"At the End of the Corn Maze," by Anna Kvasnik

Anna Kvasnik is a sophomore Psychology major with an English minor. With less time on her hands every semester, she finds herself taking the small opportunities for fun assignments with as much eagerness as her sleep-deprived body can express. This piece was written as a Halloween Fanfiction assignment for one of her classes, but she found herself amusing herself by twisting the relationship in a new direction. In the middle of a corn field, no less.

---

In the end, it wasn’t the cold that got to him, but instead, ‘twas the feeling that there was no one to see him, no one to hear him, and no one to know where he had gone. 

~~~

The leaves crinkled beneath his feet as he walked, an array of fiery wrath underfoot, silent but for the crackling sounds of their death. But it was not this that turned him off his path. 

The walls around him were all but see-through, the gray in-between of seeing but not seeing halting his speed at getting through to the end. But he was not a stranger to obstacles in his path, and as he always would, the path continued and so did he. 

The sunshine dwindled and soon enough, there was but the cast shadows of approaching twilight—the sky turning the colors of a bruise. But this was not what caused him to halt.

But in the fading light, it was him, walled-in with cornstalks aplenty, waving with the cooling wind. It was him who stood stock-still when he heard a loud rustle, a shout, and a scream. And it was him, when the silence fell, who threw himself into the cornstalks, a kind of fear washing over him like never before. 

He’d done all the things a man could do at that point. He had fought in wars, he had climbed his way up the corporate ladder and fought tooth-and-nail to get there, but in that moment, it did not matter what he had done and what he could do. All that was left was the nagging voice inside of him. 

This is where it ends. And this is where your legacy will die. Forever. A nobody, alone, frozen in the corn, trapped until you have no more to scream. 

~~~

It wasn’t her that thought up the idea—not initially. It was a joke by friends, a trick to get her to overcome her own fears. Who can truly be afraid when you’re the one to be feared? 

So, she held that play knife, folded up in her hand, blade pressed into the hilt. And when she pulled the play mask further down her face, the plastic scraping her wind-burnt cheeks, she realized: Perhaps it is not the voices in my head to be feared, but instead the ones that make it out loud. 

And turning the corner in a corn field, she smiled at the dark figure she saw, her heart beating erratic in her chest but an odd-calm washing over her, and her voice—normally soft and high-toned, came out with a puff of warm air and a breathlessness that sent her words into a lower tone. “Hello, would you like to play a game?” 

The screams could never scare her now.

~~~

He was running, cornstalks scraping his face as he tore through them, bending and crushing with his broad build. Let me go, let me live, the words in his head were hurried and tremulous. I’ve worked too hard to go like this.

“Hello?” He heard a voice, but from what direction, he did not know. “Are we playing tag?” Rustling behind him sent him lurching forward, the cornstalks suddenly parting in front of him and depositing him onto the ground on a different maze-path. From cold or adrenaline, he did not feel the ache in his knees as he pulled himself up and went to keep going, but in front of him was only the field at the end of the maze: the final rays of a sunset cresting over the distant horizon. 

“Oh, look, I made it.” But it was not his voice who said that, and he turned around, only to see the woman he so despised behind him, pulling off a mask and wiping her sweater sleeve across her face. As crushed bits of cornstalk pricked her face, she used her other hand to meticulously pick them off the sweater. 

“You?” His voice was shaky in its demand. 

She looked up, her surprise hard to distinguish in the fading light. “You?” she returned, significantly steadier in tone. 

And as they stood there, in the dark, his chest heaving and hers barely moving as she observed the space around them, they heard a distant generator begin to whir and a floodlight turn on a distance away. 

They could never be friends now.