Eric Shumacker was a quaint man of pointedly obvious shortcomings. He was grave, pale, listless, and frighteningly erroneous in physicality. His demeanor made him believable as a decaying statue, cornered in the back of a mausoleam, a makeshift idol covered in rambling lichen, and sparkling bat guano. Living in the edge of the countryside, he had chewed up plenty of corn husks, and made a living selling hallowed out cob pipes. He loved his pipe tobacco.
The miles of corn laid out straight in lines of obsessive-compulsive latitude sat across the road of his two-story farmhouse. The love been tattered from its hanging shingles long-lost to the corporate build-up factory farms made him rock steadily in thought. He has lost a great deal down the chasm of life's indelible path, wives galore, kids moved off to cities in vast countries unknown to an Iowa farmer. Just the corn remained, just the corn. He vibrantly lifted himself from the rocker of cedar pine, purchased from out of a ten-cent catalog back when the ice box truck man would mosey on down the line.
The farmhouse was bustling with history, weighted in sawdust and dogwood, scaffold of cement and iron. The kitchen was the larger portion of the home, it seated twelve, and had enough room left over for the Sunday Congregation. Now it was a long hall of pity and despair, paining Shumacker every time he had to trudge through. The ghost of the past settled within the dust, salting the pretty abode's ancient luster.
The day was drawing to a close, and Eric Schumacker was growing weary with every step inside his own personal living museum. The barren house allowed for his stature to stretch a shadow for miles across the corn, with merely a candlestick to guide its path. The dismal twilight gazed steadily upon him like eyes of an overlord, a sumpter in the celestial solidarity. He mustered towards the stairwell thwt rose to meet the closeted pocket door of the master bedroom. For years now he had laid down I. The deathbed of his morose dad wife of tw
enty years. A widower younger than ever imagined, he lies in the King-sized bed, sinking lonely into the mattress from which his lovely wife succumbed to cancer, and where on the bed sprig his father had his fatal heart attack. Nothing new ever seems to creep it's way into the farmhouse, but becomes enraptured with the hold, somehow vanishing I to the background of what is the true portrait of the old Schumacker Farmhouse.
As night crept over the corn, rows and rows blackened by the loss of light, a beacon shined directly onto the eyes of Schumacker, he tossed and turned, I a stream of consciousness that was desperately trying to reach a dream. Yet the physical world was disavowing such luxuries, as the beam pierced through his eyelids, and forcing them open with illuminating fingers.
He peered from under his comforter, not yet willing to escape the dream world that stifled his senses put mere moments ago. He stood up quickly, attempting to hover between awake and asleep, as he lingered over to the window, and shut the drapes, creating the perfect atmosphere of shadowed beauty.
When the covers were about him once again, and his head began to nod, Eric Shcumacker was running towards his dreams once again this time R.E.M. seemed to come about even faster than the first trek. Images escaped through the cerebellum, flooding his mind's eye with vivid persecution, and herald thoughts of wisdom...and fear. The night danced in-and-out if the room, like sprites over a diamond-crusted pond. Schumacker tossed and turned gently, but the discomfort was mustering through his warm slumber. He had lost himself in the dream, visions of ghostly caricatures, and then he saw his beloved wife, still haunting his subconscious years later, he shed a tear, reaching out, and pulling himself out of the bed, awaking to the dismal glow highlighting the blue drapes with the white hand-drawn flowers.
The light shined about like a masquerade ball. The door swung open with gusts of marigold pollen and dust bunnies. Without invitation, the specters flew in with flowing locks of bird nests and autumn leaves, barely clinging to the ghostly waves. They danced around in frolics of wind gusts, the whirling floundered down, leaving a mess of nature on the oak floor, the hairs of corn and leaves of autumnal colors rested gently at Eric's feet. He fell back on the bed, awestruck by the wonder of what he beheld. The struggle to maintain consciousness was lost as the ghost of his father, several of his children, and his lovely, locks of white wife encircled him with whispers of lovely sounds, and voices long gone.
He felt a lift in his body as he felt his feet leave the hardened floor, and float up to his past loved ones. They smiled, and swirled him, his wife coming in, and kissing him gently on the lips. The phantom lips elf like humble electricity mixed with frozen air, as they were all skyrocketed out of room, and over the miles and miles of corn. Blurs of free and yellow, with flashes of LED lights throughout the field. It was beautiful, as Eric Schumacker saw his entire life flash in front of his eyes, and it was magical.
He crossed the great state of Iowa, the landscape long and clean, only a double-lane and a lonely tractor with its hazards on is all the human footprint onto the wild land. His wife's spirit giddily held him close, resting her spectral head on his back, as though resting like she had done so many times before on his motorbike. Eric smiled, and spun around gently, as the few firefly lights of the neighboring houses miles away flickered on and off, as some were going to sleep, and some were waking up. A beautiful light show of continuity and American work ethic.
Then, a sharp turn, and he was bustling back with ghosts aboard towards his own silhouetted home, nestled across the street from miles of corn. The spirits set him down gently on his bed, and slowly vanished, whispering lovely things into his ears, a feel of warmth and comfort not felt in decades. They vanished slowly, until only his wife was left behind, and he smiled in the translucent blue eyes that he had loved for so long to wake up to, staring into a soul that burned without ash. She laid next him, and they held tightly to one-another. She felt cool to the touch and in the autumn night it was a welcome feeling. He has been so cold for so long, now he was hot with happiness long gone, and her touch had brought him back down to reality.
Her whispers were so much like the autumnal winds, and carried off into oblivion, as though they never existed before. The end was drawing to the night, and it was clear to Eric Schumacker that he was being left behind. He sat up, and packed his corncob pipe, and lit the resin off a wooden match, but his wife touched his hand, shaking her head. She smiled, but it was halfhearted, and it was then that he knew this wasn't some chance meeting.
Suddenly, with a pain of such mortality, Eric Schumacker awoke from a dead sleep, and clutched his chest with a fear of one who was dying. After a moments of wrestling with the pain, his soul was released, Eric Schumacker left the earth, and was then again joined, by those hazy blue eyes. He clasped his wife in a ghostly embrace, as the heavens awoke, to eons of peace, and lightyears of corn.
Tha I you for reading the Malacast Editorial, Short Story Weekly will be back again next week, I'll be taking a week off in June to focus on E3 2016, but after I've finished those posts, I'll be right back in June to do a Short Story Weekly. If I'm able to efficiently finish those posts in a fair amount of time, then I'll attempt to get one done that week, but E3 has to take precedence. Thank you again for supporting the Malacast Editorial, and have a great weekend!
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