The Minotaur

September is when you start to see them — signs for corn mazes, each advertised as being the world’s largest. The purpose of such places is to separate families. The admission fee is equivalent to their glee upon being reunited. Children vanish so parents can feign panic, trusting that the fact that they can’t find their way out must mean they’re safe. It’s always the youngest who gets the most lost. When his parents and older sisters have already made it through the maze, the boy is still missing. Not because he couldn’t find his way out (he saw the exit and stepped back from it as if from an edge) but because he wanted to find the place where the minotaur lives. Just as his family is starting to worry, he is stepping softly into the cul-de-sac of corn, stalks matted down like ground upon which something monstrous has been born. He stares at the forelocks folded at the soft, mossy knees, the horns spiraling up to impaling points, the human torso torqued to see who it is who has found him, here, in the dead center, the point around which the whole maze turns. He knows he should run but he can’t turn away. The minotaur is too strange, too beautiful. His father is saying that he’s fine, that they should let him find his own way, but his mother won’t hear of it. She is thinking of kidnappings, alien abductions, things she’s seen on Unsolved Mysteries. She announces that she’s going back in, like someone announcing that they’re running back into a burning house. She calls his name through the walls of corn, the leaves mottled the blue-black of battery acid, his name falling on all those deaf ears. Unlike when she was trying to get out, she knows where she is going. She doesn’t doubt her decisions as to which way to turn. She is being drawn by a deep instinct, like the instinct that makes animals migrate. Finally, she comes to the weird anteroom to find him on his knees. He twists at the waist to see who it is who has found him. You decide who it is she has found.