Counseling by Jamie L. Dea

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Over the course of the day, the fence posts turned into scarecrows. My uncle took old flannel shirts and buttoned them haphazardly around the posts, hammered nails into the cuffs, so that the sleeves draped over the rails. With a black marker, he gave their pumpkin heads eyes, but no mouths and no ears. Without legs, they could not jerk up and stumble away. Easy in the ignorance of their creation, these half-men slumped against the fence and surveyed the scene before them.

The land my uncle leased was all scraggy brush before giving way to the bright autumn sky. Every boulder, every brambled shrub was a potential refuge for rattlers. The air was dry, despite the chill that clouded puffs of breath from between the boys’ lips. They dug steel-toed boots into the arid dirt, finding a firm stance before reaching, with hands sweating inside their gloves, for the shotgun when it was their turn.

With an ease of having taught plenty of life lessons, my uncle intended to load and lock the gun as many times as it might take. Watching over each boy’s shoulder, he helped him line up, warning how the gun would jerk and bruise their shoulders when the chamber emptied. Then he stepped back. From the corner of his mouth, he muttered, “Alright then. You want to see what it’d be like to blow a man’s head apart, then you just go right on ahead.” If they hesitated, he’d turn in that straightforward manner and eye them like they were the voiceless men reclining along the rails. “What? Ain’t
this what you wanted?”

As the shots rang out, ripe chunks tore off and scattered behind the fence. There was nothing graceful about it, no morbid poetry written into the emptiness left behind. Seeds clung to the swaying orange tendrils, as filaments of thoughts and soul might to a mass of black and clotted hair that was the
mangled innards of a brain. One by one, scarecrows turned back into fence posts.

After each shot, my uncle received the gun from shaking hands. “There now,” he said at the end, “come and take a look.” Alone, he made for the fence.