I had a dream last night, it was a weird one. They usually are.
It started off with me going for a simple walk in the country. I live in the country, so there’s nothing strange in that.
I turned down a small country road with fields either side of it and as I walked I just took in the scenery. The various birds chirped and fluttered about the trees. Bees bounced from flower to flower. The smell of cow shit hung in the air and offensively filled my lungs.
Grass sprouted up from between the cracked road and patches of dirt told the stories of road tax poorly spent. Blackberry bushes poked out among the old and forgotten wooden fences making me wonder which had been there first.
A rusted old tractor seemed to spark some romantic farming memories that surely belonged to someone else as a pheasant casually sauntered across the lane.
I walked a little further and noticed a field that had a scarecrow in the middle. This seemed strange to me because I can’t recall a single time in my life where I’ve ever seen one.
It was what you might imagine it would look like. Perched on a makeshift crucifix of branches in the middle of a freshly ploughed field. Dressed crudely to look like a man in an old three piece suit and a tatty hat, he just stood there. He just watched as the crows and blackbirds helped themselves to the newly planted seeds, utterly failing in his only task in life.
I fixed his hat that had shifted in the cool breeze and turned to get back on track when the silence of the scene was broken with two words:
“Thank you”
I turned around and the scarecrow smiled back at me
“I do like to look my best, even if I don’t do what I’m supposed to very well. The wind can really play havoc with ones appearance”
“Oh right, no problem”
“Hope I didn’t startle you, but I’m quite happy to have a chance visitor”
“Well it was a bit unexpected alright. You must get pretty bored out here”
“Oh, it’s not that bad”
His expression changed and I knew he wasn’t being entirely honest.
“Really?”
“Well, it does have it’s drawbacks”
“I’ll bet it does”
“Yes, muscle cramps from being tied to this post for a start. The birds taking the piss out of me and the loneliness”
Oh here we go.
“I miss being touched. I wasn’t always a scarecrow y’know. I started off in a field just like this one. Then when I was cut and bailed I was used as bedding and food for the animals. They’d spend their day lying on me or nibbling me. It was a great way to sate the urges.”
Right even though this was a dream, and my dream this was all taking a turn for the worst.
“Cool, well I better be making a move”
“Will you just, if it’s not too much to ask”
“What?”
“Well, you see my fly is open so if you could be a mate and just stuff the straw back inside and zip me up, that’d be great.”
“I dunno man, if you hadn’t just come alive and started talking about urges I might have done”
“Please, it’ll be one less thing for those bastard crows to laugh at me for”
“Fine”
So I grabbed a handful of his open fly overflow and stuffed it back inside, well I tried to. It was already so tightly packed in there that I had to shove and wrestle with it a fair bit to try and get it all in. Then I thought fuck this for a game of scarecrows and tried yanking some of it out instead.
That’s when my newly animated friend started to get into it.
“Oh, fuck man keep going that’s the stuff. Oh I haven’t been treated this rough since the combine harvester, keep it up, just give me another minute”
I stood there wanking off a scarecrow in the middle of my field of dreams, and before I could make the pun of “If you build it they will come” I woke up leaving me without a punchline for this entire piece.
I’d have been plucking at straws anyway.