I stood in the towering corn, sweat and rash at my feet. Lost in a cornfield? How cliché. It had tantalized, teased me, with its mysterious depth. Gazed at from car window or shady berm, I speculated wildly as to what lay at its center—some great corn god? Though I knew it was bound—suburb, highway F, dirt road (to water tower), gravel pit—my eyes convinced me it was infinite.
When running through a corn field, the strobe of light and shadow can suddenly sync with the electricity of your body, causing instant delusion—is the corn moving, while I am standing still?
A corn field is a strangely silent place, except for the hum of a thousand invisible insects.
Standing there, the moment of realization—a sinking of shoes in soft earth—I felt now the burn of September sun on my neck, and the corn scratches across my ankles, and the tiny, thumbtack-rocks wedged in my dusty shoes. Somehow the plug had been pulled. The dark green of cool trees, which separated the world of Corn Field from the world of Midwest Suburb, had silently disappeared somewhere between there and here. Turning wildly, the world had been reduced to dirt, corn, and sky. I gazed down the parallel rows, where paled yellow stalks converged to a blurry infinity—dirt, corn, and sky.
Possibly, there had been something in the way he had said “get the hell out”, which had drawn me to that electric hum, where I forgot about shady trees, where I welcomed scratches on my ankles. Something in the word “hell”, how it seemed to ooze black tar from his yellowed teeth, how it rang in my head, one hell for each step, another hell for each step, becoming louder as I got further in. And now: rock in my shoe, sun on my neck, scratch on my ankle. I listened for the siren song of suburb, but could only hear the fleshy beating of my heart, alien against the corn field buzz.
He said go out, and I had gone in. And now I was burned. Burned by my own lack—lack of decision, lack of thought, lack of a sweetly quiet small-town disposition. Lack of a half-empty brain, which was so popular around here. I was filled up, so that each little memory looked like an identical stalk of corn—corn!—skinny and menacing in its anonymity. Filled up, so that even when I squinted, I saw the same pale yellow. And I had watched, too, from my own car window, as my hands grew more unsteady, and my voice turned to gravel. And I had listened, over that electric hum, as he asked me to make up my damn mind, while I was thinking how my mind had already been damn made-up, plowed and planted into neat rows.
So I had gone in too far, above my head, fooled perhaps by some corny god. Of course I had gotten lost in a corn field, who wouldn’t, when they felt the gentle pull of another person lighting your cigarette. Who wouldn’t go blindly forward, following that electric hum. Gone in, going. So I kept stepping, between the unwavering stalks. The thumbtack-rocks rattled and stung me through my socks.