EiS Short: Endless Cornfield

I accepted my writer friend Craig Child's unusual invitation to spend a few days in a cornfield—in the middle of Iowa, in the middle of July, in the midst of what turned out to be an historic climax of heat and humidity called a 'heat dome'—not because I was in sympathy with his evident masochism, nor merely because I knew that he needed somebody to provide comic relief. In fact, I had reasons of my own going back to childhood trips with my parents, driving across America's corn belt in the heat of summer thru hundreds of miles of vast green fields, drowsy and bored, hallucinating really, wondering what it be like to wander off into those Midwest jungles, just walk in a dozen feet into corn taller than me and get turned around and disoriented and… be lost forever, I assumed, striking off into a heart of darkness and joining the Children of the Corn in their evil worship of He Who Walks in the Corn and dying there, my bones only found much later when they were ground up by the Reaper of All only to find their way in to a box of corn flakes… Well; I was a strange kid. Still, the fields of corn were scary to me and I stayed out them with superstitious caution. Foolish of me, perhaps—but I lived.