 Lurvy around the old Ford. His circles get wider, he drags his body into ragged breath. He trips on the stump, that flat redundant rot, a crevice barely jutting out of the earth. The grass envelops him. He disappears. The bugs are strangely still.
When he gets up, he is looking at the scarecrow. The scarecrow smiles (bland yellow tips). The scarecrow angles the straw hat on his head, nimbly hops off his cross and plants his thick boots firm on the ground.
They say this is how it begins: Lurvy puts his arms out for an embrace. He leans back into the fluttering darkness. The darkness is alive, they say. He touches his stomach and the scarecrow presses at the luxurious tufts of straw that stick out of an empty interior. Lurvy holds his naked dick. The scarecrow pumps his stuffed crotch. Arms pinioned to nothing, they face each other. The scarecrow's polyester pants bulge. When the scarecrow pirouettes, they say his pants fill out nicely from behind. A shirt, dyed yellow-white under the moon. A blank face, pillowed excess.
Lurvy is empty where he used to have a bouncing sales belly. He used to sell trucks, they say. Had a wife and a kid. Now he's in the fields, watching the scarecrow tip his hat one more time to poor old Lurvy who cannot follow the scarecrow's shimmy, poor Lurvy, arms nailed to the cross of wooden planks, naked, no boots, bald spot shining under the stars, mouth swollen over.
Without even a salutation the scarecrow walks off through the fields and you are alone, grass and clover and chick-fern and thistle and dandelions and ragweed close over your head and all you can see are the honey lightning bugs, the swamp mosquitoes, the midnight gnats, the coal crickets, the chocolate cicadas, thelonghorned grasshoppers, the great golden digger wasps - bugs fluttering over your twisting face. Grass alive swaying. A sound like a heart ticking. Think of poor Avery, they say to taunt you, poor Avery. The scarecrow effigy prances forward, you're all innocent blood, a smeared trail on striped brambles, the thick of the fallow field. Glimpses of the old Ford flash. Moonlight the colour of dried bone. You go into the fields at night and the light sticks to you like a web.
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