In the Middle of the Cornfield
For the first time in his life Myles had to learn to roll his own joints – his best friend Seb was away at college. On a waning gibbous moon lit night he left the house, shutting the front door delicately behind him and walked to the back of the neighborhood that abutted a crisp hill. There was enough light to see by, and Myles crawled through a hole in the chain link fence. He hadn’t been the one to cut it, but he’d used it many times over the years. He slid a couple of times on the loose gravel as he climbed the hill. When Myles reached the top, he sat on a bench that had the names and initials of lovers carved into it, and faced the cluster of lights that was San Francisco, way off in the distance. He soaked in the moment of privacy and freedom he felt away from the tension and fear of the house. The relationship with his mother and Carl was, as the months passed, taking on a padded wall quality. They were constantly watching him out of the corner of their eyes. He could feel everyone’s gaze, suddenly fixated on him if he zoned out for even a moment. The zoned out look was one of the only forewarnings to a seizure, and even then when picked up there still wasn’t always enough time for someone to reach him before he fell down.
The joint Myles rolled was lumpy and burned quickly. But he still got high, and he sat on the bench and remembered his first kiss (wet and sloppy). Their warm mouth against his sent a shrill shock coursing through him from the point where each of their separateness joined. Way in the distance energy hummed through the cold city streets. Myles thought about the influence that the people who typed away at the desks behind those tiny office windows had. Their power reached so much farther than the lights. Myles felt his phone in his pocket and pulled it out and looked into the blank screen and thought of the people coding decisions and choices into it. It glowed back up at him. And then, he woke up at the bottom of the hill. The moon was askew, wrong in its sideways arrangement.
Someone should fix that. He thought, laying there in the dirt. Then he noticed the ache in his side. Each time he breathed there was an uproar of pain.
Why does it hurt so bad? He wondered.
He sat up and put his palms together. They stung because they were full of little rocks that pressed into the skin. Something rustled in the grass nearby and in the post seizure haze Myles felt distantly afraid. A coyote appeared and the animal’s eyes glowed in the lights of a car that drove by, too far off perhaps, to have seen Myles lying there in the dark. The coyote did not stop and look at him, or show any sign that it knew he was there. It just walked on, parting the grass. When Myles stood up the feeling in his ribs was worse. He thought he might throw up but he didn’t. By the time he snuck back into the house the sky was starting to lighten from deep indigo blue to a dusty purple. The night was coming to a close.
The bathroom mirror did not make him look good. Dried blood gathered in the corner of his mouth where it had dribbled out. The side of his tongue ached where he’d bitten into the soft tissue. Seeds covered in Velcro-like hooks had traveled from the hillside into the house, riding along on the soft waves of Myles’ hair. One by one he pulled them out and by time he was done the drain of the sink was completely covered in them. Myles got into bed and pulled the covers over his head.
Seb, Myles’s best friend, came home for a break. Seb rolled up in front of Myles’s house in a beat up Honda. It looked as bad as it always had, and when Myles got inside the familiar smell of pine air freshener and French fries washed over him.
“Long night?” Seb asked, looking at the bruises on Myles’s cheek as he slid into the car.
“It’s awful man.” Myles smiled like he’d just won the meaningless victory of popping a balloon with a dart at a carnival. Seb turned onto the highway. Myles turned up the stereo and for the first time made no jokes about Seb’s devotion to Radiohead. The monotone and despairing sounds of the band’s music spoke to him in a way they had not before. Myles opened the window in Seb’s basement, the same as he always had, cranking the handle and pushing back against the green ivy vine that snaked around the house. The yard was ripe with fruits and flowers while the neighbors’ yard was just a tumbleweed landing strip. Seb said it was his mom’s green thumb. Fran said Seb’s mom didn’t follow the state’s water restriction guidelines. Myles cautiously tugged at the vine that had pressed between the wood that framed the glass. It was strong and he couldn’t rip it. The neurologist had mentioned something about genetics playing a role in Myles’s epilepsy but Fran didn’t have the gene, and Myles’s father had skipped out before he was born. Seb held up his bong.
“Is it still cool for you to smoke?” He asked.
“The doctor said to stay away from alcohol, but he didn’t talk about weed.” Myles shrugged.
“Guess a lot of doctors are still afraid to touch that subject. It’s getting legalized though, little by little…It can do a lot of good,” Seb said. He leaned down and white smoke swirled beneath him in the spherical base of the bong. He’d always gotten up on a soap box when it came to the FDA. He turned to pass the bong to Myles who was sitting at the other end of the brown couch. Myles hacked up a lung while Seb politely busied himself with his gaming console.
“So do they know why you are having seizures?” Seb asked. Myles shook his head. The word seizure in Seb’s mouth was like a punch in the gut, and Myles felt himself come down back to planet earth even as the lifting effects of the weed began to set in. This thing, this condition, illness, this affliction had such an impact on his present, and now, with Seb a part of it, Myles felt it tampered with the past too.
“Well, whatever it is, I hope it goes away soon. I still can’t believe you haven’t played this game yet. Everybody’s playing it at school,” Seb laughed. The character walked freely in a pixelated universe that filled in according to the direction the character moved in. When Seb pressed a button and commanded the character to jump, it obeyed and in return, a shimmer of gold diamonds and silver stars rained down all around the screen. Seb beat Myles three times in a row but he didn’t care. He was just happy to be there, feeling like life was simple.
“Are you dating anybody?” Myles asked.
“Yeah, me and this girl Beth have been going out for like a month now. I think it’s actually going pretty well. I cooked her your special pasta.”
“The one with the vodka sauce?” Seb was quiet a minute, and then they both cracked up.
“Its just pasta and a jar of sauce. She was impressed by that shit?” Myles looked at him, his eyebrows raised.
“I guess she was probably being nice, but she ate it. And she hasn’t dumped me yet!”
As they laughed, the way they always had, Myles yearned for the fearful moment crossing the threshold into a party where he and his friends didn’t know the hosts, and might be kicked out. He wanted to walk by a dirty front lawn strewn with soiled red cups. He had texted with Sylvie from the cornfield for a while, but the distance and the difference in their lives had desiccated the communications pretty quick. Myles wished a professor would demand a paper from him in which he had to explain the way a cell wall held up the stem of a daisy. He would give anything to go back to the biology lab and prove a theory about fruit flies that was already widely known and accepted. All of it was proceeding without him.
Myles had never felt more alone and he began to walk to the mall to take refuge in a Barnes and Noble for whole days at a time, sipping the one coffee he’d bought and poring over the graphic novels he had loved when he was younger. He nostalgically returned to the familiar and trustworthy fictional worlds laden with Greek mythology. The scientifically impossible weapons that threatened all of mankind’s existence, and the unlikely hero that turned out to be the only one who could stop them, were a comfort. His hours in the bookstore felt like a fold in time, like he was in suspended animation. Sometimes Myles eyed the customer service desk, a question brewing in his mind, but day after day he remained where he was. He and Seb hadn’t talked in a while. Myles had called him.
“Hey man,” Seb said brightly.
“What’s up? I’m hanging out at the bookstore. Just chilling,” Myles said.
Seb went off about the girl he was still seeing, and the summer job he was going to do with a professor.
“If it goes well he might take me with him to do research on textiles in Peru next summer.”
“Wow, very cool,” Myles was able to choke out.
“Ah, yeah, I mean, it’s chill. What’s up? How have you been?”
Myles tried to lie, but couldn’t.
“I’m fine, not much to report.”
“Ah ok well no news can be good news right?” When they got off the phone Myles tried not to feel. He stood up and went over to the desk and asked if they had any books about epilepsy. Heat rose where the collar of his shirt rested against his neck as he followed the salesperson to a part of the store far from the vibrantly colored young adult novels, past photography and self-help, philosophy and spirituality, into shelves of health and science. Myles returned to his usual plastic table in the furthest corner of the bookstore’s café with a bag of salty almonds and cracked open a small book about life with epilepsy. The table of contents was long and daunting. He skimmed pages about how some seizures were just like a lightbulb flickering, and the person would stare off a moment and then return, no convulsion, no scene, no injury. Other people seized 10, 15, 20, 100 times a day, in a way that involved their entire body. He stopped skimming when he reached the section about Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy and read each word with extreme care. It was still a largely unexplained phenomena that involved seizures and the person having a decreased drive to breathe. Those words, decreased drive to breathe, washed over Myles and remained at the table with him seated in the empty chair across from him like a specter. An employee came over with a damp rag and Myles lifted the bag of almonds so that crumbs that were not his could be wiped away. They looked like they had come from a blueberry muffin if he’d had to guess. Across the room a woman sat alone at a table reading a biography of Cleopatra. At the next table two people sat with steaming drinks. They had both taken the lids off and sipped straight from the paper rim. Myles would have traded places with any of them at that moment. He stood, leaving the book on the table, and walked out of the store. He wanted to leave his illness behind. Let it be driven by a stinking garbage truck to a landfill where it could be buried in plastic that would take hundreds of years to decompose.
Rage fomented inside of him with each step. The first person he saw when he stepped outside was a woman selling crystals. She gestured at him with hands laden in silver rings, pointing to the piles of turquoise, amethyst, and black stones. Little hand written cards promised cures for various ailments. One of the gold stones caught the daylight and flecked it into Myles’ eye like an ember. It burned. He grabbed the edges of her table, his fingers bunching the soft fabric roughly, and with a violent jerk he pulled. The crystals went flying. They scattered across the sidewalk and along the curb. Some clattered down the storm drain where they could never be recovered. The blackbirds that had been perusing the sidewalk for debris scattered. The woman started screaming as she kneeled down, clutching the bottom of her shirt in her hands like a pouch to gather the crystals. People had stopped on the sidewalk and they stared at Myles, the fabric now dangling limp and soft in his hands. A man with a briefcase and a tie pointed at him.
“What’s wrong with you? She’s just there minding her own business and what do you do?” The man walked close and pressed a finger hard into Myles’s chest. His breath was stale and the hair on his face was a dark and thin layer, like it had just grown since the morning. Myles shoved him out the way, and ran, kicking the crystals even further as he fled. It was a while before he slowed down. He stopped outside a coffee shop with colorful window paintings of muffins and wraps and sat down on a bench. He called Fran and told her to pick him up there hanging up before she could ask any questions. When she pulled up, he had his head in his hands and he didn’t know she was there until she was standing in front of him. She looked him over and scanned for injuries.
“What happened? Why are you here?” She looked toward the café as if the windows with their latte doodles might offer an explanation. Myles went to the car and started to cry like a hairy overgrown child. He heaved and heaved while Fran rubbed his back in a slow, repetitive circle.
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About the Author
Lena King is a high school English teacher at Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School in Brooklyn, New York. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School. Her work has appeared in Evergreen and Eunoia Reviews.