I’m fighting to fly away and stay earthbound.
I kick the shit out of a wheat field, slashing swaths through like a scythe. If you get mad enough, you see pink lightning, not red.
I’m stuck at the family hunting lodge with my brother and my cousin, Andy. They refuse to drive me home for my sack of weed. We’ve been here three hours. I already smoked the quarter I brought. They sat on the porch talking deers and rifles while I smoked bowl after bowl like a choking man slurping up oxygen.
I thrash through wheat and grow angrier and angrier.
First it was Depakote®, which ballooned and depressed me. Now, it’s levetiracetam which makes me kill wheat wanting weed; the latter, my doctor said, might better wrestle down the seizures, though it’s just flung away like a child from the back of its father.
Smoking takes me to the doorstep of normal.
I stomp back inside and announce I left my medicine at home; I’ll have a seizure if they don’t take me back now. Those are both lies: there’s enough medication in my blood to last a couple of days.
Andy, who’s still panicky about my tumor, flies into action and begins packing our bags, but my brother, who scowls, watching me, halts him. “He’s lying.”
I dive on my brother, like I’m trying to shove the words back down his throat. He pulls my arms down. “C’mon now.”
We twist and turn through the cabin, clumsy like a wedding dance, me scrabbling for his lips, clawing. We flip a coffee table over, send beer bottles rolling. One rests at the feet of a stuffed bear, a trophy shot by some uncle or cousin decades ago.
My brother’s more weary than angry. “Alright, just c’mon now.”
He attempts to guide me onto one of the beat-up couches, but I pull at the neck of his t-shirt, and we spill backward out the door and down the porch. My grip anchors me upright. We end up back out in the wheat. I release him and drop into the stalks, dirt, and rocks. When he goes to help me up, I’ve yanked out crumples of wheat to cram into his shirt. I’ll make him a scarecrow to blow away in the wind.
Andy’s pulling us apart. My brother backs away, spitting out grains.
I sit screaming and throwing handfuls of wheat; they leave me there shrieking and howling. I jump. I’ll wrestle the clouds down. I’ll twine my fingers through them like tangles of hair and haul myself up to gnash the ankles of angels.
I crouch, sprawl, bowing to the wheat. Andy calls to me from the porch, holding a baggie. He says he’d been saving an eighth of what he dubiously names “pineapple kush” for later, that if I’d just asked politely.
We sit on the porch with a joint, me in the middle.
“Were you mowing the lawn?” my brother says, a wheat stalk dangling from his lip.
My cousin laughs, says, “That was crazy, man—”
And, at that word, I burst into tears. Both of them wing an arm around me. I tell them I’m losing control. It’s too big. I can’t die.
As they comfort me, I beg them not to tell anyone that I’ve said the “D” word.
“Let’s shoot something,” Andy says, meaning bottles off the fence that runs alongside the driveway. We’ll get up early for deer and find nothing to kill, none of our hearts in it.
Shamelessly, I ask if we can just smoke again? Andy looks to my brother, unsure. My brother nods, exhausted. While they roll another joint, I walk through the field and run my palms along the grains in apology.
Andy says, “You look like Gladiator.”
The wheat tickles my palm. It’s calming.
“That’s heaven,” I say.
(he/him) is an epileptic teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in Bending Genres, Fractured Literary, Gone Lawn, JMWW, and other places. His work has been nominated for Wigleaf Top 50 (“The Turkeys” in 2024) and Best Small Fictions. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs, often with his wife and son.
