Michael Robert Liska

Michael Robert Liska

Bears in the Corn

Four people hurtled across the flatness of the Midwest in a Subaru wagon that was slowly filling up with snack wrappers and wadded, booger-stained napkins. Phil (the driver, the father, the husband) believed this trip would act as a kind of gateway into a new golden era in their lives. The kids were old enough now that you could give them an electronic device and then vaporize yourself, become a mist that hung in the house with a glass of white wine floating in your hand. He hoped that soon, he and his (wife) would start having sex again, a practice they’d abandoned shortly after Connor was born—Bri only liked being intimate when she felt completely relaxed, and she’d claimed for several years to be functioning under a standing load of parental and professional stress which made such activities impossible. She’d suggested to him, more than once, that if he wanted to get her in the mood he might try helping her relax by foreseeing the things she would worry about and removing them from her path before she ever encountered them, a feat of continuous prognostication that was obviously beyond Phil’s capabilities. So he’d proposed this surprise road trip instead—Wasn’t it spontaneous? Wasn’t it fun?—hoping it might de-stress her so completely that the festivities of their early relationship could resume. He imagined they would pick up right where they’d left off, at occasional anal sex and light roleplaying, and was so enthusiastic about the prospect that as soon as he saw a sign for something fun and possibly stress-relieving, something other than the same three chain restaurants and the shifting feudal domains of the gas companies—in this case a corn maze, billed as the world’s largest—he pulled onto the exit before anyone in his (family) understood what was happening.

Bri complained that they hadn’t eaten for several hours, and she wasn’t wearing the kind of shoes required for a corn maze. But Connor was on his side. “Corn! Maze! Corn! Maze!” he shouted as he smashed his small fist against the window. Outside, a wall of corn sped by where before there had been only empty fields.

“Stop hitting the window, buddy.”

Connor twisted in his booster seat. “Can we go to the corn maze?”

Connor could hear him; that was reassuring. Sometimes, his (son) became so lost in his own little head it was frightening.

“Let’s have a family vote,” Phil said. “Connor and I say yes. Mom’s a no. Lucy?”

“Nobody cares what I think.” Lucy had spent the last hundred miles staring at Phil’s headrest in disbelief. She’d been fine when she was younger, but as soon as she became a teenager it was like a switch had been flipped. She’d lost touch with any sense of an objective, shared reality.

“Well, I asked,” Phil said. “That shows I care.”

“I literally didn’t want to be here.”

“Do you have a preference regarding the corn maze?”

“I fucking hate mazes. Everybody knows that.”

“Hey, that’s not appropriate language,” Phil said.

Bri said, “Phil, can we not do this? I’m getting hangry.”

“I’m not the one doing anything,” he said. Then, to Lucy, “You’re lucky you live in a family that has no rules.”

“Thank you for undermining me,” Bri said.

Phil released the argument from his brain like a balloon in the wind. It was jettisoned, gone in an instant. “Okay. So it’s two to one, with Lucy abstaining.”

As he’d aged, Phil had settled into a kind of gentle, private misogyny. He didn’t hate his (wife) and (daughter). He loved them, more than anything. He thought they were so beautiful and his (wife) was obviously more intelligent than him, or at least better educated, and he admired them so much. He just couldn’t help but see them both as being like little unhappiness machines, constantly blowing out gray smoke to obscure anything in the world that might remain fun and uncomplicated. Bri was already assembling a snack kit for them to bring with them into the maze. Apple slices, juice boxes, little cups of yogurt.

The fact that she could express her disapproval with the way she placed snacks in a bag was actually kind of amazing.

The only one in his family Phil could relate to was Connor, sitting on his booster seat without a cloudy thought in his head. Connor the accident, he sometimes thought—Connor who’d come out of nowhere to upend the comforting predictability of their days, who’d functionally ended Phil’s sex life, and whom Phil still regarded as a blessing. As they pulled through a fortress-like gate made of stacked hay bales into a gravel parking lot, his young son was waving around a road atlas he’d fallen in love with, doing a kind of dance beneath the straps that held him in. A corn maze dance.

They were the only car in the lot. Phil looked around while Bri got Connor out of his seat, and then he drifted uncertainly toward the ticket booth, a tiny structure just large enough for one person to stand in, painted red and white like a barn. The sliding window was shut, and there was no one behind it. A chain coated in green plastic had been drawn limply across a wide opening in the corn.

“It’s obviously closed,” Bri said.

“Maybe you pay at the end,” Phil said.

“You know that’s not true. You’re just rationalizing.”

“I’m speculating.”

Bri said, “Where’s Lucy?”

Lucy was no longer by the car, no longer visible anywhere.

“She went in the corn maze,” Connor said, standing next to their Subaru and tugging at his shirt.

Phil walked over to the maze and straddled the chain. He looked in both directions and saw only browning cornstalks, shivering in the breeze.

“Lucy?” he said.

Connor followed behind him and scooted under the chain. “We’re going in . . .” he said into an imaginary radio.

Breanne (the mother, which seemed to be her only role in this family) hobbled behind her (husband) with her tote and the cooler bag slung over one shoulder. The car keys and both of their wallets were in her fanny pack because Phil hated having things in his pockets. The corn rose higher than their heads, which made her feel closed-in, trapped, her pathways in life narrowed to these aisles of corn which Phil ambled along, occasionally turning back to smile at her obscenely, as if this was all great fun.

“Lucy?” she called out.

“What do you want?” Her (daughter)’s reply came from beyond an expanse of corn.

“Stay where you are. We’re coming.”

“No. Come towards me.” Phil said. “Follow the sound of my voice.”

There was a long silence. Then Lucy shouted, “I can’t.”

“Are there bears here?” Connor asked.

Phil said, “Retrace your steps.”

Lucy let out a frustrated shriek. “It’s a freaking maze, people! Isn’t getting lost literally the whole entire point?!”

“But are there bears . . .” Connor repeated, unwilling to allow one of his utterances to remain unacknowledged. Breanne was afraid she was starting to hate her (son). She sometimes hated being a school therapist, hated that she’d ever decided to study psychology. It made her too aware of her own thoughts, even the dark ones that should probably be allowed to float on by, unnoticed.

She said, “There are no bears. Bears only live farther north.”

“That’s not true,” Phil said. “There are grizzlies in the west. Those are the really mean ones. There are black bears in the east, but they’re basically just big raccoons. There’s a rhyme you can remember, for how to deal with the different kinds. If it’s brown, lie down. If it’s black, fight back. If it’s white, goodnight!”

“Please. Phil.”

Connor lowered his voice an octave, issuing instructions to someone unseen. “Be careful of the bears on that planet.”

She said, “Don’t you think we should go back and call someone? For help?”

She often did this, presenting her opinions as questions, fishing for the validation she lacked in her early childhood. Their phones were back in the car’s glove compartment, because Phil had declared their vacation to be a No-Phone Zone.

“What would we say? We can’t find our daughter in a corn maze?”

“Yes, that’s what I was thinking.”

“What do you think they’ll do? Mobilize the National Guard?”

Connor shouted, “Down! Get down!” and dove to the ground. She pulled him up and he resumed walking, imaginary crisis averted.

“I’ll go back for my phone, just in case.”

“No,” he said. “We shouldn’t split up.” When Phil was frustrated with her he spoke in a distracted way, as if someone was dictating the words to him through an earpiece. “We’re already separated from Lucy. I don’t want to have to look for you, too. I’m just trying to keep us together.”

They took a few more turns down aisles of corn that looked identical. Breanne had a sense that they were descending, even though everything around them was depressingly flat. She started to say something else about the cloud of doom she could feel gathering, but Phil shushed her and called Lucy’s name again.

“Jesus Christ, what do you people want from me?” She was further away.

“I just want to know where you are.”

“I’m right here!”

“Are you standing still? Can you hold up your arms?”

“We’ll rescue you!” Connor shouted. He began to make shushing noises as he soared through the maze, a rocketship in slow-motion.

* * *

Corn, corn, corn, corn, turn.

Lucy moved away from the sounds of her (family), who were clearly insane. She liked to imagine she’d been switched at birth, and that her real, normal (parents) had gone home from the hospital with whatever weird baby Phil and Breanne had produced, one who was probably more like Connor, who had some kind of low-level retardation that no one seemed to notice except for her (the daughter, the sister, the forgotten princess).

Embarrassment drove her deeper into the maze. She’d recently made a number of stupid posts—posts which everyone at her school had probably seen, and which desperately needed to be counterbalanced with good posts, cool posts, posts that contained all the best emojis and didn’t say much except for so cute!, so people would forget the older, stupid posts, which she hadn’t even been able to delete because Phil had taken her phone away for no reason whatsoever. At this point, so much damage had been done that she could only keep moving and hope that nobody ever saw her again.

She began to run. The stalks of corn blurred on either side of her, a green chute through which she imagined she might reach escape velocity, leaving her old, shittier self behind. When she was out of breath, she stopped and listened. Nothing. The wind shushed through the cornfield.

She imagined thin lost souls standing between the stalks of corn, watching her. They had once been human (children), forced to come into this stupid maze by their insane (parents), where they’d become lost forever. They weren’t mean spirits. They were just sad, and hopeless, and trapped. But that was still scary. You will join us, they whispered. This is where you belong.

She ran from them, too. Corn, corn, turn, corn, turn again. Corn and more corn. She could run from anything.

It felt like they’d been wandering for a very long time, but it also might have been twenty minutes. Breanne had no way of knowing. Time seemed to have come unglued. The last time she’d checked in with herself, it seemed, she’d been in grad school, unmarried, and somehow she’d gotten here: in the middle of a cornfield, attached to a (husband) who had no respect for her and a pair of (children) who regarded her with suspicion and disdain. When had that happened?

They hadn’t heard anything from Lucy in a while. Phil was still acting like he had everything under control, which he clearly didn’t. She knew exactly what he was doing: He enjoyed creating difficulties where there had been none, so he could then burst in to save them and be lavished in doglike praise for his efforts. And then, when she didn’t provide this, or at least never at a volume he considered appropriate, he would become frustrated and double down on whatever behavior was causing the problem in the first place. It was a toxic loop in their relationship. She focused on the sweat stain spreading across his back and wondered: had she been unknowingly reinforcing this? It would be better, she thought—healthier and more productive—if she quietly punished him for it whenever it appeared.

“Are we lost?” Connor asked.

“No,” Phil said. “The car is back that way.” He pointed in a direction Breanne didn’t think the car was in.

Connor said, “Don’t worry. If we see any bears, I’ll kill them.”

She didn’t mention how her boots weren’t broken-in—which now guaran- teed her painful blisters for their vacation. Each thing she didn’t say was a positive act, a sacrifice she was making for the good of their marriage. And whatwould the point be? His responses were just that predictable. He would say that Lucy was fine, and she was overreacting. Then he would point out that some farmer had meticulously designed and cut these perfect, intricate corridors through the corn. Wasn’t it a marvel of human engineering? he would ask. Why couldn’t she appreciate that?

“We’re lost,” she said. She tried to modulate her tone, not blaming him but maintaining her right to state something that was the case.

Phil stopped at an intersection. Everything looked exactly the same. All it looked like was corn. He said, “I guess whoever designed this maze did a good job.”

“How does that help us?”

“I don’t know,” he said in his distant, earpiece voice. “From this point on, I’ll try to say only helpful things.”

She’d once loved this man, and now she didn’t. The puzzling thing was, he hadn’t changed. The Phil ambling before her with his growing sweat stain was in most ways identical to the man she’d married. Maybe this was the problem? She wasn’t one of those people who went into marriage hoping to change their spouse—she understood that this never worked—but she’d expected at least some growth. She thought it was reasonable to expect him to mature as he aged, as she had, to keep up, and start to worry about the same kinds of things she did, the things that were actually important, and perhaps even take some of that worry off her shoulders and carry it once in a while. Like how she carried him in so many small ways—planning out their entire vacation, reading restaurant reviews, booking their rooms, getting the kids’ schoolwork. He hated making plans. Websites confused him. She’d arranged it so he could just drive to their hotel, following the directions she’d printed, and then immediately start having fun while she took care of checking in and getting the kids into their bathing suits. She wanted nothing more than to find him standing aimlessly in the cocktail lounge, a dumb buzzed smile on his face, staring at an indoor waterfall. But instead, he’d chosen to divert them from their carefully-mapped course and drag them around aimlessly in a cornfield, while their (daughter) was lost, possibly in real danger, and he remained either unable or unwilling to discuss this situation like (adults). No, he had not grown. If anything, she thought, he was regressing.

Becoming more childish.

She’d wanted to fly. He’d argued relentlessly that it would be more fun to spend fourteen hours in the car with their small (children). She could have been leafing through the empty, glossy pages of a magazine as the kids played on their tablets in the hushed and darkened cabin of an airplane, but here she was: exhausted, cold, and starving, with a lump of panic rising in her chest demanding to be heard.

Phil didn’t protest when his (wife) suggested they break for a snack, even though Lucy could be getting further away by the second. The angry energy radiating from Bri had already wilted his fantasies of a sexual renaissance, so he just ate a granola bar and sulked as she tried to coax Connor into accepting more baby carrots. Connor was overstimulated, and he hurled every third or fourth carrot into the corn. Phil was accustomed to his speeds—overdrive mode would last for a while longer and then he would crash, something Phil wasn’t looking forward to. Moody Connor was hard to deal with even in the comfort of their home.

He would begin to wail and scream about insignificant events, like if someone dropped something; even something as light as a pillow wasn’t allowed to fall to the floor.

Phil suggested they begin rationing their water, but Bri only gave him a dirty look and then poured some on her hand to clean Connor’s face. How could he save his (family) if they wouldn’t even listen to him? He crumpled his wrapper and almost stuck it in his pocket, but then threw it on the ground as they began to walk, an act of pure spite.

“Dad’s littering!” Connor announced. He picked up the wrapper, sniffed it, and then threw it back on the ground.

The sky looked heavy and a surprising chill had come over the field. He’d forgotten that the days were getting shorter. It had been late when they entered the maze, and now it was already getting dark. He scanned the corn to see if there was anything he could use to construct a rudimentary shelter, if it came to that. A corn hut of some type. If they were truly lost out here, how long could it be before someone found them? He imagined their stiff, frozen bodies uncovered by the spring thaw. He looked back at his (wife) and (son) and wondered if they were thinking the same sorts of terrible things. Connor’s eyes bobbled like eggs behind his thick glasses.

They came to another intersection—had they passed this one before? Three identical avenues of corn presented themselves. At first, he’d been taking them in the general direction of Lucy’s voice, but since she’d stopped responding he’d been choosing their route almost at random, with a (dad)-like confidence that his sense of direction was unimpeachable. Now he wasn’t so sure. He chose one and pushed onwards. Within a dozen steps he came to another, similar intersection. He announced, with manufactured cheer, “Well, I’d hate to see the world’s second largest corn maze!”

This was his job: to put a positive spin on things, so his (family) didn’t despair as he figured out how to navigate them through life’s challenges. But Bri still had on her angry face, so he shut up and fumed for a while over the fact that he was the only one actually expected to do anything.

He had the idea that they should be making a trail, so he began bending cornstalks towards the ground as they went, one every few yards. Connor saw him doing this, and trampled the bent cornstalks with accompanying karate noises, as if Phil had just been softening them up so he could deliver the coup-de-grace.

“Dad! Dad! Dad!”

“Yes, Connor.”

Connor searched into a yawning vastness, awaiting instructions from what- ever distant galaxy he was plugged into. “There’s a lot of car accidents over here!” he finally shouted, kicking at a section of corn. “Really bad ones!” Phil turned away as he began to do another one of his little dances, a ten-car-pileup dance.

Phil’s toolkit was limited. He silently reviewed the years of his marriage: numerous small home repairs of which he was inordinately proud, the unremarkable limbo of his office. His mind kept returning to a team-building presentation his company had offered. A consultant had been called in to shout at Phil and his coworkers for an hour about breaking the fifth wall. As far as he could tell, this was just finding a new way of looking at a problem. Phil surveyed the dense wall of corn and wished that it could be broken just as easily. Then he realized, in just such a leap of abstract thinking, that it could. What was it that held them back?

Only corn! They didn’t have to follow its arbitrary twists and turns. They could smash right through the walls. Ha! There were no walls.

He picked a direction and began forcing his way through the cornstalks. “What are you doing?” Bri asked.

“Breaking the fifth wall!”

He emerged into another neat row. Proof-of-concept. He continued to the other side and flung himself at the next wall of corn. It was both thick and yielding; he tripped and pitched forward, but when he fell, he fell on corn. He began to get into a rhythm, throwing the weight of his body against the corn and then pulling himself up and forward, his mind filling with visions of the sexual splendor that would be his reward for these exertions. He imagined nurse outfits and maid outfits, sloppy afternoon blowjobs, a naughty finger in his butt. Torn and limp cornstalks gathered around his ankles. Connor followed behind him, punching at the corn and screaming a long, quiet scream.

“What about Lucy?” his (wife) called out.

Phil was too out of breath to explain. He was using all of his powers to free them. She would have to see that. He didn’t have time for endless questions. Corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn.

The maze was definitely magical; there was no other way to explain its endlessness. Lucy had always been sensitive to magic, an inborn gift she thought she’d inherited from her real (parents). The dusk had begun to fill the spaces between the cornstalks. She slowed to a lost shuffle and retrieved her lip balm from her pocket. Its cherry scent helped her accept that this was her fate: to wander alone in a corn maze. She envisioned herself as The Maid of the Corn: a sad, spectral figure who drifted down the rows, eternally forlorn. It was perfect. Everything in her life had been pointed in this direction.

She hoped the Spirits of the Maze would feel sorry for her. She imagined them as revengeful fairies who would lead Phil and Breanne around in confused circles, then whisk her away to their secret kingdom.

You will be our queen, they whispered. Claim your throne, and command us . . . Literally right at that exact moment, she emerged into a courtyard with loose straw scattered on the ground. In the middle of the space there was an old tractor, its huge tires sunken into the dirt. The tractor looked like it was from the 1950s. She had a dim awareness of this era—it made her think of crooning singers, smartly- dressed women being pursued by wise-cracking men in suits. But this tractor was from a different version of the 1950s. One populated by creepy old farmer men with dirt under their nails, who had basements spattered with animal blood.

She forced herself to take a few steps towards it. She reminded herself that she was The Maid of the Corn.

Your royal chariot awaits . . .

Up close, it lost some of its eerie power. It was just a piece of forgotten junk. The wheels and everything were rusted and grown over with small weeds. The leather of the seat was old and cracked and completely worn. Parts of it had been fixed with tape, and the tape was completely worn, too.

She climbed up onto the seat. There were a few levers and rusted dials with clouded or broken glass, a steering wheel. From the high perch of the seat she could see over the tops of the cornstalks. The corn extended in every direction as far as she could see. There was nothing in the world but her and the tractor in an ocean of corn. She couldn’t see her (family) anywhere. It was getting darker now and the details, the distance, became muddy.

Surrounded by all of that corn, something inside of her broke loose, and felt final. She decided she would never post anything again. She would be silent forevermore, a queen living in a haunted maze of her own creation.

She took out her lip balm and turned the dial and it revealed itself like an old friend, cherry red and sparkling. There was a thing she’d wanted to do for a long time, but hadn’t dared—it was too weird. But out here in the corn, there was nobody to see her, or judge her. She kept turning the dial, unspooling more of the lip balm, and inhaled its fruity scent. Then, she brought it to her mouth and took the tiniest, rabbit-like nibble from the end. It didn’t taste like it smelled. It tasted like nothing, but was somehow just as glorious as she’d imagined, firm and greasy and crumbly all at once. She used her tongue to work a gob of it from her teeth and then swallowed, pretending it was the magic spirit food of this new kingdom. Then, more boldly, she bit off half of what remained. She didn’t chew, but allowed the lump of it to remain there, dissolving in her saliva as flecks of glitter came to rest on her tongue.

She was a freak. She knew it. If this was what it meant to be a freak, she decided that she liked it. Breanne came to the place where her (husband)’s path left the maze and twisted into a field of unbroken corn that might stretch for miles. She imagined that eventually he would find a road, flag someone down, and hitch a ride back to the parking lot, where she’d be waiting with both of the kids asleep in the backseat and one more shard of resentment in her heart. What did it matter? Her capacity was limitless.

Connor thankfully hadn’t followed his (father) out of the maze. He was crashing. She found him sitting in the gloom amidst dried cornhusks, vigorously rubbing one of his eyes. She had his drops in her bag and managed to tilt his head and get a few in before he realized what was happening.

He blinked. “Why did you do that?” His voice carried a wounded lilt. She knew what was coming. The terrible person in her, the one she tucked away in her most secure compartment, told her the best solution would be to rip his head off and throw his little body into the corn and be done with it.

“You needed your drops.”

“Oh,” he said. He started rubbing his eye again.

“Stop that.”

“It itches.”

“Stop itching.”

A few stars had begun to appear above the cornfield. They were outside, and it was night. This was now an emergency. She took a keychain flashlight from her fanny pack and pulled him to his feet. This was her job: she kept moving, kept everything from falling apart. She began to walk, dragging Connor along, the soft beam of the flashlight playing over the corn. She called out her (daughter)’s name again, and only the corn answered.

“Mom,” Connor said, in an urgent whisper. “Mom mom. Mom.”

“What is it Connor?”

“You’re really hurting my arm!”

“If you walk, it won’t hurt.”

“You’re going too fast,” he said, and began tugging in the opposite direction. She was not going to play this game. She would not let him manipulate her, like his (father) did. She tightened her grip and strode forwards. Connor stumbled along like a prisoner being dragged in chains.

She said, “Please please please honey don’t do this mommy is so fucking tired.”

“Why are you cursing at me?” His voice cracked with disbelief.

“Connor, you need to walk. This is not optional.”

“But I’m really tired!”

“Big boys walk.”

“You’re not . . . even . . . listening . . .” he whined. He made himself fifty-five pounds of dead weight; if she wanted to keep going, she would have to reason with him or else drag him along the ground, which would probably be considered some form of abuse. The people who made these rules, she thought, they didn’t have children.

She dropped his arm.

He rubbed it and eyed her warily, his abuser.

“Helloooo? Connor? Earth to Connor?? Here I am! I’m listening! What do you have to say Connor?”

He howled something she was too exhausted to care about. Something about bears. It had been bears for a week. Bears, bears, bears. Bears at breakfast, bears at bedtime. She was over bears. She was starting to worry, seriously worry, about Connor. The tantrums, the obsessions. He was behind the other students; he couldn’t write his name or recognize even the simplest words on a page. She’d been called down to the office a few weeks before, to take him home because he’d bitten a girl. He needed to be seen by a specialist, to figure out what was going on with him, and she would need someone there with her in the waiting room. And if something really was wrong, she might need help taking care of him—possibly for the rest of his life. She didn’t want to think about it.

All she really wanted was a single moment of absolute peace, more than even a vacation could provide. Sometimes, she had the surprising thought that this meant what she actually wanted was to be dead.

Bears, bears, bears, bears, bears, bears, bears.

Connor (a boy, six years old, the hero) stood in the field with the corn shushing all around him. The moon had risen into the sky and it was too big—the moon wasn’t supposed to be that big. He didn’t understand how everything had gotten so CRAPPY. The dark, the cold, the too-big moon. There were bears in the corn and now his (mom) was being really mean to him for NO REASON.

She said, “What do you want, Connor? Can you tell me that? What is the thing that you want me to do?”

His (dad) and (sister) had been gone for a really long time, and he was worried about them. He imagined turning the next corner of the maze and seeing the bears in the beam of the flashlight, hunched over their bodies with bloody claws and bloody teeth. He knew what death was, of course. His (dad) had let him watch grown-up movies, and in them he’d seen men mown down by machine- gun fire, blown up in spaceships, and entire cities exploded by missiles or engulfed in tidal waves. But he’d never thought of it happening to the people he loved. And when he imagined that he might never again proudly stand next to his (dad) in the garage as he fixed something, or hear the house come alive each morning with Lucy’s shrill screaming, a wave of grief passed over him like a blanket. Fat tears began to blob out of his eyes and his glasses fogged up, which he HATED.

He wailed, “Pick me uuuppppppppp . . .”

She said, “We’ve already had this conversation. You’re too big.”

“That’s! Not! True! You’re lyyyyyyying!” She’d carried him lots of times before; she was really strong.

The bears, the moon. Their claws. The claws of the bears. Something terrible had been happening in that cornfield, a thing he couldn’t untangle and put one name to. Nothing was the way it was supposed to be. His (dad) and his (sister) were not supposed to die. And now, on top of everything else, he was starting to think his (mom) didn’t love him anymore at all.

She yelled, “Connor Maverick stop this right now! You’re not a baby anymore! Are you a baby??”

This final insult sent him over the edge. His arms and legs began to move on their own, to vent the terrible sadness building inside him. It was all so unfair. He kicked and flailed at the STUPID corn. All that he wanted was to feel safe, and loved. Wasn’t that basically HER ENTIRE JOB? He ripped up some corn husks and tried to hurl them, but the pieces just scattered in the wind as he screamed, “I HOPE THE BEARS GET YOU TOO! BECAUSE YOU’RE A REALLY! BAD! MOM!”

After his fury was spent, Connor stood sniffling in his foggy prison, unable to move or speak. Neither of them spoke for a really long time. Then he heard soft noises and realized his (mom) was crying, too.

He was flooded with shame. He didn’t really want the bears to eat her. And somehow, she understood. She slipped her hands into his armpits and hoisted him to her chest and pressed her mouth against his head and he felt her breath dance over the tips of his hair as she whispered, “I’m so sorry, baby.”

Suspended in her warm arms with his tired feet dangling, all of his bad feelings instantly scattered out into the corn. He wiped some boogers onto her sweater with an animal nuzzle, then closed his eyes and felt himself slipping, falling, first through a peaceful void and then back into one of the familiar movies that were always playing at the back of his mind. In this one, he was a traffic reporter, soaring over the cornfield in a helicopter full of scientific equipment.

The moon had returned to its regular size, and its silver light revealed all the maze’s turning and twisting pathways beneath him. Directly below, he saw his (mom), shuffling through the corn with a peaceful, sleeping (boy) against her chest. He scanned ahead and found his (sister)—She was alive! She was okay!—sitting on some kind of farm machine with her head in her hands. He pressed a button to send force fields over them both. Then, he moved the control stick to follow the trail his (dad) had trampled through the corn, mouthing a silent prayer that the bears hadn’t gotten to him yet. The wind from the helicopter’s blades made the corn ripple and sway as Connor came upon his (dad) stumbling blindly through the field, unable to stop until he reached something that was not corn. He turned to look up and the wind blew his hair around like crazy as he saluted his brave (son). Connor pressed the button to send a force field over him too, and then let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. His (family) would be safe, at least for a little while. And out in the corn, the helicopter’s microphones picked up the sound of the bears, howling in rage and frustration.

Michael Robert Liska’s first novel Alice, or The Wild Girl was released by Heresy Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, in 2025.