18

7/50: CORNFIELDS

IT WAS the weekend of 7/50 that the furniture started to vanish.

On Saturday morning when Esther woke, the microwave and dining room table were gone. She’d learned not to question these sudden disappearances, so she made her oats on the stovetop and locked her laptop in the chest at the foot of her bed, just in case.

On Sunday morning, the TV was gone. The landline phone. The slow cooker. Reg’s old armchair.

Eugene preferred to ignore these things and give Rosemary the benefit of the doubt—maybe she wasn’t selling all their stuff on Craigslist again—but Esther liked to watch their mother sometimes, just to make sure things weren’t getting too bad. To this end, she had constructed a specially formulated gauge to calculate how broke they were at any one point in time:

DEFCON 5. Rosemary ordered takeout = not so broke. Normal readiness. Action required: none.

DEFCON 4. Ramen for dinner more than two nights in a row = moderately broke. Above normal readiness. Action required: general observation of situation. Intervene where possible.

DEFCON 3. Food was not provided. If lack of food was mentioned, Rosemary suggested they get jobs = pretty broke. Increased readiness. Action required: attempt to prevent large appliances and furniture from being sold online.

DEFCON 2. Distant relatives started calling the house looking to be paid back the money they lent = flat broke. Extreme readiness. Action required: cry to said relatives about how Rosemary had lots of bills and Dad couldn’t work and they were absolutely, definitely, positively not broke because she’d been hitting the slot machines more than usual. Lock the bedroom to prevent pillaging of remaining family heirlooms.

DEFCON 1. Maximum readiness. Rosemary’s engagement ring gone for “cleaning” = pretty damn broke. This had happened only once before. Eviction from house imminent. Action required: hide valuables. Like, really well. Say you lost them when Rosemary asked where they were. Suffer her wrath. (Reg’s service medals, Esther’s most prized possession, were currently buried in Heph’s backyard to prevent Rosemary from selling them.) Pack all remaining valued personal belongings in suitcase, ready to move in with Hephzibah or any number of angry relatives at a moment’s notice. Prepare to become a ward of the state.

There was no food in the house on Sunday morning. When Esther asked her mother about the grocery shopping, Rosemary suggested she get a real job instead of selling cake, so Esther hid her late grandmother’s jewelry in a loose floorboard under Eugene’s bed. Then she dressed as Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol, facing left, and went outside to wait for Jonah on the porch steps, as had become her routine.

She’d been swept up in a moment of giddy appreciation when she’d agreed to go on a date with him and now she kind of hoped that he would both a) not remember that she’d said yes, and b) never mention it again.

When he arrived, though, he was dressed in a pressed brown suit with a custard-colored shirt and patterned bow tie. It was easily the most hideous ensemble of clothing Esther had ever seen, but Jonah somehow made it look adorable. He kind of made everything look adorable. That was part of the problem. It would’ve been far less panic-inducing to be around him if he wasn’t quite so charming.

He’d made her a paper corsage (complete with a dead moth corpse glued to one of the petals; so romantic) to mark the occasion, so she could hardly change her mind now.

Still, cornfields were far less terrifying than going on a date, so she insisted they do that first.

“Cornfields aren’t scary,” said Jonah as he parked the moped under a tree and they started to walk toward the distant farm. “What did corn ever do to you?”

“It’s like the dark,” Esther explained as she used her parasol as a walking stick, her long white dress hitched up in her free hand. “It’s what’s in the corn that’s scary.”

“What the hell is in the corn?”

“Children. Crop circles. Scarecrows. Serial killers. Tornadoes. Aliens. Seriously, cornfields are messed up. They may actually be the epicenter of all evil things.”

“How come corn got the bad reputation, and not wheat or sugarcane? All this discrimination against moths and cornfields makes me sick.”

“I had my first panic attack after watching Signs when I was thirteen.” Esther wasn’t sure why she told Jonah this; she’d never told anyone before. Talking was easier around Jonah, somehow. The muscles in her shoulders that were constantly clenched around other people seemed to loosen in his presence. He calmed her. Made it easier to talk about scary things.

“Yeah, well, Mel Gibson is a frightening dude.”

“Eugene and I watched the movie at Heph’s house. I didn’t sleep that night. I swear I could hear something outside the window making that clicking noise the aliens make on the baby monitors. When we got home in the morning, I decided to go for a run, just around the block, just to burn off some of the anxiety. One of the aliens started following me.”

“What, you were hallucinating or something?”

“No. I never saw it. I wasn’t even near corn or anything. I just knew it was there. I knew it was right behind me. I ran until I collapsed, and then I crawled under a car to hide from it. Took me two hours to get home. I had to run from car to car, hiding from this alien. Scratched up my knees and arms until they were bleeding and I was bawling my eyes out, shaking. I knew I was going to die.”

“Man, you’re more messed up than I thought.”

“Thanks.”

When they reached the edge of the corn, Jonah knelt and fished a drone out of his backpack. A goddamn drone.

“Do I even want to know where you acquired that?” she said.

“Probably best you don’t ask questions about this one,” he said as he attached a camera to the device and sent it up into the air.

Then they sprinted together through paths in the cornfields, the drone cruising along above them, dipping and whirling as they ran. Esther imagined what the footage would look like: the long green ribbon of her hat trailing along behind her like seaweed in the air, mint umbrella at her side, the billowing skirts of her dress threatening to launch her into flight. Then she thought of that long, terrible morning she’d spent running for her life, the first time fear really got its claws into her. The first time she felt what Eugene felt every single night as she sat hunched over and hyperventilating in the gutter next to a car, tears streaming down her face, knowing logically that she was in no real danger but unable to shake the certainty that death was imminent.

They turned. The drone followed. The corn began to sigh in the breeze as though breathing. Whispering even. Jonah slowed, and then they stopped completely to listen. The sun beat down. A bead of sweat rolled down her spine. The drone circled above them, strangely threatening. Something made her eyes water.

“We shouldn’t be here,” she said quietly. The corn was definitely whispering. Run, run, run, it said to her. Something is coming for you.

The cornfield was a sea and they’d swum far away from safe shores. The stalks were taller than their heads. A sea of corn had drowned the world. It was everywhere, everywhere, and they were sinking in it, being pulled down. Esther felt a surge of panic, that same panic that jolts through you when you’re underwater and scrabbling for the surface but aren’t quite sure if you’ll make it before your lungs involuntarily suck in a flood of water.

Get out, get out, get out, sighed the corn. Or maybe the warning was from the irrational part of her brain. The same part that made her worried about sharks in swimming pools, murderers lurking behind shower curtains, and sudden velociraptor attacks.

“I need to get out!” she said, and now she was panicking, turning, looking for an easy escape. The corn was whispering, hissing, snagging her hair, pulling at her clothes. Creatures were moving through the stalks. She could feel them. She could see the shadow trails they left behind, and the corn was trying to trap her so she could be eaten.

This was the point where most people said, “Breathe.” This was the point where most people said, “Calm down.” This was the point where most people said, “Aliens don’t exist.”

Jonah Smallwood was not most people. He put his hands on her shoulders and said, “The curse doesn’t make you interesting.”

The statement was strange enough to rip Esther right out of the panic quicksand. “What?”

“You think the curse is the most interesting thing about you, but it isn’t. It doesn’t even make the top five. You being scared of cornfields and aliens doesn’t make you some special snowflake. Everybody’s fear sounds the same in their head.”

“How dare you,” she said sarcastically, panting as she came back to herself. “I am a special snowflake.”

“You really wanna let M. Night Shyamalan do this to you? That’s like crying to a Nickelback song. Have some self-respect.”

She gave a shaky laugh. “What are the top five?”

“Top five?”

“Most interesting things about me.”

“Narcissist.”

“Shut up.”

“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you number five right now, but I’ll save the other four for later when you no doubt have other freak-outs about all the fun stuff we’ll be doing.”

“Okay.”

“Number five: your hair color.”

“Strawberry blond isn’t interesting.”

“Nothing strawberry or blond about it. It’s peach. Hair like an orchid in summer,” he said, and then he had a strand of that very same hair threaded through his fingertips.

“You read too much Shakespeare.”

“How about you tell me a story. I wanna hear more about that Jack Horowitz dude.”

“Okay,” she said, and as her breathing settled into a manageable rhythm, she told Jonah Smallwood about the second time her grandfather met Death.