When the sun came up that morning, it painted the eastern sky in a wash of soft oranges and misty grays. Ignatia stood barefoot on the wooden porch of their old farmhouse, one hand shielding her tired eyes, the other wrapped around a chipped coffee mug. Her husband, David, was already halfway down the dirt road in his rig, a heavy-haul flatbed that stretched into the horizon like a silver snake.
Five-year-old Julius pressed his face to the screen door behind her.
“Is Daddy gonna be gone long?”
“Just a few weeks,” Ignatia lied. “He’s got deliveries all the way to Oregon this time.”
Julius sighed and let the door slam shut behind him, stomping back into the kitchen. Ignatia watched the truck shrink to a speck and then disappear entirely. She didn’t cry. She hadn’t cried in months. She had grown used to the long silences between the engine’s roar and its return.
David was gone more often now. Freight paid better the farther he drove, and with fuel, livestock, and repairs always chewing away at their income, every mile mattered. He used to call every night. Then it was every other. Now, she was lucky to hear his voice once a week. His texts were short, always polite, but distant.
She blamed the road. The road wore people down.
The farm was quiet that spring, save for the rustling of the wheat fields and the grumbling of Mr. Jones, the hired hand who managed the livestock. He was kind in a gruff sort of way—old, wiry, always chewing on something that wasn’t meant to be swallowed. He had worked that land longer than she had lived on it, and though he rarely smiled, he treated Julius with the soft reverence reserved for delicate things.
Julius grew lonely. He set two places at the table: one for himself, one for David. He pushed his toys toward the empty seat and narrated both sides of the conversation.
“Daddy says the tractor’s too slow,” he giggled one night.
Ignatia tried to smile. “He’s not wrong.”
The loneliness crept in like fog. Days bled into each other. Nights stretched long and soundless. She started leaving the television on just to feel less alone.
One morning, Julius came running into the kitchen, straw sticking out from his overalls.
“I made Daddy!” he shouted.
Ignatia followed him out to the barn where, propped against a hay bale, sat a crude figure stuffed with straw, dressed in David’s old flannel shirt and work jeans. His boots were jammed onto the stick legs, and a trucker hat tilted forward on the lumpy head. The face was a stitched-on pillowcase with two charcoal eyes and a faint suggestion of a mouth.
Something about it made her stomach tighten.
“Let’s bring him inside,” Julius said, taking the figure by the hand.
Ignatia should have said no.
But she didn’t.
The Strawman sat at the table that night. Ignatia had set him a plate of cold meatloaf, mostly for Julius’ sake. The boy beamed, chatting animatedly between bites.
“Daddy likes it here. He says he misses us too.”
“That so?” she said, trying not to look at the thing too long.
She found herself talking to it, too. Silly things at first. Small comments about the weather, the tractor needing oil, the cost of feed. She tucked him in beside her at night because the bed felt too wide. Too cold.
She knew it was unhealthy. But it filled the gap.
One night she woke up in tears. She had dreamed of David—real David—pulling into the driveway, stepping out of the cab with open arms. But when she blinked herself awake, all she saw was the lumpy outline of the Strawman lying beside her.
She began to dread the mornings.
The first time the Strawman moved, she told herself Julius had done it.
She had gone to sleep with it beside her, its hand gently grazing the edge of the quilt. But when she woke, it was gone. She found it in the living room, slumped on the couch next to a sleeping Julius. The boy claimed innocence.
“He came to watch cartoons with me.”
“Did you move him?”
Julius shook his head slowly. “No, Mama. He walked.”
She forced a laugh, but it curdled in her throat.
Then came the animals.
One of the horses broke its stall door and ran headlong into the woods. Mr. Jones found the goats trembling in the corner of the pen, bleating pitifully. Chickens refused to enter the coop. The barn cat vanished entirely.
“Ain’t natural,” Mr. Jones muttered. “Animals sense things. Always have.”
He looked at the Strawman, who now sat in the parlor chair by the window.
“That thing gives me the damn willies.”
Ignatia opened her mouth to protest, but then paused. A breeze drifted through the open window, and the Strawman’s head turned—just slightly—toward her. She told herself it was the wind.
That night, Ignatia dreamed she was awake. A hand brushed her hair. She stayed still, too terrified to turn. A voice, low and familiar, whispered:
“I like it when you don’t move.”
She jolted upright. Straw lay across her pillow. The bedroom door was open.
Julius became quieter. He stared more. One morning, he sat at the table, pale and wide-eyed.
“He says you shouldn’t take him away. He says he was here first.”
“Who says that, baby?”
“Daddy.”
She confronted Mr. Jones. Told him everything.
He didn’t laugh. Instead, he pulled a weathered journal from his coat.
“You ever hear of ‘Fetching’? Old country magic. Used to build bodies outta straw or clay. You don’t pray to God for it. You just want something so bad, you make space for it. And something… comes.”
“Are you saying I… summoned something?”
“I’m saying you left the door open.”
He showed her drawings in the journal: crude human shapes filled with straw. Circles drawn in dirt. Names written and crossed out. One passage read: “When grief becomes invitation, the Fetching will answer.”
That night, she burned the Strawman.
Dragged it to the edge of the field and set it ablaze. The fire cracked and spat and hissed like a thing alive. She cried for the first time in months, watching the stitched mouth curl into a grimace.
Mr. Jones stayed with her that night. She curled on the couch while he kept watch with a shotgun.
The house was quiet. Too quiet.
The next morning, Julius was gone.
They found him in the barn, curled next to something wrapped in a tarp.
“He came back,” Julius whispered. “He said you tried to hurt him.”
The tarp shifted. A charred hand reached out.
Ignatia screamed.
The Strawman rose from the earth like it had never burned at all. Its face was darker now, scorched and blackened, but the stitched mouth twisted into a smile.
“You made me,” it rasped.
She stayed and fought. What else could she do?
She screamed and slashed at the thing as it rose. Straw spilled like blood. Mr. Jones fired once, then twice. But it wasn’t until Ignatia took the fire poker and stabbed it through the heart that the Strawman collapsed with a hiss like air escaping a grave.
It crumbled into ash.
The room smelled of burnt earth and old tobacco.
The animals returned to normal. The barn smelled sweet again.
Julius stopped setting two places at dinner.
The flannel shirt and jeans were buried in the far field, along with what little ash they could gather.
David called a week later. He was coming home. He had picked up a load from Montana and would be there by Sunday.
She told him she couldn’t wait.
But every now and then, when the wind came down from the hills just right, Ignatia swore she could hear boots crunching on gravel outside the window.
She never looked.
Some things were better left unseen.
