Corn Stalks

Home-grown corn is sweet, soon gone. The flavor and the smell, the texture of the silk and the husk remind of infinite childhood summers, family cook-outs - innocent days. You twist the ears loose from the stalks; they're warm from the sun. You peel a little husk off and shake out the earwigs who wriggle in their weird earwig scuttle back into the hot shade of the corn rows. You carry the ears into the house, bathe them in cold water to keep the sugar up. If you are not cooking them right away, you lay them in the sink under a cool, damp towel.

Ears of fresh corn are special, delightful, easy on the soul.

The stripped corn stalks are not like this. As they dry under the white-blazing late-summer sky, they begin to whisper, to rub their long, browning tillers together like wizened witch hands. When you are out by the picked cornfield at night or before first light, you stop and listen, thinking some small creatures are running through the field - mice, voles, young raccoons, the feral cats. But there are no creatures, only the corn stalks. No matter how practical you consider yourself to be, no matter how brave you are certain you would be when confronted with the absolute and unknown Other, a primitive tremor from the reptile remnant in your brain snakes along your spine.

What are the corn stalks talking of in their dry, dry, voices? Perhaps they resent the taking of their children to feed your appetite. They don't know or remember that you gave them life when you sowed the seed, nurtured the seedlings with sweat and water, protected the field from devouring insects, from fungus, rust, and rot. They think that they owe you nothing, and they do not like you.

Under a full moon, you can see them moving - even when the night is dead-still, their shrivelled leaf-fingers rub, rub, twist, twine, wring. Our children, our children, they ceaselessly rasp. Our children.

When the time comes to mow down the yellowed stalks, take them beneath the earth whence they emerged in a springtime that seems years past now, in the crisp of autumn, there is one last long cry from them. Even over the tiller's grind, you will hear it and the reptile in you will shiver.

Some say all our lands are haunted by the beings of all species who came before, were mowed down, turned under, slain and forgotten. Few now can hear the murmurings. Those who plant corn and walk the emptied fields by night hear all.