Children of the Corn?

I have a disturbing and thankfully vague memory. I know it happened, but I can’t seem to recall the time, place, or exact circumstances. As you may know, I am prone to wild flights of imagination, so I’ll try to keep out the adjectives here and describe the memory as clearly and concisely as possible.

There was a party out in the country when I was about ten or eleven. Wide-open spaces and fields, lots of people I didn’t know but who knew my parents. I have no memory whatsoever of the house, but since it was summertime, it was an outdoorsy celebratory affair. Me and my brother made friends with the other little folks there and we played all sorts of games outside.

Across the street was a cornfield, so, naturally, we decided to explore and investigate. Being from the suburbs where my neighbors’ houses stood but ten feet away, we were awestruck by the concept of a cornfield. It was fun and quickly we all decided to play a game of hide-and-go-seek.

We did this for a while uneventfully. Then, I remember being a little nervous because I ran too far into the cornfield. Did I get a sudden chill, or did it actually get colder, as if the sun went behind dark clouds while the wind picked up? I don’t know, but it was getting late, because I could hear my mother’s faraway voice calling for me as it was approaching the time to leave.

I recall feeling relieved, and made my way out to where I thought the street was. I came into a clearing and I looked away from the house, back towards the body of this massless, sizeless, boundless field, and froze in terror. About fifty yards away – a guess, really – I saw ears of corn being tossed into the air, one after the other, quietly and unmistakably coming closer to where I stood.

You know that unpleasant feeling when your heart seems to stop to allow all that adrenaline to be dumped into your bloodstream? So intense where you almost flicker out of consciousness for a second? Well, that was me. Fortunately I found my feet a half-second later and tore off down that path to the street and to the safety of all the people in the house beyond.

I stuttered to my mother but she and another lady just chuckled about “monsters in the fields.” We left for home and that was that.

And this was at least three or four years before I read “Children of the Corn,” from that most excellent collection of Stephen King horror tales, Night Shift.

Now, I probably just saw some other kids playing in the fields, too short to poke their heads above the high stalks of corn. But if so, they were deep in the field. Still, up to that point in my short life, it was one of the most frightening thirty seconds I have ever experienced.