‘Leviticus 18:22’

Ners Neonlumberjack was born in a tiny town in central Indiana in 1986. Having lived throughout the Midwest, Southern, and Western United States, the variety of landscapes in which they have lived informs a wealth of variety and interest in plants and animals in imagery as well as material choice. After graduating Herron School of Art and Design with degrees in Painting, Sculpture, and Art History in 2009 the longing for a sense of place and being conscious of the fragile nature of mortality has been a current within the works.

Leviticus 18:22

“The Aftons got a new scarecrow today,” I announce at dinner over a table of mashed potatoes I had been pushing around for the past five minutes, refusing to put the last clump of the under salted vegetable in my mouth. My father looks up from where he had been flipping through the sermon he has written up for this Sunday, focusing on Corinthians, and the dangers of temptation. 

“No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.” That’s his go-to for whenever he suspects I might be having fun. His tanned face, wrinkled from years in the sun, is pretending to be interested, but I can see the pull of his eyes to the paper, finding Mathew, Mark, Luke, or John more interesting than me. 

“Mm?” he asks, unsubtly sliding his eyes back to the stapled-together papers. 

“Real creepy-lookin’ thing,” I exaggerate, trying to capture his attention once more. Of course, the scarecrow I had seen had been barely more than a flash in my peripheral on my bike-ride back from Katie’s house after school. It was nothing more than a set of straw-stuffed clothes on a pole in the distance. But the kitchen had been quiet for far too long, and I can’t stand the quiet sloshing of my mother washing dishes in the background being the only noise. 

“Mm,” my father responds, deciding that the conversation was thoroughly complete, going back to the sermon and muttering something underneath his breath as he flicks to Psalms. Deciding I will get nowhere with him, I pick up my plate, smearing the last bit of mashed potatoes across it to make the mass smaller before he can see I haven’t finished my plate and make me sit back down. When I enter the yellow-tiled kitchen, my mother spots me subtly trying to slide my dish into the full sink she’s working in, the steaming water going up to her elbows as she scrubs the pot the forbidden potatoes were cooked in. My futile mission is halted as she raises an eyebrow, and I’m already walking to her right with a towel before she even gets the word out to tell me to. 

“Saw a creepy scarecrow today,” I tell her as she passes me a soaking wet plate and I swipe the towel once, twice, across the plates edged with a checkered pattern. We’d had them for years, given as a gift to my parents for their wedding. These plates were nothing compared to the china my mother received from my grandmother’s house after she’d passed away, because these were chipped at the edges while the others were trimmed with silver. Of course we only brought them out for the holidays when family visited, but I liked that we did that, because there was something about watching the fragile edges of the China catch the light of the candles in the center of the coming table that made it feel magical. With the China on the table, anything in the world can happen. 

“Hm?” she asks, but in a much more interested grunt than my father’s, but still not particularly. I hope my story is more interesting than the dishes. 

“In the Afton’s field,” I explain, taking a glass she hands me, still dripping with watered-down milk from where she didn’t get it washed all the way. I say nothing, not wanting to have to be handed a dish twice. “Was real creepy lookin’.” 

“It was really creepy looking,” she repeats back to me, forever exhausted with my failing grammar, a forever plight of my generation. I fight back a sigh, knowing it will be taken as a sign of disrespect, rather than frustration that they seem to be missing the point, that the scarecrow was creepy. It wasn’t really, but that wasn’t the point either. 

“It was really creepy looking,” I follow her lead, but in a town that makes her raise a side-eyebrow at me that I knew what it meant, and so did she, but after our incident at the mall last week, we were both on thin ice around each other. 

“The Mall Incident”, as I had recently dubbed it over an angry phone call to Katie, was where my mother and I had fought so loudly on whether or not I could wear a halter tank top that “Myrtle” the attendant at the mall politely asked us to leave. What was the most disappointing was that it had taken us forty-five minutes to drive to the mall, and we were only there for about thirty. 

“I didn’t even get a soft pretzel!” I had cried to Katie over the phone in the hallway, aware my mother could hear me after the return drive that seemed to last longer than forty-five minutes. Katie, I had known, would understand the tragedy of the lack of a soft pretzel better than any other friends at school, who lived closer to town, so the idea of a mall trip for them was an average weekend, as opposed to a shining pillar of hope that only appeared once a month. After my declaration, I heard a sigh from down the hall, and I knew that despite my indignation, my mother would not see the tragedy that lied in a soft pretzel. 

It’s getting to the point of the year where it’s too dark for me to walk to Katie’s after dinner, so I shut my door gently after dinner, so it doesn’t seem like I’m slamming it, and I pull out a copy of some teen magazine Katie had given to me that I smuggled in my backpack before I left her house, and go back to the quiz we were working on. 

Earlier that day, the two of us had been lying side-by-side on her bed, giggling over the quiz as she crossed off A, B, C, or D, each answer depending on fake scenarios on what she expected Devin, the only guy who had skipped out on a summer growth spurt, would do. 

“Do you think if I’d drop my books he’d help me pick them up?” she asked me, gnawing on the tip of her pen, “Or do you think that he would just step over them?” 

A or D. I had tried to picture shy Devin being the devil air hero she wanted, swooping in from the back of class to pick up Katie’s books her for, but I couldn’t still, in order not to burst her Devin-bubble, I nodded enthusiastically, saying, “He’d pick them up for sure.” 

I flip through the questions, trying to figure if my crush would A: Notice if I’d changed my hair and compliment it, B: Notice if I’d changed my hair and not say anything, or C: Not notice it at all. This is suppose to tell me if my crush likes me back, and I flip and desperately wish I actually have a crush to answer the questions. As my classmate’s faces click through my mind I try to pick one--not Trey, who I remembered being the slowest person in kickball from gym glass, not Ryan, who I had overheard his ex Samatha telling her friends that he’d tried to open-mouth kiss her on the first date, and absolutely not Caleb, who always smelled like egg-salad. 

Far away, in the faint sliver of darkness that comes through my pulled curtains, there’s a movement. So imperceptible that I’m not even sure it’s happened, and I almost count it up to being nothing more than my curtains moving from the faint wind that comes through the top of my windows that aren’t fully able to close. Then again, something flicks in the darkness, on the faint shadows of where my parent’s land is cut off by a row of trees before we hit the Afton’s field, is interrupted by movement. Knowing that anything would be more interesting than the inapplicable quiz, I toss the magazine to the side, hearing it crinkle as it hits the floor, and with a wince I make a mental note to apologize to Katie if any of the pages are wrinkled. The carpet below me muffles my steps, and my room is turning cold with the changing of the months, so I regret getting off of my warmed spot on the bed. But, I’m halfway there already, so I lean onto the ledge of my windowsill, and pull the polka-dotted curtains that my grandmother made for me years ago out of fabric scraps to the side. Air bubbles showing age pucker the glass, making it hard to see. 

As I press my eye as close as I can, I can still see the tipple of the movement in the trees far away, as someone pushes their way through the Afton’s field to ours. 

“Abso-fucking-lutley not!” Izzy says with a punctuated slam of her hand into the lunch table, appalled by the idea of a potential pop quiz after lunch. 

“Yeah, no way in hell,” I add on, and I hate hate the way that my voice automatically dips down to a whisper on the final word. I’m not suppose to swear, because my father says it's considered a sin. But I’d rather sin than be the last in my friend group to say “hell” without fear. I never say the lord’s name in vain though, because I figure that God will be more willin’ to turn a blind eye to the sinning if his name isn’t involved in it. Still, the word hushes itself as it leaves my lips, and I can see Izzy give me a side eye as I don’t match her energy. 

“I haven’t even fucking studied,” Izzy continues, and I resist the urge to tell her that none of us did, it’s a pop quiz. But I agree with her--the idea of a pop quiz is dreadful. I spent most of last night posed on the edge of my bed, leaning out to the window with the curtains fully pulled to either side, watching for movement. For five minutes from when I had first noticed it, there was something constantly crashing through the trees, brushing the undergrowth to the side before it fully appeared on the very edge of our property, a far off spot that meant something was there. There it stayed. I had moved to the bed because when I first spotted it, I felt like not being on my bed was unsafe. I hated that feeling. It was the same one of being eight years old, and convinced there was a monster in my closet, and that being underneath my covers would protect me from whatever imaginary claws it had. When I felt it, I pressed my bare toes into the cold carpet and crept back into bed, staring at the window as whatever was on the edge of the trees stared back at me. 

“I failed a pop quiz today,” I blurt out over the dinner table. The words had took up so much room inside of me for the entire length of dinner that I wasn’t able to take a  single bite of the cornbread my mother had made for fear I would explode. So I eventually took the trade, and I spit the words out as fast as I can before shoveling in a butter-soaked bite. It goes stale immediately as I see disappointment flood my parent’s eyes, and I attempt to swallow the cornbread chunk that has absorbed all the moisture in my mouth, and it goes down in a solid lump. My mother’s fork pauses from whether it was about to stab the last bite of green beans off her plate, poised like a dagger about to fall. Silence sits for a moment as I watch my parents lock eyes, each of them deciding what my punishment should be. 

“It’s not my fault!” I follow up, taking the beat of quiet I get to try to explain, knowing that those are the wrong words to say, but not sure what would be better, “There was something outside last night-” 

My father looks over at me, and my mouth shuts like a fish on a hook. 

“Go on to your room,” he says in the tone that I know means not to argue, because it's the same one he used whenever I was disrespectful as a child and got my bottom spanked. I swallow the last dried-up crumbs of cornbread as shame fills me, lapping at my insides and turning them soft and warm as if they’re melting. I start to pick up my mostly filled plate, but my mother shoots me a look before shaking her head. Go right on to your room, it means, and I leave it on the table. The smell of the slice of ham on it turns my stomach sour, and I know that even if I wanted to, if I took a bite of the glimmering edge coated with honey it would taste rotten. 

In my room, even with the door closed, I can still hear the murmurs of my parent’s “talk” building into a fight as they debate on what to do with me. Tears sit at the edges of my eyes, and I try to tune out the varying punishments they’re thinking of (Grounded for a week, extra chores this weekend, having to help Grandpa with cleaning out his garage tomorrow) as I crawl onto the floor to under the bed, which is more disorganized than my mother would like, and grab a stuffed bunny I tucked down there last year before I turned thirteen. Its eyes are two sewn on mismatched buttons that stick out above a pink nose, and it's right ear is fraying on the inner panel. The insides of me, already hot with shame, grow hotter, burning me internally, but I ignore that, pressing the baby-powder scented toy to my face and let its fur absorb the tears that finally fell over the lip of my eyelids. 

As I curl up underneath my covers and wait for my father, he’s always the one they decide to send, to come yell at me, I stare out the window through the curtains I never closed and watch far in the distance. Where the tree line separating properties is, I can see a faint glimmer of movement from underneath the setting sun.

I’m not sure what it is at first. All I can see is a rumbling figure pushing its way through the back to back trunks, weaving in and out of the undergrowth, and ignoring the branches as they spring back and smack it across the face. From a distance, I try to see if it’s a bear or a particularly stubborn deer, but start to make out how human it is. Two arms, two legs, something of a head pushes its way under the bleeding sun that has started to fall beneath the leaves, and as the red halo of light crests over the world, I can see the Afton’s new scarecrow push onto our field. 

My mouth goes dry with fear, and subconsciously, the stuffed bunny is crushed in my hand. My lips open and close themselves to scream, but no sound comes out. 

It stumbles across the edge of the trees onto the field, and the light turns its burlap body fiery orange. The straw stuffing makes it awkward and uneven, and it sags on the right side from where it was over-filled. Its face is a burlap sack, still tan instead of being bleached from the sun, and its mouth is a crossed line of string that’s been stitched into a permanent smile. 

I am cleaved in two: the part of me that sees the Afton’s scarecrow, and the part that doesn’t. The part that doesn’t says that these things don’t exist, they don’t happen, and that it isn’t real. That part of me is blinded with fear. The other part sees it--I see its shambling form picking its way over the field, trampling the shorn corn stalks. I see it's emotionless eyes finding me through my window. I see its legs picking up high so it's torso is thrown back in a loose march, flinging straw out of its tattered overalls. Blankly, somewhere in the back of my mind that isn’t blacking out, my lips finally manage to move, and in a cracked and very small voice, I start to sing what I used to when I was very young and had a nightmare. 

“...all day all night,” I whisper to myself, and I feel that tears that froze for a moment come back with twice as much fevor as the Afton’s scarecrow takes another massive step through the fields, headed toward my window, “Angels watchin’ over me, my Lord.” 

It takes another step, and its head lulls to the side slowly. 

“Well its all day all night,” I keep going, and it steps forward again, reaching halfway down the field, “Angels watchin’ over me, my Lord.” 

A scream tears through me as my door suddenly opens with a thunk that my father decides was too harsh. I see the apology in his eyes as he catches the door from where it bounces back toward him. There’s a beat of confusion as he looks at me, a furrow on top of his glasses, unsure if he should comfort me. Then his back straightens as he decides he was sent to be the bad cop for a reason. I glance toward the window and see an empty field. My father puffs a breath of air underneath his mustache, and it’s so strange to see how normal he is after my world has been shattered. 

“So kiddo,” he says in a voice that tells me he really doesn’t want to have this conversation, and would rather be in his office working, “what happened with the test?” 

How can he be asking me about tests? 

“I failed it,” I say dumbly, and in a moment of dissociation, I realize it is just me who has changed in the world, and everyone else will go about the rest of their days as they always have forever. My father’s eyebrows creep higher on his face, and I wonder if he sees the change in me. If he knows I am different forever. 

“Would you like to explain yourself?” he asks, and I can see the line he is giving me. So I take it and try to drag him with me. 

“I saw the Afton’s scarecrow come to life last night and I couldn’t sleep as I failed my test,” I blurt out, and the words float for a moment, fresh as clouds, and I want to grab onto them and travel all the way to heaven to demand answers from God. As I had known, and as I feared, I watch my father’s face fall, and I know he is running through the lectures he can give me on the sins of lying. “It’s outside if you wanna see, go look!” 

I know, of course. In the same way that you know you can never tell someone the exact dream you’ve had, and any chance you try to explain it it’ll make the dream drip through your cupped fingers like water, I know I can not make him understand the scarecrow. It wouldn’t be there. Even if it was, part of me doubted he could see it. With a sign, he steps around my bed up to my window, and around his disappointed form, I look through the window to see an empty field and feel an emptier heart. 

I wonder if it will appear once more, the second my father leaves, or if it will wait until I’ve gone to sleep to peer at me through my curtains. I wonder if it’s there at all, or if my mind is breaking like my grandmother’s I never got to meet. But that matters so much less than the lecture my father is giving me. He tells me I’m grounded for the next week. He tells me if I fail another test I’m grounded till Christmas (I don’t bother to correct him that it was a quiz). He tells me that he and my mother are both very disappointed in me, and that stings the most, just slightly less than the indignity of telling the truth and not being believed. 

When my father leaves, and my heart stings from the scolding, and my eyes sting from the tears I can’t stop from coming, I turn back to the window, glaring out at the field as if it made me fail that quiz. In a way, it did. I stare out into the darkness, trying to find the leaning, pointed tip of the scarecrow’s hat in the nooks and crannies of the darkness. But whether or not the scarecrow was here, it disappeared. But I don’t move. I stare out the window, and wait for it to come back. 

Finally, when the edges of my vision start to go white with exhaustion, I find myself too tired to care, and in a quick movement, I pull the bunny tight to my stiff body, and flip over on the bed, turning my back to the window. I wait for a terrible second. I imagine the shatter of the glass and the racking of claws I never saw across my back, even though I know that my sight wasn’t what was keeping it from appearing. I breathe once. Twice. No claws come. No class. No scratching of straw or the resp of burlap. The scarecrow has either disappeared completely or stayed hidden, and I sit up all night on my side. In the morning when the sun slips into my room, I see a faint shadow narrowing as something moves back into the field. 

“I’m grounded for a week,” I announce at the lunch table, and Katie is the only one whose head turns to me with the motions of a pout on her lips. 

“But we were going to hang out after school!” she whines, and I want to frown but can’t. The muscles on my face have atrophied in the hours lying on my side in bed, and fear has frozen on my features. Stiffly, forcing each movement, I make my shoulders move up and down in a shrug. “I had something to tell you.” 

I feel myself stare at her, and I’m so tired I do not know what expression I am supposed to make. Something inside of me has changed irreparable, and I am forever separate from Katie. When I don’t egg her on to continue, she does anyway. 

“Devin and I are going to the mall tonight!” she says, and the edges of her voice tilt up in a squeal of excitement. I try to picture Devin’s face, but am too tired to do so. Still, a part of my heart hurts at the distance that grows between me and Katie, and I see the rope between us tighten with tension as we are stretched in different directions. Katie peers at me with unperceptive eyes, and I see a flicker of hurt cross her face. “Isn't…that exciting?” 

Not as exciting as a scarecrow coming to life. “Yeah.” 

“So you’re gonna have to help me pick out my outfit and I’m deciding between these two skirts, and my mom’s gonna drop us off…” Katie’s rabble drowns out to a fair roar as she details every detail of how Devin has asked her the day before after she dropped her books (apparently he did pick them up) when she’s done, all I can do is lift my head from where it had fallen to the table. 

“I can’t help you pick your outfit, I’m grounded.” My voice sounds dull and flat, but I can’t figure out how to fix it. From my numbness, I feel a beat of my heart breaking, as the news of Katie not being just my own hits me. She stares at me, and the confusion and concern in her eyes changes to something more malicious. 

“What is wrong with you?” she asks me, and it has the bite that tells me she isn’t actually concerned for my well-being. 

“My neighbor’s scarecrow is coming to life and haunting me.” 

“Well,” she says, and scoots slightly further away from me on the lunch table, pointing her nose up in the air, “you don’t have tell me if you don’t want to.” 

I’m staring out the window and watching the scarecrow through the glass. Earlier, I had watched it push unsteadily through the brush. It's head had twisted unnaturally, and it's sewn eyes stared at me. I saw that there was a mistake on the left one that was making the thread slowly fray and come undone. Its forever smiling mouth gleamed at me as it pushed forward until its body was pressed against my window, and with its straw hand it tapped slowly against the glass. 

A scream squeezed through my throat and came out as a wheezy whimper. I was disappointed in myself. When discussion fire drills in school, or watching the news, I always had this idea that I would have full, fat lungs, and be able to scream fire if I was being abducted. I knew I had enough rage within me, and expected it to all come pouring out the moment I needed it. It didn’t. Instead the rage in me has pressed down, closing my throat and courage, and turned me into the one thing I never wanted to be--a teenage girl. 

Now, with hand that seem to move better than word, I reach forward, and my fingers tremble like leaves in the wind. 

“Well?” I ask it, pretending to be brave. “Are you going to do anything?” 

It doesn’t respond to me, obviously. It might not have been that oblivious, because it obviously wasn’t supposed to walk either. 

“You made me fail my quiz,” I tell it through the glass and it looks on silently, and rage bubbles inside of me, “I don’t suppose that you’re going to retake it for me. Oh and I’m grounded for a week. And Katie…” 

The scarecrow stares at me, and its head twitches ever so slightly. Then it disappears as my hands swipe the curtains to the middle once more, but it shadow continues to glare at me, relentless as a nightmare. I wait for a long moment, wanting the shadow to disappear and it never does. It waits for me to open up the blinds. I wonder if it can see me just as well with them closed. As both of us refuse to relent, hours pass. The stuffed bunny remains squeezed tightly in my hands, and tears pour and dry, pour and dry on my face over and over again. I don’t think I blink in that time, waiting for it to fade away. 

I sit through dinner with my parents where conversation is replaced by the scraping of forks on nearly empty plates. My parents occasionally make eye contact over the table, each one raising their eyebrows in turn to egg the other on. Neither did, always waiting on the other. Cowards, I think through the meal. I’m facing a monster. They can’t even give me a lecture. When I’ve spread all the mushy peas across my plate to make it look as though I’ve already taken a few bites, I stand up, and see my father’s head shoot up, ready to tell me to put my plate in the sink. I hold his gaze through his glasses, and my reflection looks much taller than him. So I turn around, leaving my plate, and march off to my room. 

The phone rings in the hall, making me jump a foot out of my bed, and as I let my soul settle into my skin, I glare out the covered window to the shadow of the already-appeared scarecrow as if it personally was making my phone ring. I’m not supposed to answer the phone right now, because I’m grounded, but the fact that there’s a living scarecrow at my window puts things slightly in perspective. With my shoes kicked off so I don’t creak the hardwood, I tip-toe out of my room, turning my back to the scarecrow. 

My father has disappeared to his study, and my mother is in the kitchen, so no one spies me as I lift the phone gently, pressing it to my ear. “Hello?” 

My voice comes out in a creak, fear stealing almost all of the volume from my throat. 

“You have to come over!” Katie peals into my ear. “I wanna go over the whole date with you! We went and got pretzels, then went to the arcade, and at the end of it-” 

“I’m grounded,” I repeat for the third time, and I know that even if I wasn’t I couldn’t bear to hear about Katie’s date. 

“Oh whatever, come over, sneak out!” Kaite convinces me, and I worry about the effect Devin is having on her. The idea sounds preposterous, and I can already hear my father’s lecture for when I would get caught, telling me that one of the ten commandments is to head one’s father and mother, and that by not obeying their rules I’m direction disobeying God (even if they’ve never technically told me not to sneak out). That technically it what I hinge on, and the idea of disobeying God sounds incredibly appealing right now. I breathe a sigh out into Katie’s side of the conversation, and I realize I desperately want to sneak out. I cannot spend another night staring at the scarecrow. Even if I’m about to head outside, where it is. Without a goodbye, I place the phone down onto the receiver, and without even putting my shoes on, I creep down the hallway past the living room, keeping my eyes trained on the kitchen where my mother is washing the dishes. Swish swish, clink, each one goes, and I can hear the wet pile of dishes building up without me to dry them. Slowly, but with no fear battering my throat, I slink into the living room. I know better things to be afraid of than my mother. 

She doesn’t spy me as I pass through the living room like a ghost, and pull open the front door while I wait with a breath for the clinking of dishes to stop. They don’t, so I pull it open a little more, and dart out into the night. 

It’s come down after the cusp of fall, and it’s too dark to walk out after dinner. I walk out anyway, and for a moment, I close my eyes and let the hum of the porch lamps turn the world to white noise. The air is crisp against my skin, and I can feel pebbles stabbing into my bare feet and hear insects singing in the distance. I know that when I open my eyes the scarecrow will be there. So I keep them closed, fighting against the fear inside of me to do so, trying to cling to the seconds of darkness I have. 

One. 

Two. 

Three. 

I peel them open, and I wasn't wrong. Next to the path that leads from the door is the scarecrow, four feet away. The first side of our property stretches far in front of me in a moon-lit field that turns the shorn corn to a watery illusion. The waiting scarecrow is the only dark spot. I take a step onto the path, and its head twists slightly to the side, watching me take the path down to the gravel road that leads to Katie’s. I hear swishing me, and I see the scarecrow marching behind like an escort. Every step of mine it matches, and I watch as its weight swings from side to side, somehow balanced enough on the straw so it doesn’t fall over. 

“What, are you coming too?” I fire at it, and it says nothing, just matches my increasingly speeding gait. When I reach the gravel road, I pray that the moon gives enough light to walk. The field is briefly cut off by a line of trees before it's the Afton’s field, and the scarecrow is right next to me again, both of us taking the way to Katie’s house. 

For a moment, it’s peaceful. Somehow the most peaceful it’s been. The air is cold, and every swallow makes it feel like water, and when I peer up the moon is clear and bright. The animals of the night creak and whistle and hoot around me, and up in the sky there are thousands upon thousands of stars. I think about Devin and Katie, and how three years ago, Katie and I wrapped our pinkies around each others and promised to never get a boyfriend. Too tired to have felt much when she first told me of the date, under the waking night I feel the sting of betrayal, and wonder why I still felt like boys have cooties when she did not. I feel the pressure of my parents, and the eyes of their God versus the eyes of mine. I thought that seeing the scarecrow was the break between me and the rest of the world, the fissure that I could never cross to be normal. But underneath the moon, I realize that I had been splitting off long ago, right when I was told it was a sin to be lustful, and me and Katie sat up that night, her giggling over the modeling pics in the magazine, and me not finding anything particularly interesting other than the way her hair smelled like strawberries. 

I didn’t want to go to Katie’s house tonight, I realize. I don’t want to go and listen to her giggle over the date with Devin and talk about how he gave her a kiss at the end of the night, and how she tasted like peppermint without knowing it myself. I don’t want to go home and look into my mother’s face as I open the front door and see the realization that I had disobeyed them. I pause on the road, feel the sting of gravel underneath my feet, and breathe in the sweet smell of corn before turning to the ever-present scarecrow. 

Slowly, as if it was afraid that if it moved too fast I would run away, it raises a burlap, straw-stuffed arm, and holds it out to me. When I touch it, it’s cold from the night, and the straw pricks my fingers. The scarecrow turns around, taking a step further into the field, and I hesitate on the road for a minute, behind the safety of the gravel. Then I follow, crushing the broken stalks beneath my feet, and disappear into the field. 

Holly Jones (she/her) is a student studying Creative Writing at Missouri State University. She is a volunteer editor for University magazines Moon City Review and Logos. She is currently an unpublished author and the host of The Not Natural Podcast.