Corn

Laurie
Corn
Spotted Dog, August 25, 2008

I am an admirer of Julie Hecht, and having just finished reading her latest collection of short stories, Happy Trails to You, I tried a prompt using her deadpan delivery and comic awareness of mortality.

Lana asked me to collect corn, tossing over canvas bags. "Take thirteen. It won't matter." She picked strawberries for the farm, and the extra corn was her tip. The canvas bags had seen better days. The straps were frayed, and bits of soil clung to the insides. What would be a better day for a canvas bag? Being packed with a picnic and carted off on a tropical cruise, maybe. The times I’d been on sailboats I gotten seasick. Once I sailed up the Hudson with a young man I had hopes for, but he found me argumentative.

I picked out the fattest ears from the bin and looked at them with apprehension. Lana was having people to dinner and would expect me to eat at least two. She was a food Maoist. You had to eat corn the day it was picked, and you couldn’t refuse it. The food you brought into her house had to be organic. To her a supermarket egg was a bomb. When I see corn I think carbohydrates and see fat, lonely old age. It would be impossible to abstain tonight.

Lana gathered lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and string beans. A crate was piled high with winter squash the color of pumpkins and on their rinds grew warty patches that looked like the shins of old men. Lana said she didn't eat winter squash in summer. I said I would take one, thinking I could defend myself from the corn, even though winter squash is high in carbs too. I hadn't eaten any sort of squash in a while. The man with whom I’d sailed up the Hudson now had the scaly shins of an old man. He thought at this point of life, when nothing was going to last that long, maybe we had a shot. I pretended not to know what he was saying. I was living the life of a house guest and in that circumstance could eat corn.

Lana cooked the ears just right and set a platter on the table with gray salt from a moody, turbulent sea. I picked up the largest ear and sank my teeth in. I had never tasted anything so good. The sweetness, the crunch, the perfume, the Naples yellow of the kernels. Corn is a weed encouraged to colonize the planet because it feeds cattle, whose methane gas emissions comprise a large percentage of the greenhouse gases dooming Earth. The man who sailed up the Hudson liked to pack a canvas bag with caviar and toast points and imagine he was Noel Coward and Gerty Lawrence setting off for a day of ease. I finished off two ears and part of a third, forgetting I was going to die of some damn thing food could not protect me from and that the Earth was on its way to becoming a garbage dump.