If the world ended, I’d enjoy it for a bit.
If I woke up and the apocalypse had started, as it always does, in the big cities, I would yawn and stretch and drive out from big time Muncie, Indiana into the cornfields while all the other wives shanked each other over granola bars and bottled water at the Walmart.
Roads empty, I would roll down the window of my Prius with the duct-taped fenders and listen to the silky ocean sound of the corn rustling.
Further down, I would breathe the sun-baked smell of the soybeans turning from seas of green into fields of butterscotch. I know better than to lay down among the rows, but if I did, would anybody give a fuck? Would anyone but Mother September watch me?
***
When I wake up, it’s a shotgun silence. So pure it is almost like a vow. A penance for how loud we’ve been, unable to shut our damn mouths or turn off the TV or put down the phone before our words are recorded in Facebook’s database forever. Finally, we’ve just stopped.
Though I heard plenty of road noise last night from under my coverlet of soybean leaves—horns blaring, shots fired, I only see one car packed to the guts with belongings dragging its belly along the pilgrimage path into the sticks where its inhabitants will hopefully be found and eaten last.
I stretch, my arms dimpled with chigger bites and freckled with dew-wet earth. In the pink-cheeked morning fog, I feel something tingling in my stomach. Something almost patriotic. I glance across the street to the cornfields grown brittle in just a week and then back to my butterscotch soybeans. In the silence, my laugh is a bark.
“I mean, it’s not technically amber waves of grain, but it’s close enough.”
America the beautiful, at fucking last.
— Lydia Wilhelm is a CNF writer and poet living in big time Muncie, Indiana. Her work can be seen on the Rabbit Room Poetry Substack and 365 Days of Covid from Sunday Mornings at the River. If she isn’t grading or writing, she’s probably reading aloud to her husband, Jayden.