Attack of the Killer Cornfields

Dude,

I fucked your mother and learned so much about you. We pretended the Pooh Bear nightlight in your bedroom-shrine didn’t remind of us a zygote. She hid the refrigerator polaroids of you and me kicking soccer balls together on a prepubescent travel team. We fucked, but it wasn’t just hollow fornication, not mechanical insert-withdraw repeat, not accessorized masturbation, not without need or intimacy. She and I leaned way way in.

In the hours before we met by the dairy aisle, I tripped over caveman thought-shadows: there must be a soul because I can feel mine pissing on my liver, swelling secondary bladder eroding a hollow in my gut, pressing the abdominal wall, stunting my appetite. I decomposed, was wasting away at photon speeds, reduced to spinal column, dermal shroud and a soul-pissy balloon near my navel, staggering around the streets like a stem with a single clinging grape. The soul piss sac wanted parasitic ground beef, tobacco and a set of bell curved hips –the kind that toll when in motion and make my soul snap its jaw so all my emaciated ears hear is ringing female anatomy and clicking incisors. Which is when I saw your mother holding a gallon of skim, looking soulful.

Lust faded like an anti-polaroid once she squished her wounds against mine. Skin cells and capillaries knitted together, binding us in knotted scar tissue. The whole situation only became uncomfortable when your mother referred to my penis as a “little exclamation point.” She punctuated her moans with tantric ooohhhhmmms and probiotic brand names. After our exclamations wilted we laid in ageless eggshell sheets, sweat damp bed covers, my panting dome on her left areola, listening to the hump and pump of her chest cavity.

Your mother made me brush my teeth and change into flannel pjs before she recited a bedtime story (one she told you, once upon a time) about the man who floated above sticky linoleum floors on a cushion of cig and bud smoke. A methed out Jesus. No name, no clean socks or place to sleep at night, but the man made every party hop by whipping his waxy mane and whiskers in precise orbits until anonymous pills flew from his roots like the devil’s own dandruff. He killed a man in California – “Frisco,” he called it – pushing this Other into oncoming traffic with one worn boot heel to the ass. Blood and pedestrian vomit flowed downhill in iconic cable car tracks. The end.

Then we slept. For 100 hours, waking unshaven and ravenous at the heart of a bio-siege. Through the bedroom window: a legion of cornstalks crept towards us with sun-touched hand grenades rather than ears. Erect ranks of plants smothered the Kentucky Blue lawn and overran your childhood’s patio furniture –dingy white plastic fractured to splinters. I hope the corn lets your mother and me go before winter embraces us all for months, trapped in the farmhouse where your memory still pitter-patters down the halls. Bare little footsies.