town with a smile on their face.
They love what they do, and rarely do they have people leaving their towns, taking care of the land, of the crops being a traditional activity for the families around the town for generations.
And they are always content.
Sometimes as people can’t haggle with Mother Nature, the harvest is a bad one, a poor one, thus being harder for the town’s folk to sell their crops, but even then, the people are happy.
Why?
They are happy because even if the harvest is a poor one, they would have enough food to eat for months anyway, so they aren’t stressed.
As the maintenance of not just the fields, farms but even the tools used is done by someone from within the family (branches upon branches of families live together in the area surrounding the town), it’s rather “cheap” to maintain the business.
There was an exception to strengthen this rule, one season of harvest from the year of 1998 was horrible.
A plague that affected all the crops appeared only in the area, while fires broke out in the warehouses, wasting the saved emergency resources, effectively bringing famine to these lands.
If other towns, and the government hadn’t sent help in time, the friendly folks of the Toaumn area would’ve had to move or accept their inevitable fate of starving to death.
This year, the town was expecting one of the biggest harvests in the last decade, so the atmosphere was even more energetic and happy.
People were constantly smiling, laughing and bragging about their upcoming harvest.
They harvested these lands for decades, maybe even centuries as some “pure Toaumnians” would brag about their ancestors coming to these lands 500 years ago.
But nothing lasts forever.
The happiness, the riches, the rich harvests all shall come to an end one day, and that day was coming fast.
The “Harvesters” as they were called by other similar towns, due to their exceptional speed of harvest, never expected the outcome of their best but sadly last harvest.
On the very first “official” day of harvest, the ground shook for hours slightly, before late at night, opening up and swallowing up not only the fields, crops, farms but also the town itself.
There were those who evacuated due to the continuous shaking ground, and thus survived.
They were interviewed asking how they feel now, having escaped from certain doom, as preliminary researches have shown, that the hole that appeared under the entire area is at least 80m deep, if not deeper.
The survivors comments were clean, and rehearsed, while also being varied, but it all could be summed up in one sentence.
They have never thought that one day, they will be “the harvest”, and Earth will be the “harvester”.