Cornfields

This story is by Callie Murray and won an honorable mention in our 2024 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

Callie Murray is an entrepreneur whose work has been featured on The TODAY Show and The New York Times. She’s currently writing her first novel and lives in the novel’s setting of Norcross, Georgia, where she’s probably hosting a potluck right now. 

The email lands in my inbox with a thud, and I stare at my computer as if I’ve found a spaceship in my cornfield. It’s the first time a literary agent has read my entire manuscript. My eyes scan her words for a quick clue as to her intention: is it good, bad?  

 

Does she come in peace? 

 

“You are a terrific writer,” I read. Terrific is in italics, and I feel elated. I imagine the extra two seconds it took to press command + i, and I count them as mounting evidence that this email might change my life. I skip across the following sentences in search of more clues until my eyes tangle at the most unfortunate coordinating conjunction. 

 

But. 

 

I smell it then—a shit sandwich. “But I don’t think I am enthusiastic enough about the novel to feel confident that I could represent you effectively in a tough fiction market.” She then generously gives feedback as to why. I wrap everything up too nicely in a bow, she says, and I don’t give in to the tension. The result is a novel that feels predictable. 

 

My amygdala awakens and decides immediately to freeze. I feel the warmth from my limbs retreat to my heart, which is cowering inside me and needs to be coddled. I’ve spent two years on this novel, and I’ve woven so many parts of my story into that of these fictional characters. The protagonist has my health challenges, she’s fallen in love with a man with my husband’s humor, and she’s trying to make my father—her father, oops—happy. This is not just the story I’ve written; this is the story I’ve lived. 

 

I finish reading the email and close my computer. I transfer the laundry from the washer to the dryer. I calmly drive my afternoon carpool route and decide the publishing journey is not for me. 

 

Later that afternoon, I text a screenshot of the email to my best friend. “Is this you?” I joke. Her recent beta reader feedback was so similar to the agent’s. 

 

“Ouch,” she replies. I watch the dots start and stop and start again as she ponders a longer response. “I’m about to say something that may be the best thing I’ve ever said to you. Or maybe it will be the worst,” she sends, and my amygdala again jumps to its feet. “You’ve got really hard things in that book, but the agent is right. You gloss over them in the moment, and you spin it all into too happy a story. I think you’d have an easier time sitting in the tension if you could do that with your real life, too.” 

 

It’s then that I finally cry. 

 

The truth is that both the agent and my friend are right, but to acknowledge that would mean to acknowledge something I’ve tried my entire life to ignore—that my father isn’t perfect. In fact, he’s actually a mess. And even that is a lighthearted take on the truth. He’s been mean to us our entire lives, and we’ve danced around him like a minefield knowing that he might tear our limbs off at any wrong movement. 

 

Wow, that’s way too dramatic. He never hit us. He’s thrown things and threatened and manipulated, but that’s not abusive. Plus he comes from so much trauma, so it’s not like he can really help it. And it could be so much worse. We had some really great experiences growing up, and I’ve made some sweet memories. 

 

I’m doing it again. The spinning, the glossing over. It’s so natural that I don’t even recognize the habit. I think about my mother and the way she does this, too. I think about my manuscript now, and it’s so obvious. 

 

The father character does the right thing in the end when his daughter loves him just enough. There is quick forgiveness and joy and immediate healing. The bow is tied, double-knotted. It’s exactly where the book should go if I continue down the path I have taken my entire life.

 

But what if I untie that string? What if I begin to pull? A new path crystallizes in my imagination, one that takes me in an entirely different direction. It is perpendicular to the first, never crossing.

 

I imagine myself in a turn-of-the-century plot of land in rural America, with two dirt roads intersecting beneath my feet. There’s a signpost with two scraps of wood tacked at eye level. On one is scrawled GOOD. It’s this road I’ve been walking, where the story is tidy, where my father is just wacky, a term I say with a laugh and a shrug. Here, he is fine. I’m fine. It’s all fine. This path is smooth underfoot, and my shoulders are warm beneath the late-sky sun. People join me in this journey, and the conversation flows. I look up for the first time though, and I squint. Where does this road even go? I see it rolling on and on until it tunnels into a hazy horizon.  

 

My eyes snap back and follow the arrow on the other sign, the one labeled BAD. Here, I name what my father has done and said. I list the ways I’ve been disappointed—and hurt. I do not do what is expected of me. I recount with clarity and longing the moments I’ve watched brides dance with their fathers at their weddings, laugh with their dads at the grocery store. I can already see the uneven gravel and the sections washed out by flood. The sun has already set there, and the waning crescent moon is shrouded by clouds. 

 

Is this where I’m supposed to go? Is this the tension I’ve been missing? 

 

It can’t be. The truth is, he’s not all good. But neither is he all bad. I cannot cleanly make him the hero nor the villain. In my story, he plays both. The speech he gave at my rehearsal dinner, the dissolution of his marriage to my mother, the pained way he apologized for forgetting my birthday this year—it’s all so complicated. 

 

The threads become too knotted in the unraveling. I want to freeze again, to close the tab on this manuscript and walk away. I decide this novel I’ve written will remain a Google Doc that my children can just read one day when I’m dead, and I unenroll from author emails and writing groups.

 

But then my father calls, and I search futilely for his unsubscribe button. 

 

In my imagination, I lift my eyes from the signpost to the ninety degrees of land in between the dirt roads. It’s the space in between what my father does, who he is. It’s my space—what I feel, how I respond. 

 

It’s full of cornfields. 

 

There are no well-worn paths here, and I can only see inches before my eyes. Scenes from childhood movies fill my imagination now, and I envision what awaits me if I push through this unknown: the monsters, the ghosts, those aliens. 

 

But surely cornfields can not continue indefinitely. They are planted, tended to. Somewhere there’s a farmhouse, a sturdy structure with groves of trees to block the wind and a fire in a hearth where a loaf of bread bakes. There is a bed there with an heirloom quilt, a windowsill with a steaming pie. There’s the sound of little girls’ laughter, and at that, my breath catches. 

 

My daughters. 

 

Without a second thought, I push my way through the field as stalks snap back against me. 

 

I respond to both my friend and the agent. “You’re right,” I tell them. “I see it now. I’m going to navigate my way through this tension.” For me, for my father, for the generations ahead. 

 

“I’d like to read the revision,” the agent writes back. 

 

I smile, fully released from the pressure to give her a book that sells. 

 

Because now, I finally know where I’m going. 

 

I’d like to write—to live—a story that heals.