Dead Lines

Prologue: Corn Maze

Unedited.

Every year at the beginning of October, a corn maze is opened just outside of town. The farmer spends the last half of September getting it ready, sacrificing ten to fifteen acres in order to complete it. He always tells people, when they ask, that he doesn’t mind. Seeing the smiling faces of children as they enter and exit always makes it worth it. It used to only be five dollars per person to go in and he always said it made up the price of the corn. Not that he didn’t get that too since he would plant those ten to fifteen acres earlier than the rest just so he could harvest it before he had to make the maze.

I got lost in that maze when I was six. They never found out how it happened, just that I was there one second and gone the next. My mother got me dressed in a red dress with a red ribbon in my hair. She joked it was so she could spot me a mile away in case something happened to me. Cecil picked on me about the ribbon and the shiny pair of black Mary Jane’s my mother forced me to wear. He told me I looked like a china doll, something to be put on a shelf and admired instead of played with. Since I was only six, I took offence to that and refused to talk to him for the rest of the day. He told me when we were older that it was one of his deepest regrets because I still wasn’t talking to him when it was my family’s turn in the maze. Cecil and his parents were behind us and would be allowed in after five minutes.

The farmer employed several of the local teens to patrol the maze to make sure no one got lost and to give “suggestions” on where to go if asked. I overheard my parents when we got home later that night saying the teens that were supposed to be on duty in the area where I disappeared were making out in one of the mazes many hidden corners instead of doing their jobs.

They say I slipped through some stalks and wandered away. My mother swore up and down that she had a hold of my hand the whole time and from what I could remember of that night, she was right. But something made me slip my hand from hers and then disappear into the cornstalks.

The adults searched for an hour for me but the farmer had over a hundred acres of land and it was getting dark. They brought in the big spotlights they used for nighttime road work and continued searching. Mrs. McCourt sat outside the maze with both my mother and Cecil, the men folk calling out my name in the distance. No one knew why I didn’t call back out to them.

But this is what I remember. I was scared, I was lost, and there was something about that part of the cornfield I didn’t like. It had a strange feel to it. Every turn I made, I thought I saw something so when it came down to it, I curled up in a ball in the plowed dirt and waited. My father always told me if I got lost just to stay where I was and he’d find me. But as the sun went down and it got colder, I worried that he wouldn’t. That I would never be found and Cecil and I would never decide who could swing across the monkey bars the fastest.

After that, everything got a little hazy. I remember a pair of dark eyes looking down at me. I remembered being lifted into a set of strong arms and being moved, the sounds of the stalks swaying in the breeze, but the next thing I remember clearly was my father calling out my name. I sat up in the dirt, shivering from the cold, and called out to him. Within seconds, both six year old Cecil and my father came bursting through the mile high corn stalks.

According to them I was missing for six hours. To me, it felt like a life time.

No one noticed until later that the red ribbon in my hair was missing.