“This was the fun part. I reminded myself of that. At least, it used to be the fun part. Mazes gave me all the chances I needed to get where I was going.”
– from “The Fodder Shock Maze”
Do you have a favorite part of autumn?
I have trouble narrowing it down to one thing, myself. I’m a huge fan of pumpkins – painting them, carving them, setting them out on a front porch, baking bread and pies, making fudge (yes, my family even makes pumpkin fudge!). Then there’s that sweet, dry smell of corn stalks I remember from the fodder shocks my grandmother used to buy at a farmers market up the road.
Autumn is a season of memories for me. When I set out to write an autumn short story (the second of my two-part “seasonal” fiction series on this blog), it seemed only fitting to honor that power of autumn memories. I decided to send my main character out on a little hero’s journey spurred by her own memories of the season. If you’re interested in reading more, you’ll find my new Sacred Grounds short story “The Fodder Shock Maze” below.
Whether you read it or not, I’ll still leave you with a question. If you were to write a short story in honor of one of your own autumn memories, which memory would you use? Why would you choose that one?
Wishing you joy in this season!
– Callie
The Fodder Shock Maze
By Callie J. Smith
“Thanks. But tomorrow isn’t good.”
“Forecast says it’ll be perfect.”
“Sorry, but I’ve got work.”
That response seemed to catch Aaron off guard. He studied me. “I thought you worked for yourself. Don’t you make your own schedule?”
I waited for a wink, or smile, or something to tell me he was joking. Nothing. He looked back at me with those momentarily sincere hazel eyes. I had to laugh. “Are you fantasizing about going into business for yourself?”
He grinned. “All the time.”
“Don’t.” Then I enunciated each word carefully. “Thank you for the invitation, but no.”
Aaron rolled his eyes. “You wouldn’t even volunteer to help with the exhibit.” He flung his hand back at a far wall of the coffee shop, which had begun gathering a hodgepodge of local art. “It’s called ‘fun.’ F-U-N. Ever heard of it?”
I’d had patience with Aaron. A frequent customer at this coffee shop, he’d made himself my one-man welcoming committee when I first started using it as a place to get work done. He had a goofy-younger-guy vibe I’d sort of liked. But this F-U-N campaign was getting old.
“Small latte with whip!” called the barista from the counter.
“This isn’t over.” Aaron hopped off the stool and went for his drink.
I returned to my laptop, glad to get back to work. I even lost track of time.
“Not into pumpkins?” The sixty-something coffee shop owner with short, bleached-blond hair had wandered over.
“Hi, Chris.” I smiled but didn’t remove my fingers from the keyboard. “I do like pumpkin festivals,” at least, I used to, “but it’s a busy weekend.”
She sat in Aaron’s abandoned stool, gazing out the window to the parking lot. “Big project?”
“Stuff due Monday.”
She took a sip from the coffee cup she’d brought with her. “Being your own boss can be hell.”
“Tell me about it.”
“No vacation days.”
“None.”
“It’s why you’ve gotta make your own. Trust me.”
I studied her. Chris usually didn’t get into other peoples’ business. “I know, but …,” I gestured at the laptop screen.
She took another sip of coffee and leveled dark eyes at me. “You’ve been looking stressed.”
Something in her tone made me take my fingers off the keyboard and turn to actually face her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She nodded at my head. “Messy bun?”
I reached up involuntarily, wondering how much had fallen down. Shoulder-length mahogany waves were great, but it took time to do anything with them.
She flicked a finger at my soft knit tunic. “And bum clothes?”
“They’re not bum clothes! And I don’t have any meetings today.”
“You’re not the Claire Russell who showed up last year with her shiny new business.”
My shoulders hunched a little. Chris was right.
“You can’t tell me you’re not tired,” she said.
Who was I kidding? “I am tired,” I admitted. “I need every one of these clients, but I can’t focus. It’s a gazillion people, and organizations, and schedules, and this is a,” I caught myself before I used profanity, “a labyrinthine mess. I don’t know how to get through it all. And it doesn’t stop.”
“Make it stop. Set your own boundaries.”
“I need to get this done.”
Chris shook her head. She dug into a pocket of her black jeans and tossed a card onto my keyboard. A big, smiling pumpkin face stared up at me from the middle of the card. “Claudeville Pumpkin Festival Starting September 20th,” the bold lettering said. “Complimentary admission.”
“We’re supporting Kat.” Chris stood up and pushed in the stool. “She shows artwork there on the weekends.”
I stared at the card and sighed. Unfortunately, I liked Kat. The sweet little barista had a quirky flare, and she was kind.
“We’ve got a 12-seater van going tomorrow,” Chris added. “Be here at 11.”
I did get there at 11. I started out the drive trying to do email on my phone in one of the back seats, hoping to annoy enough people to get the information I needed. But, as I’d suspected, a twelve-seater van got loud pretty quickly.
“No. See?” The dark-haired woman beside me was jabbing a finger into the booklet that a blond woman on her other side held out. “The margins aren’t right.”
“They’re close enough. I’m not worried about it.”
“But I am.”
“Get over it.”
I wasn’t the only person trying to get stuff done.
“Ladies,” called Chris from the front passenger’s seat, “you’ll give yourself headaches reading in a moving vehicle.”
“We’re not reading,” said my neighbor. “Just proofing.”
“A report?” I asked.
“Exhibit program,” said the blond woman. “We’re on the volunteer committee organizing the art exhibit.”
“Ah.”
“You people don’t know how to take a break,” Aaron said from the driver’s seat. “It’s Saturday. We’re having fun. Quit working.”
“This is for the art exhibit,” the dark-haired woman shot back. “It is fun.”
Aaron narrowed his eyes at her in the rearview mirror but didn’t respond.
Perhaps seeing an opportunity, Aaron’s son called out from the backseat, “Let’s play the license plate game!”
“Perfect!” Aaron turned off the radio. “First person with ten states wins.”
“I’ll beat you!” his son yelled.
“I’ll beat you!” he yelled back.
No one, in fact, reached ten states by the time we saw the Claudeville Pumpkin Farm sign. I had eight, though, which it pleased me to notice was two more than Aaron found. As he parked, he mock-shook his fist at me.
“What’s wrong with him?” whispered the dark-haired woman beside me.
I shrugged. “Does he poke at everyone like this?”
“Not this much.” She smiled. “I’ve been trying to set him up with a friend of mine. I think they’d have a lot in common, but he keeps putting me off. Makes me wonder if he’s wanting to ask you out.”
“What?” I asked a little too loudly.
Half the people in the front of the van turned to look at us.
I whispered after that. “He knows I’m in my 40’s, right?” No need to specify how far into my 40’s. “And he acts about as old as his kid.”
She nodded solemnly, unbuckling her seatbelt.
“I doubt that’s it.” I unbuckled my own seatbelt and climbed out of the van. “I told him I was too busy for this. I bet he’s miffed Chris could talk me into it when he couldn’t.”
“He is competitive.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“I’m Morgan, by the way,” she said, holding out her hand. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Claire,” I said. Then my phone dinged, and I dug it out of my cross-body bag as we walked to the entrance. I found an email response I’d been waiting for and sent back an acknowledgement as we entered the gate with our free passes.
We wandered past a maze. Made of fodder shocks and bales of straw, it stretched along our path for quite a while. Several in our group paused there, but Chris shoved her hands into the pockets of a cherry red hoodie kept walking.
“I’ll be at Kat’s barn,” she called out over her shoulder, pointing up a gentle hill to a barn. “You all got my cell number?”
Everyone but me nodded.
“Good.” Chris left.
I lingered. When a couple of the parents with kids decided to do the maze first, they moved toward the entrance. I didn’t follow.
“Claire?” It was the blond woman from the van.
I shook my head. “Not yet. I’ll go see Kat first.” But I didn’t move.
“I’m no good at mazes,” she said, hanging back with me. “But I can follow people.”
“I used to love these things,” I said, not even sure why I was saying it. “Made my parents take me all over the place looking for corn mazes.”
“You sure you don’t want to come with us?”
“Maybe later.”
“Okay.” She shrugged and gave me a wave. “I’ll see you in a bit.”
“See you.” I waved back and then walked half-way up the hill, turning to look down. The hill hadn’t risen high enough to give me a better view of the maze interior, so I walked the rest of the way up to the barn.
Chris stood in the back with Kat, a petite thirty-something who’d pulled her milk-chocolate hair into a messy bun, too. Somehow, though, she had made it look sophisticated. Framed landscapes and still life paintings hung on the wall behind them. My attention, though, snagged on the picnic tables underneath with candies and baked goods. I went straight to the peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate. “I haven’t had buckeyes in years,” I said, feeling something a little like wonder as I stared down at them. It had been so long. “My mother used to make these.”
Kat grinned and pointed to an older woman in a lawn chair behind her. “My mother.”
The older woman looked up from a knitting project in her lap and smiled.
“Hi,” I said. Then I glanced back down at the tables. Cookies, popcorn balls with candy corn, pumpkin fudge, hand-made Halloween costumes – they had a cute hodgepodge of things. “You’re a talented family,” I said. Then I held up the buckeyes. “I’ll take these. And seriously,” I dug cash out of my bag and then nodded at the wall of paintings, “I’m impressed.”
“Thanks.” Kat put her hands into her grey trouser pockets. “I enjoy painting. I got into it when I was a kid, so I guess it stuck.”
“I loved mazes when I was a kid,” I said. It was the only thing that came to mind.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling at the memory. “I guess I wanted to figure out how they worked. I’d get to the exit and then go back inside and try all the rest of the paths, too.” My phone dinged. Compulsively, I reached for it. “Working weekend,” I said. “Sorry.”
Kat watched me check my email. I found two responses to my earlier emails. Pleased, I typed quick acknowledgements.
“I stopped painting after grad school,” Kat mused. “I got busy. But I took it up again last year. I don’t have time for it, but I realized I go a little nuts when I don’t have something like this outside of work.”
I’d paused from my typing.
Kat’s face had gone very serious. “It keeps me on track.”
“I stopped going out to mazes, too,” I said.
“Why?”
I shrugged. Because they don’t accomplish anything? Because they don’t pay the bills? “It’s too much like life,” I said instead, not wanting to hurt Kat’s feelings. I doubted her buckeyes and landscape paid the bills, either. “Twisting paths and dead ends – I’ve got too many of those already.” Though vaguely aware that Aaron had entered the barn and called out a greeting, I ignored him. I was thinking about what Kat had said and didn’t even realize Aaron had come up behind me.
“Nope. No work,” he said, reaching for my phone.
I pulled it out of his reach. “What are you doing?”
“Take a break, will you?” He was reaching for my phone again.
“Hey!” I turned my back and hugged the phone to my stomach with both hands. “Leave me alone!”
“Hand it over.”
“Aaron.” Kat and Chris said it at the same time.
I thought about kicking him in the shins, but then I decided to unzip my bag and shove the phone in there, instead. Unfortunately, I had to let go of the phone with one hand to unzip the bag. Aaron seized the opportunity and gripped the edge of the phone.
“Aaron!” Kat and Chris both sounded lethal now.
My anger surged. “Let go!” I pulled hard.
Aaron pulled harder. Which might not have been too bad if he’d actually held onto the phone. As it was, though, he surprised himself when he got the phone away from me. It left both of our hands and made an impressive arc toward the barn wall. I stared, the sight of my flying phone a little too astounding to be real.
Then it hit the wall. The phone dropped to the ground with a smack.
I stared. The phone had fallen behind a table, but I didn’t move to go after it. Noone else moved, either.
“I’m sorry,” Aaron whispered finally.
His voice broke the spell. I went around the table. My phone lay face down on the wooden floorboards. I picked it up and found several cracks fanning out from the upper left corner of the screen.
“Claire, I’m sorry,” Aaron repeated. “I’ll pay for the repair.” He stepped closer as if he could fix something.
I turned on him. ““Leave me alone!”
Aaron stepped back.
Still clutching my cracked phone, I glared at him. Then, when I again considering kicking him in the shins, I knew I needed to calm down. Turning, I stalked away. Out the barn and down the hill, I didn’t even know where I was going. I felt too angry to care. How could he have done that? What kind of juvenile, self-centered …
A screaming child ripped my attention back to the present. The screams were coming from the maze.
“Mommy!”
I noticed Morgan coming around the side of the maze yelling, “Mattie!” She had another child with her, a little girl clutching her hand. Morgan reached the maze entrance and spoke to the maze worker, who shook her head about something. Morgan turned and walked back in the direction she’d just come from. She kept yelling at the maze wall, “Mattie!”
I walked over. “What happened?”
She bit her bottom lip. “Jake should be in there. He told me he’d go in with his sister again, but he’s not answering. And Mattie acts like she can’t even hear me.” She looked up again at the wall of fodder shocks. “I’m watching my friend’s daughter, too,” she put her hand on the little girl’s head, “and I don’t know if we should go in or …”
“I’ll go in,” I said. “You wait here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you!”
I walked to the entrance. The maze worker, a youngish woman wearing a straw hat and name tag, greeted me with an apology. “I texted the manager. I think he’s coming. But I’m not supposed to leave my place until somebody else comes to take over.”
I wondered if that instruction applied to situations with lost and screaming children, but I didn’t push it. “It’s alright,” I said instead. “I’ll go in.”
Turning to the entrance, I tried to remember the different algorithms for getting through a maze. It took me a moment to realize I didn’t even want to get through the maze. I wanted to find a kid.
“Here,” said a voice from behind me.
I turned. Kat’s mother, of all people, stood there. She must have followed me, and now she was snipping her knitting project off a huge yarn ball. She held out the end of yarn still attached to the ball. “Take it.”
I stared at the yarn, clueless.
“I’ll hold the ball,” she explained. “You carry the end of it in there with you.” She shoved the end of the yarn into my hand. “Follow the yarn back out when you find the girl.”
“Oh.” It was a good idea. “But this maze might,” I paused and glanced along the wall, “it could be a thousand yards or so. I don’t think …”
“This is a 400-gram ‘mega’ ball of yarn,” she informed me. “It’s well over a thousand yards.”
“Oh.” What could I say to that? “Well, thank you.” I fisted the end of yarn in one hand and walked into the maze.
Corn stalks surrounded me with that funny dry-sweet smell that meant autumn and childhood. Unexpectedly pleased, I flicked a stalk for the heck of it and made myself focus. Turning right, I aimed at the girl’s voice. She’d stopped screaming, per se, but she still called her for “Mommy.”
The straw bale walls only gave me the option of turning left, so I turned left. Five turns later, I reached a dead end.
“Mommy!”
I backtracked to the entrance and took the left option from there instead. Again, I aimed myself at the crying girl. Two rights took me to another dead end. I turned around, grumbling internally. I could have been at home working.
“Mattie!” Morgan’s voice came from somewhere behind me. “Hang on, Sweetie. Claire’s coming to get you.”
I backtracked, not all the way to the entrance this time, but to my next choice. I turned right. Another right, then left, then left, and two possibilities opened before me.
“Mommy!”
I went toward Mattie’s voice. That choice took me almost the length of the maze before dropping me at another dead end.
“Claire’s coming, Sweetie!”
Annoyed, I took a deep breath and made myself focus. This was the fun part. I reminded myself of that. At least, it used to be the fun part. Mazes gave me all the chances I needed to get where I was going.
I went with that thought, walking back to the last place I’d had a choice and taking the other way. Twisting along the length of the maze and up half the width of it, too, I followed the sound of tears.
This time it did the trick. I finally turned a corner and found a little girl with her mother’s long, dark hair. She sat with her back against a bale of straw, arms hugging her knees.
“Hey, Mattie,” I said.
She looked up with her red, tear-streaked face.
“I’m Claire, and I have a way out.” I held up the end of yarn. “Here.” I handed it to her. “We follow the yarn back. So, you lead the way.”
Mattie’s eyes followed the yarn back to the corner I’d just turned. Then she sniffled, stood up, and reached hesitantly for the yarn.
“Lead the way,” I nudged again.
And she did. I’d have liked to have moved a little faster, but I let her set the pace. Eventually, we exited the maze at the entrance.
“Mattie!” Her mother hurried over with the other little girl trailing behind her.
Mattie threw her arms around her mother’s waist.
“What’s wrong?” A boy from our van had walked down the hill to stand with us.
Morgan looked at the boy, and her eyes went wide. “Jake! Where were you?”
He pointed up the hill. “Up there.”
“But you said you’d take Mattie into the maze again.”
“I did,” said the boy. “But she was too slow. I finished and came out here to wait.”
I could tell Morgan was getting ready to react, so I left them to it and finished winding up the rest of the yarn. Then I handed the oddly shaped ball back to its owner. “Thanks. That was a good idea.”
The older woman beamed.
“Everything alright?” asked a voice from behind me.
I turned. A tall man with a straw hat and name tag was looking between me and Morgan, who was giving her son an earful.
“Fine,” I said. “A little girl got scared. That’s all.”
“That’s the man who built it,” whispered Kat’s mother at my ear.
I looked at older woman. “The maze?”
She nodded.
I looked at the man again. In jeans and a T-shirt with brown-black hair peeking out from under the straw hat, he looked about my age but had a much better tan. Definitely an outdoors type. He was frowning in concern.
“You built this maze?” I asked.
He grimaced. “I think I made it too hard this year.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” I said quickly. “It’s all-ages appropriate. With supervision, at least.”
That comment caught his attention. “You like mazes?”
I hesitated. “Yes.” It used to be true.
“We still need volunteers this season,” he offered.
I held his gaze a moment, taking this in. “Volunteers?”
“Yeah. Free admission and lunch each day you work. We always have one person watching the maze entrance,” he pointed back at the young woman in a straw hat, “but two’s obviously better.” He pulled a card out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Here.”
“Thanks.” I looked at the name on the card: David Lauren. It called him “manager,” not “maze maker.” Not that I’d expected otherwise. I already knew mazes didn’t pay the bills. I put the card in my bag, in the pocket with my cracked phone. “Claire Russel,” I said, offering him my hand.
He smiled and took it. We shook, and I suspected my day had just improved.
“For your phone.” Aaron tossed a wad of cash onto the counter beside me. It was the first time he’d found me at the coffee shop since the phone incident. He put his hands in his trouser pockets. “Did you already get it repaired?”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting back from my laptop. “Only glass damage.” I looked down at the cash.
“Is it enough?”
“Yes.” I wanted to simply give the money back to him, but with more bills than pride, I counted it instead. “But it wasn’t that much,” I said, giving a couple bills back.
He hesitated but took them. “I really am sorry.” He waited for me to say something.
I didn’t.
He fidgeted. “Can I take you out to dinner or something? I feel like I owe you a good time.”
“No,” I said quickly. “I need space.”
“But …”
“Space!” I declared.
Aaron threw up his hands and stepped back like I’d drawn a weapon.
Which, of course, I hadn’t.
“I can do space,” he said, eyes wide. “And … uh … I guess my kind of fun isn’t for everybody.”
“No,” I agreed. “My phone couldn’t handle any more.”
A weak version of his smile returned. “I get it. I do. So … uh … I hope you had an okay time on Saturday. You,” he paused ever so slightly and wrinkled his nose, “spent a lot of time talking to that maze guy.”
I had, and I’d enjoyed it. Feeling a tiny bit sorry for Aaron, though, I reached into my laptop bag and pulled out a name tag on a bright orange lanyard. Then I held it up for him to see, thinking he’d appreciate it.
“What …,” his voice trailed off as he read. Then his eyes went wider. “You volunteered at the pumpkin festival?”
“Yep. Did the paperwork this week. They promised me all the Saturday maze shifts I want.”
“That’s great!” His usual grin had returned. “Now I know where to find you on Saturdays.” He saw me opening my mouth to respond but beat me to it. “Not that I’d bother you there! I just mean … well, I’ll know why you’re not here.”
When he left it at that, I nodded. Then I held up the cash. “Thanks for this.”
“You’re welcome.” A pause. “So,” he took another step back, “I guess I’ll see you around. Let me know if you’re ever game for dinner, okay?”
“Okay.” Then I had an inspiration. “But I heard Morgan wants to set you up with a friend of hers. Said you have a lot in common. I bet she’d be up for dinner sooner than me.”
His surprised expression became serious. “Did she put you up to this?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, I’ll think about it.”
“See you around, Aaron.”
“See you, Claire.”
He left, and I took another look at my name tag. It made me grin, too. Or maybe that was the time talking with the maze maker and the prospect of seeing him some more. Or maybe Kat was right about things that keep us on track.
The short story “The Fodder Shock Maze” appears as bonus content in the new paperback edition of Coincidentally Yours: A Sacred Grounds Novelette (Clay Patin Press, 2025).
Callie J. Smith 