Amy Cipolla Barnes
1. THE DISPATCHFarm Reports
1974
My grandparents have a family farm outside of Wichita. I help shuck corn and find worms wriggling in the freshly-picked ears when I pull their silk blanket off. There are warm snakes under freshly-laid eggs, curing around their oval prizes.
I learn that canning is not the same as canned goods at the grocery store. There is no metal, only glass jars and heavy buckets of boiling water. I count vegetables in jars while we wait for tornadoes to pass. There are rows and rows in case we get stuck there for days under the Wizard of Oz cellar door.
1975
We are going to Texas. My parents say.
My grandfather stops to visit us in El Paso with fresh vegetables and fruit in the back of his semi-truck – green beans flapping, slick corn ears nesting next to carrots in wooden crates. I eat the vegetables raw, in the back of his truck until my stomach hurts.
My father tries to bring fresh vegetables across the Texas-Mexico border but he’s stopped and stripped of everything including flowers for my mother. She’s angry. I can tell. She turns flour and water and brown-edge yesterday’s lettuce into dinner. My father is sent to their room with no supper.
1976
My father’s brother’s wife and his children are far away and hungry. My mother sends them cans of hominy homemade bread. My aunt calls long distance for cooking instructions at a time when the call costs more than the canned goods. She has thrown out most of the hominy because she’s worried it’s spoiled, swollen corn.
Please take them in and teach them and feed my girls with your girls.
My aunt begs my parents on the phone.
You’ve had abortions. They say.
You’ve been sent money to kill babies. They say.
You’ve made enough money stripping. They say.
I can smell brandy on your breath through the phone. They say.
You named your child after booze. They say.
My parents say no in unison.
I worry my cousins are hungry.
My mother cooks Jiffy Pop on the stove to make up for me hearing about dead babies and boozy aunts.
1977
We leave Texas and return to Kansas in search of somewhere-over-the-rainbow corn. There’s ears of it on the dining room table in a fancy glass bowl. It isn’t for cooking or eating; just for looks. I pick out individual kernels when my mother isn’t looking and keep them in my coat pockets like tiny jewels.
1980
I climb a rusty ladder with a 10-year-old farm friend who can drive a truck, my feet held up to avoid the rusted-out floorboard. We shimmy into a child-sized porthole and slide down corn grain to the silo’s bottom. When we emerge, there’s field corn dust in my lungs and my hair and my shoes and my skin.
Back home in the suburbs, I eat corn in juice and cream from labelless cans with angry red discount marks on them. I wonder where the corn juice pool was on the farm. Most days, the cans with slight dents aren’t corn. There are only peas and carrots and pasta circles engulfed in a metallic tomato sauce.
1985
My hungry cousins grow up and drop out of high school and sell drugs in front of elementary schools. The one named after booze goes to prison for a very long time. She uses her one phone call to call my mother who doesn’t answer.
We were right to not take them in. They say.
1990
I’m in college, not prison. I get my corn infusion through cheap Taco Bell tacos, genetically-modified shells filled with protein that keeps me filled through work and school and more work.
2010
I have two children with corn silk hair. They don’t slide down grain elevators or ride in rusty trucks with other 10-year-olds. We visit pumpkin patches with corn mazes. I know my kids can only get briefly lost there. I finally know what happens when you slide down corn silos, breath grain. You can die. I could have died.
I breathe in the smell of corn maze and imagine it’s summer and I’m surrounded by Western Kansas sunflowers and don’t know about safety or death or a sad cousin eating meals on metal trays shoved through a prison door slot.
2012
My kids go to a school plantation field trip where Andrew Jackson is labeled a hero and the Thanksgiving Native Americans are hailed only for their corn-sharing skills and long tear-filled walk across the country.
How can you say that about such an evil man?
I ask the docent.
My children ask too.
The Confederate-uniform clad guide doesn’t respond. They don’t have an answer, just corn husk doll parts laid out on tables, slightly wet to be pliable and silent and smelling of wet corn.
2015
My children debate in favor of GMO corn at school. They want to feed all of the children in all the places, including their second cousin in a Kansas prison who they’ve never met and grown-up farm children with corn dust in their skin.
2018
Our suburban high school has a random drug bust with dogs who sniff the kids and their lockers and their cars for drug dust. They catch kids from inside the school, not in front of it, kids with full bellies and not-rusty cars.
Who is selling the drugs? I ask.
No one knows. I watch for the ghost of my drug-dealing cousin in the crosswalk but I only see Porsches and Jeeps and Hummers.
2020
I haven’t seen hominy in grocery stores for years. Only steamable corn. Corn salad. Corn salsa. Gourmet baby corn. Corn muffins. Pickled corn. I open labeled cans.
2022
I slide into Google Earth on my kids’ virtual reality headset to visit my childhood home. The yard is a concrete parking lot where many grandfather semi trucks full of vegetables could park. The once corn yellow house is now sterile-hospital teal.
That can’t be my house. I say.
When it’s dinner time, I don’t call my mother for instructions to cook corn or hominy or hominy grits. I don’t call the prison to talk to my cousin who maybe has been released by now.
I buy farmer’s market corn. I rub corn jewels in my pocket until they’re as smooth as rubies and emeralds and canary diamonds. I buy bougie baby corn and charcuterie-board it into neat little soldier rows. No one eats it.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYeMac
Hello Kitty manual pencil sharpener
AP Bio test prep books
Rainbow post-it notes
Empty printer cartridges
3-in-1 laptop
Printed out pages to read and edit, highlighters/G2 pens
Framed pictures of kids
Reading glasses
TBR stack of indy press books
3. BIOGRAPHYAmy Cipolla Barnes has words at FlashBack Fiction, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, The Molotov Cocktail, The Citron Review, JMWW Journal, Lucent Dreaming, Anti-Heroin Chic, Flash Frog, Janus Literary, Paragraph Planet, Cabinet of Heed, Spartan Lit, and many other sites. She’s a Fractured Lit associate editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit editor, and reads for Narratively, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, CRAFT, and The MacGuffin. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, longlisted for the Wigleaf50 and included in Best Small Fictions 2022. ELJ Editions published her debut collection in summer, 2021. A full length collection AMBROTYPES was published by word west in March, 2022.