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“Joe Meets the Wizard”
by Stephen Lochton Kincaid
After the tornado, Joe caught them in
the
coyote traps he had put around his trailer; the coyotes had been getting in his
trash again.
He shot
the lion
and took its carcass to the taxidermy guy out on John Brown Road and had a nice
rug made out of it. Its new glass eyes
stared dully at Joe’s worn out La-Z-Boy.
He chopped
up the
tin man and took the pieces to the recycling dump. He got $53.47 for the scrap.
Now, what
to do
with the scarecrow?
Joe thought
its
stuffing looked like it might burn good, so he rolled the straw up into a
cigarette and smoked it. It made him
feel kind of funny, like he was dreamin’.
He smoked some more. While he smoked,
he thought about wicked witches and flying monkeys and wizards and golden brick
roads. Weird shit, he thought.
Emerald green smoke drifted lazily around his
head.
He
had smoked all the stuffing up to the scarecrow’s chest when the scarecrow
started crying: “Dorothy! Where are you,
Dorothy! I always loved you!” Tears
leaked out of its sackcloth eyes.
Joe
was not surprised when he got to the scarecrow’s head and just found more
stuffing.
Stupid
scarecrow, he thought, taking a drag off the last bit of
stuffing-cigarette. There was a small,
dreamy smile on his face. Dorothy’s
locked up in my basement.
Stephen Lochton
Kincaid grew
up in the flatlands of Kansas. After spending most of his life there, he
now lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he draws upon the lowering gray skies
and primeval forests for inspiration to write the stuff of nightmares.
J. Elliott is an author and artist living in a small patch
of old, rural Florida. Think Spanish moss, live oak trees, snakes, armadillos, gators,
mosquitoes. She's published (and illustrated) four collections of ghost stories and three
installments in a funny, cozy mystery series (fourth coming 2026!). She also penned a ghost
story novel, Jiko Bukken, set in Kyoto, Japan.
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