Downstate Illinois featured
fertile land, with dense rows
of sweet corn, stretching for miles.
In Summer, ’75,
high-school students
earned $2.00 per hour
with a thirty-minute break.
Sadistic farmers hired us
to pull tassels and
fling the tufts on the ground.
Nine-hour shifts in the blistering sun.
We’d trudge forward, then turn around
and repeat the process
all over again.
The crew and I worked together,
grooving to my friend Linda’s
crackling transistor radio.
We danced through rows,
shaking our hips to
“I’m Not in Love”
and “The Hustle.”
Linda was a straight A student
who couldn’t wait to burst
free from downstate Illinois,
even if she had
to claw her way out.
Last time I saw her,
three years post-graduation,
she lived with a collection of pet lizards,
in a basement apartment
in Champaign-Urbana.
I was a hippie with a hundred-dollar car
and a thing for guitar players.
The two of us fell out of touch.
I pitied her boring life.
But now, fifty years later,
Linda has a PhD, and
I am still pulling tassels.
Leah Mueller's work is published or forthcoming in Rattle, Writers Resist, Beach Chair Press, NonBinary Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Citron Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Does It Have Pockets, Outlook Springs, Your Impossible Voice, etc. She has received several nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. One of her short stories appears in the 2022 edition of Best Small Fictions. Her fourteenth book, "A Pretty Good Disaster" is forthcoming from Alien Buddha Press in Summer, 2025. Website: http://www.leahmueller.org.
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