The Cornfield
Ohio, 1994
Tom is in a cornfield. It is his father’s cornfield. Prior to his father, the field belonged to Tom’s grandfather. And before that, it belonged to Tom’s great-grandfather who came to Ohio from Illinois after a flood.
Tom doesn’t want to inherit the cornfield. To own a cornfield is to have children, to go to church, to join a bowling league. To own a cornfield is to have a wife. Tom doesn’t want any of those things. Instead, he wants to have sex with men.
Tom thinks about having sex with men almost all the time. He thinks about it in Algebra class and while driving to work and before falling asleep at night. And though Tom understands he will likely never have sex with a man (that is the sort of thing that happens only in cities), he still does not want to own a cornfield. To own a cornfield would mean defeat.
Tom walks alone down one of the field’s leafy rows. He pretends the row is a hallway in an old mansion. Tom sometimes reads ghost stories to forget about cornfields and his small Ohio town. He wishes he could lose himself in an old mansion from one of the stories now.
Losing himself wouldn’t feel like death, Tom thinks. It would feel like escape.
Tom walks for a long time. Eventually, he comes to a paint-pealed door in the cornfield. The door doesn’t stand upright like other doors. Instead, it lies flat on the ground between the leafy rows.
At first, Tom thinks someone must have thrown the door into the field. Someone who was remolding a house, perhaps. Someone who needed to get rid of a door.
Or maybe the door is a piece of an old house that once stood in the cornfield. Tom’s father told him that fragments of old houses sometimes surface in the fields: wash basins, broken china, coal stoves.
Soil, when tilled, can behave like water. Debris floats up from the bottom.
Tom wonders what would happen if he opened the door in the cornfield.
Maybe he would find a hallway underneath. Maybe the hallway would be lit by candlelight. Tom would meet a pale young man there, the kind of young man who might own a house in a ghost story. The young man would give Tom a tour of the house and tell him about all the ghosts. At the end of the tour, in a dark corner, the young man would kiss Tom’s mouth. He would unbutton Tom’s shirt. He would kiss Tom’s chest. Then, he would move to unbutton the fly of Tom’s jeans.
Tom reaches down and touches the rusty knob of the door.
He turns the knob and pulls.
The door doesn’t open, but rather moves slightly to the left. Tom drags the door, revealing nothing but wet soil beneath. There are several pink earthworms on the surface of the soil. Tom sits on the ground beside the door. He understands, of course, that he already owns this cornfield. He owns the door as well. Tom puts his fingers in the earth and feels how damp it is and cold.
Adam McOmber is the author of The White Forest: A Novel (Touchstone) as well as two collections of queer short stories, This New and Poisonous Air and My House Gathers Desires (BOA). His new novel, Jesus and John, a queer reimagining of the New Testament, is forthcoming from Lethe Press in 2020. His work has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Diagramand Atticus Review. He teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.