To the left of the barn stood a small shed with no windows. Autumn quickened her steps. The shed gave her the creeps, but she wasn’t sure why. Moss crawled up the wood on each side, making the structure look a little alive, but the door creaked without movement. A shiver ran up Autumn’s spine.

            At the edge of the field, as Autumn was about to leave the discomfort of the wheat, another structure caught her attention. It wasn’t another barn or a haunted shed but a slanted wooden cross that hung up a scarecrow. A tall scarecrow.

            This was not the first time she’d seen a scarecrow. Most farms around her house had at least one or two hidden in their corn mazes. But those scarecrows had painted faces, a slight blush, and hats usually wrapped with a baby blue bow. This scarecrow that hung limply on the cross wore a massive hat. It covered most of the face. The body sagged like dead wheat, barely having enough stuffing to distinguish the chest from the waist, and oddly, the strands of wheat that stuck out from the rips in the scarecrow’s clothes were golden.

            “Ugly,” mumbled Autumn. Another chill ran across her spine. She bent down but kept her eyes on the scarecrow. It looked oddly alive. Autumn grabbed a stick and held it up like a sword. She pointed it at the stuffed man. Her hand trembled. She never liked scarecrows.

            Autum crept closer and closer until the tip of the stick was barely a centimeter away. She froze. A row of stitched lips frowned below the brim of its hat. Autumn stepped back, but her arm that held the stick flung forward. The stick hit the center of the scarecrow’s chest. Izzy awkwardly laughed.

The scarecrow did not flinch. It stayed perfectly still. Autumn let out a massive sigh and placed a hand on her chest. A couple of years ago, during Halloween, someone thought it would be funny to dress up as a scarecrow and scare whoever was brave enough to approach the candy bucket. Autumn, of course, volunteered since it was her first time trick-or-treating. But as she was about to reach her hand into the bucket, a stuffed man snatched her wrist, and one of the strands of fake wheat cut into her skin. After that, Autumn never trusted a scarecrow, even if she was told they were fake.

April 22nd, 1915, A Whistling Gas,

The morning began the same, with a tint of orange that bled into the mud of “no man’s land.” Surprisingly, the trench was filled with a thick fog. It was somewhat difficult to breathe in, as I could hear some of the men choking on the moist air. Everything in this trench was either soaked in water or blood, but I tried my best to keep my journal dry so I would be able to write about how thick this fog was.

It isn’t an interesting topic, but I found that my hand would gain weight whenever I wrote about the truthful image of this war. But ever since my “comrades” found out I enjoyed literature, I was given a new position as a journalist to document our victories. I was asked to describe the bodies of German soldiers as if they were prized deer, joking about how they would mount the head on their living room wall.

Sometimes I would send my father letters describing a corpse or two, believing that he would enjoy reading about his enemies being slain, but ever since he found out about my new position, his responses screamed sweet anger. He demanded that I be transferred to a different “trench,” saying that my brigadier general was a fool, but I argued strongly against his claim.

My brigadier general had given me the position when he learned I could write. He read my descriptions and frustrations about the war but gained interest when he found out I could write in German.

“Finally,” he said, “a man that can translate this war on both sides.”

But since then, I’ve wasted most of the pages just talking about dead Germans, focused on bodies that could no longer speak.

It was 8:30 in the morning, and I had already dragged a stiff eighteen-by-twenty-four canvas across campus. Yesterday, I spent most of my morning hunting down the correct materials, not knowing there was a difference between watercolor and gouache, and spent the rest of the warm day inside, glued to a blank paper. I finally had a somewhat straight line drawn at midnight. But I erased it.

The sun’s light crept through the large windows, ploddingly dull, as if it, too, was not ready to begin the day. I arrived early in hopes of getting a spot in the back. The same stool I sat at on the first day. The one with the broken easel.

Even the professor hadn’t arrived yet, but slowly, students began to flood the room, armed with totes filled with pencils and pens rather than bullets and guns. And as much as I tried to force myself to smile, reminding me that I was not on the battlefield but instead in an art classroom,part of me felt misplaced and unwanted. Like if Apollo, himself, the God of guilt, was sitting in my chest, using my heart as if it were a living room couch.

“Oh, bummer!” A student sat next to me, holding another large canvas. It was slightly bigger than mine. “I totally forgot to include the second figure. I’m going to add one quick.”

Another figure? I only did one. I looked at my piece—a half-blank canvas with hours of eraser marks that still showed through the spots of thin, muddy watercolor. My figure’s face didn’t even have a nose.