The Endor Woods

Basya was eleven when she first found out what the woods did to dead things. Hana had been busy with one of her after-school clubs, which meant she wasn’t around to keep her little sister preoccupied, and so Basya had to entertain herself. She was playing a game that involved buried treasure, the treasure being Old Mr. Cunningham’s retired scarecrows which Basya’s mother had gussied up into Halloween decorations for the front yard.

Basya didn’t like Old Mr. Cunningham — he was creepy and nosy and always trailing his moth-wing fingers over the skin of her neck and shoulders, telling her how sweet she looked, licking at the black gums in his mouth like he wanted to eat her.

But Basya loved Old Mr. Cunningham’s scarecrows, which were strange and interesting. She’d pulled them out of the garden shed early that morning, but hadn’t gotten around to planting them yet before Basya had sniped them up for her game.

There were three of them, each with a sap-sticky crucifix body dressed up in old throwaway farm clothes with cheap plastic, annoyingly orange jack-o-lantern baskets for the heads. They weren’t scary, not in the daylight, not when you knew what they were.

Basya laid them down in the shallow forest dirt, dry but not brittle, liable to kick up around the ankles with each step, but easy to dig through. She half-buried them with her shovel, also stolen from the shed, and then ran back to the start of the tree line so she could pretend to stumble upon the site.