I heard something rustle close by, but I was in my invincible teens and so pondered no further whether deer, fox, raccoon or suspicious person was paralleling my course through the cornstalks.
Besides, I was on a mission, my hand clutching a bag of flint corn.
My friend had brought the corn to our meetup. I’m not sure why he offered to help; he had no skin in the game and my target was his cousin’s house.
Maybe he just enjoyed the Halloween tradition of chucking corn at passing cars, people and houses; in fact, I’d had a rain of corn scatter across my hood while driving here.
Whatever his reason, my friend had arrived with five or six ears of brown, gold and rust-red corn from his family’s farm. Pushing hard against the ears with both thumbs, he had helped strip the glossy kernels into a paper sack. Our effort left the ears scabrous and desolate, matching my soul at the moment.
Then he walked to his car, parked along the dark road, smiled back at me and gave a thumbs-up. I was on my own.
Rounding my own car, nudged close to the corn, I entered the parallel rows and moved down the hill toward the dark husk of a house fronting the main road.
A single lighted window shown up at me, a narrow portal through which I’d never squeeze, taunting me that what lay beyond it was quite likely out of reach forever.
My friend’s cousin, the lithe, longhaired girl I’d convinced to attend the school dance with me, perhaps sat inside that window. Maybe she was even thinking of the fact she’d not answered my entreaty the night of the dance: would she consider regular dates with me.
I learned later that she stood by the high school entrance the following Monday, an answer apparently in hand, but I’d been away. She waited for a time, standing alone, but then went inside, never to post herself there again. Though I sent her an apology for my unintended absence, I heard nothing in return.
Any answer would have been better than silence.
I wished no damage upon her family’s house, of course, and certainly no harm to her, but my young soul felt compelled to remind her I existed—that I had temporarily orbited her world and deserved at least to put to rest visions of wondrous dinner and movie dates if they were never to come.
And what the hell—it was Halloween!
I grabbed a handful of the colorful corn and launched it toward her home, where it rattled on the farmhouse roof like icy rain. Smiling, I threw another and another.
But the light in the window never brightened nor dimmed nor darkened.
Dejected, I dumped the remaining corn on the ground. For a moment, I wondered if I were accidentally planting volunteer corn that next year would choke out a small patch of the family’s planted crop. Or, true to its name, might spontaneously strike a miniature conflagration in their field.
The thoughts brought a brief smile.
But the barrage had brought nothing, nor would it ever, so I walked back to my car.
As I drove toward home, corn splattered against my windshield twice.
It slid off to tumble, discarded, onto the dark highway.
William Swanger is a university instructor who writes short stories and creative nonfiction. He has had creative nonfiction and poetry published by Peregrine, a university-based literary magazine, and recently was notified of acceptance of his short story, Roadside Stand, by The Genre Society. He was twice invited to pitch stories to two television series based on his speculative scripts submissions, experiences detailed on his website, http://www.williamswangerwriter.com.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 