This story is by J Hardy Carroll and was part of our 2024 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.
The farmhouse juts from the surrounding cornfields like a lawn sprinkler. From her second-floor bedroom window Jessie can see the distant crossroads where Route 90 and Harrison intersect.
Her mom jokes they lead from Nowhere, Iowa to Noplace, Illinois.
A distant plume of dust heralds an approaching vehicle on the gravel road, a tan smear floating in the clear blue sky.
Her bedroom is stuffy with August heat. Jessie presses her face against the windowpane and smells a ghost of winter smoke trapped in the glass.
Her stomach rumbles. She hasn’t eaten since last night’s supper was interrupted by the ringing telephone.
Her mother had leapt to get it, said a few words and then hung up.
“I have to go out, Jessie,” she’d said. “I should be back later tonight or tomorrow morning.”
Jessie looks at the clock radio on her nightstand. The red numbers blink 1:20, 1:21, 1:22.
The car on the horizon doesn’t seem to have gotten any closer. The cornfields and sky shimmer together in the white heat, green and blue wavering like water. The dust drifts over the tops of the cornstalks.
Jessie thinks about the millions of insects that live in the miles of stalks, millions of crickets and ladybugs, mayflies that rise in clouds when you walk among the rows.
She remembers the steep furrows dividing the plants, the egg-sized rocks that can roll your ankle if you were careless, leave you stranded and invisible in the center of a thirty-acre field.
She’d gotten lost in the cornfield after they’d moved here from Chicago.
On a whim and without telling her mother, Jessie had crossed the road and plunged into the wall of green. Once among the corn she somehow got turned around and couldn’t remember which way she’d come in.
All the corn looked the same, twice as tall as she was, each plant laden with heavy ears that seemed to shrug I don’t know.
Then she panicked, became her own worst enemy, fear racing her mind and chanting you will never get out, you will starve out here, the darkness will fall and coyotes will eat you over and over until she wanted to curl up and scream.
Instead she sat down and closed her eyes. Without knowing why, she took five deep breaths and listened to the cornfield.
At first all she could hear was rush of blood in her ears, but as she calmed and her heart slowed its manic thudding it was like an entire universe of tiny sounds suddenly blossomed around her.
The minute scrabbling of field mice in the dirt, the gentle gnawing of aphids on the corn kernels, the rattle of the blown by gentle wind, a distant locomotive sounding its mournful horn.
Though lost as ever, she was no longer scared. The litany of woe that had raced through her mind was silenced.
She stood up, brushed the dirt from her legs and butt, and started walking. She walked a long way, finally coming to a clearing she did not recognize.
The fear started to come back, but she closed her eyes again, listened again. This time she heard the sound of a hawk circling so high above her that it took a while to spot it.
At the edge of the field was an irrigation tower, a wheeled contraption attached by a black hose. She climbed its side to gain height and looked around, but all she could sea was the endless ocean of corn.
Jessie considered the hose, thought of Hansel and Gretel finding their way out of the forest by following a trail of white stones.
White stones, black hose.
She climbed down and walked the hose-line until she came to a barn. She emerged from the field more than a mile from where she’d gone in, but she knew where she was and made it home before dark.
Her breath fogs the windowpane. The car is closer now, near enough that she can see it is not blue like her mother’s car. It might be white or silver. It seems to gleam and sparkle like a distant star.
The house creaks in the heat. She gets up and walks down the stairs to the silent kitchen. From the window she can no longer see the car, but the dust is visible above the cornstalks.
The kitchen is so quiet it seems as though nobody ever lived there, never eaten breakfast at the oilcloth table, never did a crossword puzzle or rolled out biscuit dough.
She opens the screen door and steps onto the porch. The feral orange cat who lives in the barn sits on the sunbaked grass staring at Jesse, its pupils mere slits in luminous yellow eyes.
A plume of dust announces the car crunching into the driveway, the tires popping small rocks as it comes to a stop. Jessie reads the letters on the dust-covered door. JOHNSON COUNTY SHERIFF
A man in a tan uniform gets out of the driver’s seat, reaches in and takes out a flat-brimmed hat like Smokey the Bear’s. A middle-aged woman in a tight-fitting blue suit gets out of the passenger side of the car, walks around gripping her handbag with both hands.
The woman takes a step toward the house, a shifting smile on her lipsticked mouth. She clears her throat and says Jessie’s name, first and last. It doesn’t seem like a question.
Jessie looks past them at the cornrows and wonders if she has time to disappear into them before the woman can start talking.
She closes her eyes and takes five deep breaths.
Leave a Reply