At first he thinks it’s a scarecrow, but then he notices all the flies. And it smells. My God, he has to tell the cops! But there’s no cell service in these endless rows of corn, this blue-sky-hot-sun Midwest nostalgia dream that has now become a Stephen King landscape of fear. The scarecrow is still dripping.
         He pushes his way through the rows, back the way he came. A sparrow swoops in front of his face. A corn snake slithers in the shade. Here is another scarecrow, a woman. He turns and runs parallel to the rows—although the vanishing point seems miles away, surely he will eventually exit into the normal world again. A breeze picks up behind him, and the corn to either side swishes and rustles, keeping pace with him.
         It must be just about noon. Dark shadows are mixed with the golden susurrating stalks, crucified arms outspread. He stumbles but keeps running. He is breathing some sort of corn dust; it is stinging his eyes. Here is a row of scarecrows, a whole family. Parts of a whole family.
         Somewhere ahead of him a dog is barking. Should he go toward it? But someone has planted these people in the fields—best to go another way. And so in this manner he outthinks himself and becomes lost. His pace reduced to a jumpy walk, he tries to pick a direction and keep to it. But he has seen this particular scarecrow-man before, he knows, so he’s not getting anywhere.
         He’s sunburnt. He rests for a few minutes under the man, staying away from the pool of sticky mud. As the only remotely human things in sight, by now the scarecrows are almost a source of comfort. Eventually he moves on, he hopes more methodically.
         In the end he counts more than forty of them before he escapes. He drives his car back to the hotel, but he does not inform the police, or his wife or children. In the bad years to come he often likes to lie in bed while Laura sleeps, and close his eyes, and return to them in his imagination, where they counsel and console him, and whisper surprising and unusual ideas that adjust his thinking and give him the resolve to carry on, even just a little longer.
         Even just a little longer, they whisper with their cornsilk mouths.
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