The Shattered Effigy

The summer I turned fourteen, my mother let me have two friends over for a sleepover at our dusty farmhouse in Nebraska, a place where the cornfields stretched like a hungry sea and the wind carried the smell of old earth and something else, something sour. My friends, Mara and Elise, were as obsessed with horror as I was, so we spent the evening devouring VHS tapes of forgotten slashers and ghost stories, our laughter echoing through the creaking house. For my birthday, my mom had ordered a custom cake from a woman in town who made elaborate confections, and atop it sat a perfect marzipan effigy of a grinning scarecrow, its limbs jointed with pretzel sticks and held together by sticky caramel. I was so taken with it that I placed it on a high shelf in my room, inside a sealed glass cloche, to preserve it beyond the cake’s inevitable demise. We played a board game called ‘Nightmare’ where players drew cards that summoned a specter, and by midnight, we were exhausted, our eyes heavy with sugar and fright. We fell asleep in my room, the three of us in sleeping bags on the floor, the only light the faint glow of a nightlight shaped like a grinning moon.

I woke to a sound that split the night—a raw, guttural scream, not from my friends but from somewhere else in the house. I sat up, heart pounding, but Mara and Elise were still asleep, mumbling and turning over. I heard my aunt’s voice, slurred and angry, then a man’s voice, and then laughter. They must have come home from the bar, drunk and clumsy. I lay back down, my pulse slowly steadying, and drifted back into a restless sleep. The next morning, I woke to an unnatural stillness. The air felt thick, as if the room itself was holding its breath. I looked around, and my eyes landed on the shelf across the room. My heart stopped. The cloche, the glass coffin, was still sealed, but the scarecrow effigy inside was shattered. Its limbs were scattered—one arm here, a leg there—each piece intact but torn from its joints, the pretzel sticks snapped cleanly, as if a giant hand had twisted and pulled. The caramel that held it together was unmarred, not melted or deformed. It was as if the thing had been violently disassembled in a space too small for any hand to reach, and the glass had never been opened.

I screamed, and my friends jolted awake. They stared at the remains, their faces pale. None of us had touched it, that we knew. The door had been closed all night, and the shelf was too high for any of us to reach without a chair. My aunt swore she and her friend never entered my room, and my mother, who had gone to bed early, claimed she heard nothing. But I knew what I saw. The effigy had been intact when we fell asleep. And the way it was broken—it was deliberate, almost surgical. The more I tried to rationalize it, the more the unease grew. It was as if something in that room, some presence, had been offended by the little scarecrow, and had punished it for reasons I couldn’t fathom.

Weeks later, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. I would catch glimpses of movement in the corners of my eyes, but when I turned, there was nothing. I had nightmares of a scarecrow standing in the cornfield, its stitched smile too wide, its button eyes black and empty. My mother noticed I had stopped sleeping well and suggested I see a doctor, but I knew it wasn’t in my head. One night, unable to bear it, I took the shattered pieces of the effigy and buried them in the field, far from the house, hoping to put the matter to rest. As I pressed the last shard of marzipan into the soil, I heard a rustling behind me. I spun around, but there was nothing—just the corn, swaying in the wind. But as I walked back to the house, I swear I heard a voice, thin and dry like husks, whisper: ‘You’ll be mine next.’

I never spoke of it again, not to Mara, not to Elise, not to my mother. But sometimes, when the wind blows through the cornfields, I think I see a figure standing at the edge of the field, wearing a hat like the scarecrow’s, and I know that what broke that effigy is still out there, waiting, patient, and hungry.