The Corn by Kathleen Hale art by Kevin Dooley Everyone in town knows her mother's face got taken off by a razor. Some meth head wandering out of the corn like a zombie got her in daylight next to the toolshed where she bled to death. Beannie was too young at the time to remember, but not long afterward she started setting traps outside. Trip wires and shallow holes covered with grass, butter knives stolen from the kitchen and pressed straight into the mud like stakes. Now her security systems are all covered in weeds. Now she's in eighth grade, getting ready to go to the state fair with Jason, a boy from school, frail and pale, with bones like a bird. Her sister calls him easy prey. Beannie's dreams for catching possible maniacs were simple enough at first. But nowadays she combs through hunting catalogues and military handbooks and wishes her dad had the money and leniency to let her get a crossbow or a Bangalore Torpedo. The tiny pits around her house have started growing flowers, and Beannie lets them blossom. Not because she doesn't care but because the tricks seem old. Beannie's picking out her bows now, one for each ear. She can't find the other green one, and she's got on a green tee-shirt and green flip-flops, so if she has to go with blue it means a whole entire other outfit. She knows her dad will drop her off at the fairgrounds and pretend to leave, then come back and prowl. Four years ago he caught Beannie's sister Stinky on a date there. Stinky'd been careful and not even worn a skirt, but the fat man from the freak show was still there at that point, and their father, at that point, was still annually friends with the fat man, and so the fat man had tipped off their father, who had found Stinky in one of those model fall-out shelters, sitting next to a boy with long hair and muscles, holding a rose. Beannie used to crawl in with Stinky at night, and with their legs braided Stinky'd ask if Beannie liked boys yet, and Beannie'd respond about how wouldn't it be wonderful to live inside a prison? Such thick walls and special security systems and also guards on your side. And Stinky'd say, hey man you be careful, we gotta play we don't care Dad didn't move after the Mom thing—that he's got two guns and two dogs, and that I'm good with a knife, and you've got your little holes, and whoever doesn't think we're smart and fine and healthy is an asslord. Beannie finds the other bow and kicks into her sandals. Her father is yelling pleasantly from downstairs. She'll meet Jason by the human cannonball, across from where you can pay ten dollars to get your picture taken with a bear. She doesn't have any money but Jason might. He feels guilty about what they do in the corn and ends up buying her a lot of pop whenever there's a machine. At the entrance to the fair, she and Jason see each other right away but right away they look at other things. Obese ladies on scooters, signs advertising donut burgers, damp looking children on leashes. Four years ago, after she watched Stinky get whipped by their father, Beannie strung a trip wire at the foot of his bedroom door and spent most of the night waiting for a thump. She finally heard his floorboards creak around three, but then instead of falling, she was pretty sure she heard him laugh. Beannie got so mad she spent the rest of the week stringing wires everyplace she thought he'd cross. She even put one in his car, at the driver's side door. But all that happened was he started carrying shears around, to cut his way through each system. Beannie was careful after that. Not just with traps, but about the boys she chose. She knew from the beginning they should be pimply with braces, probably a few pounds lighter than she. Absolutely no one with long hair who looked like he might own a guitar. Jason is perfect because he's too ashamed to blab. His parents take him to church two times a weekend, but more often he ditches his bike on the highway side of the corn and goes in and whistles till he finds her. They lie down and mark each other with their braces, and once he brought a hairbrush and stuck it handle first into her furry whatsit. Beannie asks her father if she can walk in the corn, and he suspects nothing. He's merely happy that she seems suddenly and finally unafraid. Perhaps she's forgotten how someone on drugs came out of there holding a razor when she was still a baby. A social worker has told him it might be therapeutic for her to return to this place, to the corn, and the fact that she lowers the flag on their porch to half-mast every time she goes only confirms the ritual for him. The water at the fair is expensive, but Jason buys it for her, and he must have been saving up because they also get an unlimited rides pass. They climb onto The Casino, which goes upside down and around and around, and no one can see them through the blur of the gray clanking machine, not even her father, if he's there. Beannie shoves her hand up the leg of Jason's shorts and waits for him to start nervously listing roller coaster death statistics. But he doesn't. "After this," he says quietly. "Let's go into the corn." She kneads his slowly hardening flesh and thinks of how this is what has come to scare her. Not that someone will find out, but that they will try to stop her. And as she scans the spinning landscape for the warning of her father's face, she is pretty sure she sees her Mom. Read the interview. Kathleen Hale is a first year MFA candidate at the University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale. Her fiction has previously won awards from PRISM, Glimmer Train, and Harvard University, and has been published in North Central Review and The Harvard Advocate. This story has been nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. Kevin Dooley is an amateur photographer and a professor of supply chain management at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. More of his photos can be seen on Flickr. All content in SmokeLong Quarterly copyright 2003-2013 by its authors. Issue Thirty (December 22, 2010): Eulogy for Maria Mamani, Fire-eater by Ed Bull «» Language Barrier by Thomas Cooper «» A Goblet Falls by Barbara Diehl «» Life Lesson by Damian Dressick «» Yams by Gary Fincke «» How We Handle Our Midnights by Charles Hale «» The Corn by Kathleen Hale «» Amelia by Aubrey Hirsch «» Inside by Ashley Inguanta «» About Things That Are Lost and the Places That Things Get Lost Andrea Kneeland «» The Good Woman by Sara Levine «» Buckaroo by Ravi Mangla «» Her New Friend Jesus by Michael Meyers «» Conjugation by Jen Michalski «» Dairy Queen by Jennifer Pashley «» What Do You Do? by Dariel Suarez «» Up, Up and Away by Art Taylor «» Three Jokes by M. Thompson «» Between Budapest and Dying by Dean Marshall Tuck «» Crash-o-rama! by Chris Wiewiora «» Thirty-Word Story Contest Winners «» Interviews: Ed Bull «» Thomas Cooper «» Barbara Diehl «» Damian Dressick «» Gary Fincke «» Charles Hale «» Kathleen Hale «» Aubrey Hirsch «» Ashley Inguanta «» Andrea Kneeland «» Sara Levine «» Ravi Mangla «» Michael Meyers «» Jen Michalski «» Jennifer Pashley «» Dariel Suarez «» Art Taylor «» M. Thompson «» Dean Tuck «» Chris Wiewiora «» Cover Art "Holiday Wishes" by Marty D. Ison «» Letter From the Editors Interested in subscribing to SmokeLong's weekly newsletter? Click here. An email should be created. Send it as is, and you'll be subscribed. If the link does not work for you, send an email to imailsrv@smokelong.com with Subscribe slq-info in the body of the email (no subject is necessary). You'll receive updates detailing the release of new issues, new reading periods, contests, etc. We do not make our mail list available to anyone else.