Clown in a Cornfield

by Adam Cesare

Matt yelled up, “If she drowns, I get to keep the body.” Janet wasn’t even sure what he meant, but assumed he was being disgusting. Even though he was the guy who let them into the reservoir to party, Matt was a fucking dick—and Janet knew she wasn’t the only person who thought that.

Janet dropped Cole’s phone. It would film the sky until the battery died two hours later. On the live feed, you could hear voices. Screaming. But you couldn’t see Cole dive in. You couldn’t see him pull his sister to shore. You couldn’t see that she looked fine. Like she was sleeping, until you lifted her up and saw the gentle gush of blood at the back of her scalp, parting her wet hair. You couldn’t see what the coroner would report, that the back of her skull had been caved inward on the edge of the stack.

OH SHIT, that girl is dead.

Dad slipped his fingers into the gap, putting his weight on the window. The guy gave him a look that said I will roll up this window and chop off your fingertips but please don’t make me do that because it’ll be a major headache for everyone.

The guy gave him a look that said I will roll up this window and chop off your fingertips but please don’t make me do that because it’ll be a major headache for everyone.

In Kettle Springs she could keep her head down, avoid the drama. No one here knew Quinn as the girl whose mother slumped low in the bleachers during last year’s regionals, then puked down her chin.

No one here knew Quinn as the girl whose mother slumped low in the bleachers during last year’s regionals, then puked down her chin. Nobody in Kettle Springs knew how Samantha Maybrook had died.

Nobody in Kettle Springs knew how Samantha Ma...

With enough work and love, you could save anything. Well, almost anything.

Their property abutted a cornfield. Miles and acres of the crop.

Out in the fields, breaking the horizon, looming above all like a warning, was a large, dilapidated warehouse and factory.

There, painted on the side of the factory, was a clown.

Philly ate its rot, was constantly demolishing the old to make way for the new. Looking at these houses, Quinn was struck with the feeling that Kettle Springs had left its best days behind. The town had given up.

wreck. Life, Quinn had decided on the long ride out here, was a matter of perspective and attitude. There was a way to look at anything and make it seem okay.

“Ha! No, that’s just Frendo, the mascot. Baypen made corn syrup, but, uh, the refinery burned down . . .”

“Cole Hill.

“And, yeah, he’s pretty cute,” she said, pausing before adding: “for an arsonist.”

She was Asian, for one thing—the first hint of difference among what to this point had seemed like a pretty buttermilk school.

Make him a little more . . . homicidal.”

“It was my family’s factory,” Cole corrected, as if that made it less of a crime. “My dad’s at least. And it had been empty for over a year. At the time of the fire.”

The old folks in the diner weren’t talking to her dad because of her. The patrons were responding to her dad’s pleasantries by giving Quinn a stare-down.

“Dr. Weller’s departure was really sudden.

I’m not your sweetheart, motherfucker.

The townspeople would never know how much worse it would have been if he weren’t around, watching out for them.

The ice pick missed Harlan Jaffers’s temple, where the clown had been aiming, and entered halfway up the mayor’s neck, its progress interrupted only when it nicked a vertebra.

Frendo transferred him to the back of a waiting van where—alone, in the darkness—Harlan’s final thought was: “Still mayor.”

Tucker didn’t mean to do it. Not all of it.

What the fuck! Tucker nearly fell out of his chair. On his laptop screen was a clown. The figure stood stock-still with its feet on the welcome rug.

In the middle of their lane, illuminated in the cold stare of Cole’s high beams, stood Frendo. The clown had appeared out of nowhere, it seemed.

Dead-eyed. Staring down the speeding car without so much as flinching.

And Quinn already wanted to save him from himself. And she could hear her mother’s voice say: “Exactly. Look how well that worked out for your dad.”

“And that’s why you always mix your own drinks.”

boys everywhere are dumb.

“Do what’s asked of you, and maybe—just maybe—you won’t be among those who die tonight.”

Grief doesn’t depend on dates—that’s

There was blood streaming down the girl’s face.

And there, sticking from her lower back, was an arrow, bright neon feathers marking the end.

Quinn watched, her lockjaw going slack, as a clown emerged from the corn. Frendo’s shoulders were uneven, set that way. His chest heaved like he’d been running.

But then the girl in Quinn’s arms slumped forward, Ginger giving a final shudder as air left her body. Frendo had hit his target. The arrow had glided clean through Ginger’s head. Enough force in the bowstring to enter the base of the girl’s skull, then punch out the left eye socket and bury itself down in the dirt.

The clown tilted his head, painted smile demonic as the flames played across his plastic mask.

Mr. Vern’s dead eyes stared up at her, his small mustache frothed with blood and spit.

You’re all so worried about what’s wrong with the kids, when you’re the ones selling us guns, telling us times were better when men were men, pretending that global warming is a hoax, and turning hate into a team sport. I mean, yeah, you have taken it all a step further, sure, but it’s not like anyone over the age of fifty has ever really given a shit about us. You guys may be homicidal lunatics, but, hey, at least you’re being honest about how you wish we were dead.”

That wasn’t CPR. That wasn’t CPR at all. Cole Hill, red-faced, a tracer of white around his neck, returned Ruston Vance’s kiss. Passionately.

Quinn took comfort in that. The fact that history bent toward progress, no matter how hard the assholes tried pushing back.