by Heidi Hoffmann
“Are you going to finish that?” my father asks me, eyeing the half-eaten corn on the cob that sits on my plate.
“Take it,” I say, even though I have a cold and you’re not supposed to share food when you’re sick. It’s okay though, because I know he’s not going to eat it.
He slides the cob into the pocket of his coat. It was the coat he was wearing the last time he saw mom and he hasn’t taken it off since, but that was six years ago, so you can imagine how it smells now. My brother hands him his untouched stick of corn before my father can ask him for it, and he slides that one into his other pocket. We’ve had corn for dinner at least three times a week for as long as I can remember. I think it’s what we ate the last time my mother sat at the table. With pockets full of corn, my father excuses himself and heads for the garage. A small sigh from my brother’s mouth takes our father’s place at the table.
An hour later my father comes back into the kitchen. “It’s my best one yet,” he says, and my brother and I follow him back into the garage because we know he’s about to ask us to come see. Sitting atop the workbench is an amalgamation of empty, full, and half-eaten corncobs all nailed and glued together and carved into the rough shape of a German Shepard. The dog’s snout is lifted toward the air, and I can hear the howl coming from its yellow kernel teeth. It really is his best one yet.
“Help me move it?” my father asks, and we oblige him, even though it doesn’t really take all three of us to carry it. We walk out the back door, across our backyard, into the line of trees that marks the end of our property, and down the path that my father watched her walk down six years before. All around us are my father’s corn dogs, standing at attention and waiting for my mother to come home.
His earlier ones are amateurish. With no eyes or ears or paws, they stumble blindly through the trees. For some, the ones who have been there since the beginning, all that remains is a pile of nails on the ground. Those ones were made out of grief and heartbreak, and he hadn’t really got the technique down. But the farther we walk into the woods, the more artisanal they become. From beginning to end they are a timeline of our mother’s absence, and when we reach the end my father says, “Right here is good,” and we set the German Shepard on the hard ground. He brings out several long nails out of his smelly coat pocket and uses his boot to stamp them through the corn dog’s paws, nailing him in place.
“This one is going to find her,” he says, “I know it will.”
Heidi Hoffmann is an undergraduate student at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, although she is originally from New Mexico. She is majoring in Film Production and minoring in Creative Writing.