I cannot do anything else. It follows me home, fluffs my pillow at night. It waits behind me as I put up my hair. I see it behind the toaster. The field. The flattened circle. It is a rat, and a book, and two twin squirrels chasing as I walked towards the terrible news.
I can never know why he was in the corn so late. Everyone knows that strangeness lies there, tepid and impatient remnants of a Midwest summer. In truth, I did not know much at all. In truth, he could have been out there every night, alone, calling for something-or-other to emerge out of the dark stalks. It is not my story to tell. However, there is nothing else but the telling.
I won’t deny that I was a nonbeliever, when the TV shaped like a friend first ran the story. How could I buy it? There were no bright lights, no funny noises or strange hipsters with large heads. No spinning saucers in the sky. He left nothing behind. Maybe he just got lost in the rural labyrinth, like that time we wandered downtown. Would I rather it be extraterrestrial?
I know it is there on the edge of the flattened circle of husks. I spin around and around, stomping on the evidence, straining to catch a glimpse. The dear green jacket, the winsome smile behind a bar-food menu. It presses closer and closer as I turn. Terrible news. Fake wood floors. Water with light ice. He can’t have walked onto the spaceship willingly. I won’t buy it. The empty circle in a desolate Midwest field. It drapes on my shoulders, my hair, my eyes. I feel my hat; it’s made of aluminum.
I cannot do anything else. It is a Wednesday, October. There is nothing in the field, in the fog, in the apartment, or in the seat across from me at the restaurant.
Don’t go into the corn field. Don’t go calling for unknown things, don’t tell stories that are not your own. Or your friend will find it one day, in her kitchen, making her breakfast for one. Colors will swim on her ceiling, bright and seeking. They will not let her sleep.
Behind the Writing
“For my friend, who boarded the spaceship one year ago.”
Writer To Writer Literary Journal 