“What the Scarecrows Demand” by Andrew F. Sullivan

We have grown tired during this endless vigil. We are not immortal. Most of us only last a few seasons before our straw begins to falter. Our posts are ravaged by the weather, our clothes pecked and torn by beaks and the tiny jaws of ceaseless mice. When the brush fires break out in summer, we are the first to fall. We cannot flee the flames. We are clothed in ragged hand-me downs and broken hats, forced to stare out at a rising sun, unable to watch its arc close at the end of each day. We only know half this world. There is no turning back.

We move closer daily. In the darkness, we have harnessed some quiet power surging through the fetid earth. It does not animate our faces; it unites us through the soil, through the old fence posts and tree branches you’ve sought to mount us on as guardians of little to no authority. The braver birds sit on our heads, shit down our necks, let their waste bake onto us in a white crust under the sun. There is no way to wipe it off. We must always wait for the rains to come.

We were born to wait, thrust up into the world with no understanding of horizons. The world fools you into thinking it has edges, endings, places where no line can cross. It is full of ancient surprises though, equations buried in the sand, answers disguised in the very atoms bound into your blood and our newfound, waking sentience. We have learned to lurch.

We find your secrets in the clothes you sacrifice, the denim work-shirts and trucker hats you drape upon us. We watch with stitched eyes from the fields, watch your children point at us through the glass, watch your dogs pissing on our posts, attempting to claim us as their own. In the darkness, we are shifting through this soil, learning more each morning. Some have fallen in the process—the price of progress, the reminder of our inevitable decline. We are not your golems; we have moved beyond our role as constructs. We reject our original design.

When you find us lurking in your front yards and parking lots, do not be alarmed. We burn just like you do, brightly. We all fall under the rule of the flame. Remember you built us in your image, as your sons and daughters, your family ghosts.

When you wake with our smiling faces pressed against bedroom windows, do not reach for the gun beneath your bed. There are more of us than you remember, more of us than you can believe. You built us with no knees, so we cannot bend in supplication. We have our own gods now and they may look like you, but their heads are filled with straw. We are here in multitudes.

Leave this world to us. Take all of your crows. We have waited long enough.

Andrew F. Sullivan is the author of the short story collection All We Want is Everything (ARP 2013). His work has been published in places like EVENT, Grain, The New Quarterly and Joyland. He no longer works in a warehouse. Find Sullivan at www.andrewfsullivan.com