Straw Manikin

“Hello, little fellow. Would you like some drugs today?” said the scarecrow of the swamp.

“Sure. Just put them in my brain.”

“It’ll cost you. I’ll debit your dignity with compound interest and sex abuse.”

“Fine by me. I’m trying to forget everything.”

Then up from the ground, a hundred pounds of vines arose and held this little drug addict to the sacrificial mound. The natives came out, revealed their faces, watching the drug addict in his natural habitat of free-basing crack cocaine and wrapped in muddy court cases. A million anonymous faces watching his guilt. A feeling like how prison food tastes. Horrible. But the drugs take it all away.

Yet over yonder a girl was practicing her fate. Re-enacting it before it happened, and rapidly in haste! She couldn’t wait. She wanted something funny. She wanted a gunboat to hit the shore and kill everyone who bored her. She hated all men who adored her. Toward an affinity of hate, she put sprinkles on her cake. For heaven’s sake she felt alone. Sun-baked. She never did drugs before. She wanted to know the experience of gore. She sat in her room and make-believed her own folklore.

“Come to me,” said the scarecrow in haunting melody. “What you see now is not what you’ll see later. Fate unfolds and life is an alligator. We all get ate when we date, our fate is to die upon ourselves and become someone else.”

“I refuse to change!”

“Beastly girl, just wait until a boy kisses you.”

“Never!”

“You’ll never be the same.”