Blisters on his fingers
from such a long day of working tore open as they rubbed. The crows were too
bad this year. They ate the crops faster than he could pick the ears of corn,
and it seemed the more he worked, the more the birds came. He didn't know how
well scarecrows actually did their job, but he felt desperate.
He stuffed the burlap
sack that would be the head, blood from his fingertips splotching the material.
He knew he needed to bandage them up, but he wanted to finish this job first.
Sliding a piece of wood through the sleeves of the old flannel shirt, he
secured the board to a much longer wooden beam, making a T shape. He stuffed
the pants and shirt with hay, secured this together with rope, and attached the
head. The thing looked clumsily assembled, but it would do. It had no face,
though. He had no marker or paint, so he improvised, using the blood on his
fingertips to draw eyes and a mouth. As a last minute detail, he tied leather
work gloves onto the ends of the arms, then stepped back to admire his efforts.
The red face gave the scarecrow a gruesome look. He smiled in satisfaction and
took his creation out to the cornfield. He'd fortunately already dug a hole
with a posthole digger — it was only a matter of finding it. He walked straight
into the middle of the cornfield, the sun already setting and the darkness
creeping in. He searched in the last greyness of the day for the hole, knowing
its location must be close. He stepped forwards and his toe placed weight onto
nothingness. He stumbled, the scarecrow going with him, and he barely managed
to keep from landing face forward in the dirt. He turned and saw the hole.
Raising the wooden post, he dropped it in. The scarecrow stood a couple of feet
taller than him.
"I wish you'd
scare the crap out of anything that comes your way."
As though to mock him, a
crow cawed in the distance.
"Bastards,"
he mumbled.
Walking back to the
house, he stopped and stared at the barn. An orange orb rested on the ground,
leering at him, eyes flickering and lifelike.
"Who's out
there?" he called. There was no response. The jack-o'-lantern stared out,
the fire inside crackling and burning. The face on the pumpkin almost came as a
shock. It looked exactly like the blood face on the scarecrow out in the field.
"Hello?"
The wind blew and
rustled the leaves on the corn stalks. He walked back to his house, cautiously,
looking behind him frequently for somebody following. He opened his door, shut
it behind him and locked the deadbolt. In the closet was a flashlight and a
shotgun. The shells were in a drawer in the kitchen. As he loaded the weapon,
he heard a knock.
"Who's out
there," he called, pointing the double barrel at the door. Nobody spoke.
There was a pounding once more. He slowly turned the deadbolt and unlocked it.
With a shaking hand, he reached forth and rotated the doorknob. The assault
came immediately as he opened the door. It felt like needles stabbing into his
eyes and throat.
#
The sky glowed red with
the sun rising in the horizon. It cast shadows of corn stalks in the field, the
leaves fluttering like hundreds of flags in the wind. Towering over the harvest
hung the scarecrow, its arms extended in a T shape. Blood dripped from the
lifeless fingertips and stained the dirt beneath. The eyes, now empty holes of
a dead skull, had bundles of hay stuffed into each ocular cavity. Straw filling
the esophagus and stomach held open the mouth, outstretched into what had been
a final scream; it poked out from between the teeth and lips in all directions,
soaked in red.
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