September 2023, week 3
Marissa drummed her fingers on the table impatiently. It was 10 am and she wanted to head out with her sisters to go to a local restaurant for some breakfast. While by now they would have been long gone, there was one issue, LeighAnn hadn't come back in from redressing some of the scarecrows. While they were primarily a honey distributor, they had inherited land for a corn field which of course their parents went ahead and planted rows upon rows.
She huffed in annoyance, while Poppi sat across from her tapping away on her phone. “Aren’t you like, at all, annoyed by how long she’s taking?” Poppi’s eyes widened in surprise as if she genuinely didn’t notice how much time has passed since she was fully immersed in a game of Milk Matcher. “Hmm,” she said, somewhat sarcastically “..nah” she said before the music from her phone started up again to say she was resuming her game. “Maybe some teens stripped the scarecrows again, could be collecting the clothes off the ground.” She went back to her game. “Pops you can see the scarecrows from the porch, they needed fixing but not an hour of fixing.” Poppi didn’t respond. “Pops,” Poppi continued to ignore her “Pops!” the music on Poppi’s phone suddenly got louder. “Ugh, fine I’ll just go get her myself, I hope you run out of lives.”
With that Marissa got up and left the house to go try to find her missing sibling, grumbling the whole way to the fields.
Marissa looked at the field hesitantly, while she didn’t like to admit it, she mostly gave Leighann the field chore because the rows of corn terrified her to a degree. Maybe it’s because of bad horror movies, but something about going in there always sent a feeling of unease rippling through her. Leighann never complained, because she would ramble about hoping to find a crop circle one morning or to find something in there, but she’d pick on her sister if she knew why she was the one to do corn duty.
She entered the fields, slowly walking towards one of the first scarecrows littered through the field. Of course, as expected there was nothing, Marissa couldn’t even tell if it was touched.
She walked towards the next one closest to her before there was a jump. Crows cawed and suddenly flew away from one of the strawmen, she stared as they flew away.
Marissa couldn’t help but to be frozen, while one would think that it could of been the scarecrow doing it’s job, or her sister spooking them, the stillness of the corn from what she could see made her wonder what could suddenly scare them off.
With some effort, she slowly made her way over to the hanging strawman, the silence was nearly palpable. She stood at the feet of the scarecrow, something about it felt wrong that she couldn’t immediately put her finger on. She stared at it for a few seconds, before it suddenly hit her.
It was breathing.
She looked up at it’s head with a gasp, to be suddenly met with it looking back down at her, green eye wide open.
She took off sprinting back towards the house with a shriek, barreling through the corn that was giving her trouble navigating a couple seconds ago, she heard whatever it was on the pole drop off and she heard it sprinting after her.
She got out of the field and tried to jump over the separation rail before she suddenly heard it. Laughing. Familiar laughing coming closer. Fear slowly turned to anger in a flash. Marissa met her sister’s laughing face as she was pulling off the sack that was used to make the scarecrow’s face, one she conveniently cut eye holes through, “Oh you dork you should of seen the look on your face!” She exclaimed in between her laughter, Marissa just stood there looking furious “Have you been hanging up on that thing the whole time? You’ve had me and Poppi waiting for an hour just so you could maybe play a prank on one of us?”
LeighAnn wiped a tear from her eye “Actually I’ve only been up there for like 10 minutes, I had to chase a kid or something out because they pulled the scarecrow down, I knew your impatient self would come out here eventually.” Marissa crossed her arms, while she was still mad she couldn’t help but to be embarrassed, Leighann could really read her like a book sometimes.
“Come on scaredy cat, I’m starving.” LeighAnn said dusting straw off her arms, stepping over the fence, Marissa followed suit, wondering if Leighann would gloat about this to Poppi when they got back to the house.