It was an accident. It was never supposed to happen. In fact, how could anyone guess that it would turn out the way it did. But in the end, it wasn’t all too bad I suppose.
Like most ideas that take a bad turn, this one started when my little brother, Jimmy, and I were drinking a few sips of Dad’s homebrew rye whiskey. I was fifteen, my brother was thirteen, so we never needed much of the rye to get drunk. Dad never noticed if a couple of shots were missing from his jugs in the basement, so we never got caught.
It was late in the summer, and my parents were taking their yearly trip away from the farm before the fall harvest when they wouldn’t see each other for almost a month with all the work that needed done. This was the second year that my parents left me in charge of my brother and myself for their week long trip.
So, seeing that my brother and I were left to do as we pleased, we snuck in a few drinks the first night we were on our own. After we were fairly drunk, we watched TV. There was some show about crop circles on, and we found ourselves watching. It was too much to resist since we had grown up on a farm that grew rye and corn. The idea formed then in our mildly drunken state that we ought to make a crop circle of our own the way they showed some group making one on the show. It would be funny, or so we thought in our intoxicated mindframe. Our own crop circle.
Before we sobered up, we went down in the basement and had a few more sips of rye. We then went out into the barn, found a few planks, rope, and a couple of stakes, and we headed to the field by the house. We went out and made a crop circle. It was huge when we finished. We kept it simple by making it two large circles that, with out pubescent humor, ended up looking like two large boobs. We put all out tools away as we laughed hysterically about our little joke.
Eventually, we went to bed still giggling about our crop circles..
In the morning, I awoke and wondered if I had dreamed about making the crop circle. I looked out my second story bedroom window and found that I hadn’t dreamed it. I wondered if Dad would realize that my brother and I had done it. With a sober mind, I wondered if the crops were going to be damaged. I was then afraid that I may have done something really bad. In the long run, I had no idea the extent of exactly what I had done.
Jimmy woke up before I did and was still throwing up in the bathroom when I came down the stairs.
“C’mon man!” I hollered at the door after I heard my brother finish hurling. “I gotta piss!”
I listened as Jimmy turned on the faucet and rinse his mouth. A minute later, he opened the door and looked at me with a slightly pale green face. “You see it yet?” he asked as he smiled weakly.
“Yeah,” I said as I pushed past him. I shut the door on my brother’s grinning green face. I pissed. I washed my hands and face in the sink. I opened the door and found my brother still leaning next to the door.
“You think it was a bad idea, huh?” Jimmy asked as I walked past him.
I stopped and shrugged. “We could just say it wasn’t us,” I said. “Maybe Dad’ll believe us.”
“We should call the news and tell them,” Jimmy suggested. “We could charge money for people to see it. Get it famous, you know?”
I continued on towards the kitchen. “I don’t think anyone will buy our story,” I said with a sigh.
I made myself a cold cereal breakfast as I tried to think of what to do about the crop circle. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like I should have realized what a bad idea it was in the first place, and I cursed myself for thinking of it at all.
