Scarecrow
The next morning she saw the scarecrow ahead as she trooped toward her bus stop. She had been hopeful that it had just been something she had imagined after the long day at school, but it was there.
14-year-old Veronica Rollins, known both at home and school as Ronnie, stepped down from her school bus after another long day at J. B. Clutter Middle School. Leaving the shouting kids behind her, she was glad this was her last week to attend that silly-assed place. After a too-short summer vacation, she would finally enter a real school.
She watched the bus pull away from her stop, stepped over to look inside an empty mailbox, then began her trudge up the quarter-mile packed-dirt drive to her home. As she slowly walked up the road, she looked to each side for small animals that sometimes poked noses through the weed-covered edges.
Two hundred yards up the road, kicking clods of dirt ahead of her, she came even with the beginning of the family garden. Her parents insisted on growing as much of their own vegetables as possible, to go with the occasional cow, pig, and chicken they slaughtered as the main course. Ronnie preferred D.Q. or something to all that stuff. It felt weird eating a hamburger prepared with meat from an animal that you saw walking around and was forced to feed just last week.
The garden was huge, a couple of football fields long. Her daddy plowed it with the tractor several times during the year, then rototilled some areas up when he felt he needed to. This time of year, after all the heat spells, there were still some things growing that needed picking, but some of the vines were drying up and dying. Ronnie was happy about that. She hated all that crap. She was city-bound, if she ever made it through school.
Ronnie looked over the garden as she walked, trying to determine what was left. Something not there this morning made her stop in her tracks. A scarecrow!