blk ink pen

Tobacco=Earth

Alcohol=Fire

Weed=Water

Coffee=Air

A short story by Sherane Pierre

“This thing looks kind of old, though. Can I give you forty for it?” Bowe was already prepared to give the woman $80, but thought that $80 should get her the flower pots at the other end of the yard thrown in, too. The woman rolled her cold grey eyes at Bowe. She turned away, tossing her knitted red scarf around her neck, just barely missing Bowe.

“You insult me,” said the woman in a quick, sliced accent. “It’s old, yes. It’s antique.” She turned her back, posing as if she’d rather reorganize the trinkets labeled “2 for 10” than entertain Bowe’s offer. Bowe seized the opportunity to take a closer look at the scarecrow. It had a slender body of meticulously bound rods of hay. It wore red plaid button-up and denim overalls so old they had faded green. Any holes were covered by patches of royal blue denim. She looked into the overalls’ single front pocket, catching a whiff of the scarecrow’s woody aroma. Empty. The overalls fit so well that Bowe could tell they were custom fitted to his spindly measurements. The scarecrow wore a green paisley print handkerchief around its neck and fabric scraps fashioned into a large bucket hat on its head.

Its head was stunning. It had a jack-o'-lantern, except it was made of a material Bowe couldn’t quite place. The scarecrow’s triangle eyes and jigsaw smile had been cut from some sort of rind. It was too thin to be pumpkin, although it was the right color. Its skin had a speckled grain like the calabash bowls at her grandmother’s house. It could’ve been calabash cut and pieced together into a pumpkin’s shape, except she had never seen calabash preserved under a glaze like clay before. But she was sure it wasn’t clay; there were no hands talented enough to make a gourd look so natural it seemed real. Bowe tapped the scarecrow’s head with her fingernail, and it chimed like porcelain. Yes, the scarecrow was old, but its head was antique.

“What’s the head made of?” she asked the woman. The woman looked over her shoulder at Bowe like her streaky brown and grey hair was a curtain. “Magic,” she said. Bowe held the scarecrow’s hand. Five hay digits stiffened under her grasp.

“How about $65? And those flower pots, too, for $10 each.”

Bowe named him Patchy and propped him up against the mangled pine stump in her backyard. Bowe had been struggling to find environmentally friendly ways to keep various pests out of her garden. As the manager of her local Home Depot’s Lawn and Garden department, Bowe considered herself to be an expert horticulturist. Her coworkers mostly just considered her to be a horror. She loved her garden more than she loved people and made sure everyone knew it. She went around her department saying things like, “I would never put this on my plants. Dumbasses who put this shit on their plants might as well be like y’all and eat a cancer burger,” which is what she called McDonalds. Bowe was a devout vegetarian and only grew what she could eat. That was no problem when she needed to look down her nose at someone, but posed an issue when birds kept getting into her berries.

Patchy changed that, though. She wasn’t sure if it was the gleam of his head in the sunlight, his willowy body that moved with the wind, or his deep and empty smile that the birds were afraid of. Whatever the case, they remained confined to the buffet of birdseed at the front of her property and left her garden alone. All her plants seemed to grow bigger and faster with Patchy around, too. Patchy was chic enough that his presence didn’t distract from the exterior decorating she had already done. He added a rustic charm to her quaint sitting area and the white lattice covered in ivy she had put up for privacy. Should any neighbors look out of their kitchen windows and into her backyard, their eyes would meet Patchy’s, and maybe that’d be enough for them to avert their gaze. Bowe preferred talking to plants, anyway. And Patchy. They were good listeners.

One cold morning she asked Patchy how best to protect her tomatoes from the frost in the upcoming Winter. When she paused for a reply, she could’ve sworn she saw warm breath leave his hollow head and condense in the air. It made her so uneasy that she decided to do her gardening routine a little later and take a nap instead, which surely she needed if she were seeing things. During her nap, she had a vision of her purchasing a frost blanket with neon green floral packaging. She put the blanket over the tomatoes, but uncovered them in the mornings. She trusted her vision and did what it had shown her. Once it was Winter, her tomatoes grew like Spring never left!

It got to a point where she could ask Patchy anything (about gardening) and he’d somehow get the answer to her. One day she asked him where to find the rare yellow apple variety she had been scouring Internet forums for information on. The wind blew into his hollow head and produced a low, clamoring howl. She nodded, translating the feeling of his voice’s vibration into an action. She looked into the single pocket of his overalls and found 3 seeds. They germinated as though they were in their native soil.

She once jested that he probably wasn’t even that scary to the birds, but he kept her outside longer, which in turn kept them away. When she turned to walk into the house, his twine reinforcements snapped and he draped himself over her. She yelped, then she laughed and held him closer. His scratchy hay arms wrapped her in a woody embrace.

Once, after a terrible and long shift at Home Depot, she elected to spend the evening in front of the tv and the next morning in bed. When mid-afternoon rolled around, she strolled to her kitchen. A slender figure with a head too massive for its body flickered past the corner of her eye. She looked out the kitchen window, expecting to see Patchy moving about in her garden. He was still on stump, but the plants were wet.