After a few hours, the road started getting rougher. Whatever municipality was in charge of yellow brick maintenance apparently gave fewer fucks the further you got from Munchkin Central. I had to keep an eye out for potholes, which of course the Scarecrow would invariably step right into, tripping and smacking hard against the bricks. It didn’t seem to hurt him at all, but it meant I had to help him up while he laughed merrily at his own mishap.

And to be honest, earnest or not, I didn’t really want to touch that guy any more than I absolutely had to.

Around noon, we parked it on the side of the road by a picturesque stream for some lunch. I didn’t know how long my stash had to last me, so I endeavored to limit myself to half a dozen meat pies.

Partway through, I gestured at the Scarecrow with a half-eaten pie and kind of grunted.

He demurred. “I am never hungry. And it is a lucky thing I am not, for my mouth is only painted, and if I should cut a hole in it so I could eat, the straw I am stuffed with would come out, and that would spoil the shape of my head.”

Once again: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.

“Tell me something about yourself and the country you came from,” said the Scarecrow, when I had finished my sixth pie and was eyeing a seventh, despite my pledge. So I told him about the mall, and how boring everything was there, and how the saleslady at the shop had basically tricked me into coming to Oz.

The Scarecrow listened carefully. “I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dreary, fluorescent-lit place you call The Mall.”

“Yeah, but you have stuffing for brains. And there’s more than just the mall. You know, like cell phones and Netflix and Tumblr and junk.”

I closed my eyes and clicked my heels together gently. There’s no place like cell phones and Netflix and Tumblr and junk.

The Scarecrow sighed. “Of course I cannot understand it,” he said. “If your peoples’ heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and The Mall would have no people at all.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “What about you? What’s your whole deal?”

“My whole deal is very little indeed. I was only made the day before yesterday. What happened in the world before that time is all unknown to me.”

Huh. For some reason I had assumed he had been stuck up on that pole a lot longer. “Luckily,” he continued, “when the farmer made my head, one of the first things he did was to paint my ears, so that I heard what was going on.”

“Wait, so was it, like, magic paint? Were they trying to make a living scarecrow?” I was just trying to figure out how he had come to life. “Did a talking snowman maybe give you that hat?”

“Not that I’m aware of.” He continued his story—basically, the farmer had painted on his face bit by bit, chatting away with some other Munchkin, and the scarecrow had become more and more aware of his surroundings as he’d gone, but kept his mouth shut because he hadn’t figured out how to talk yet. The farmer, for what it was worth, was crap at drawing faces. One eye was significantly larger than the other, and the ears weren’t at all straight. After marvelling at their handiwork, the pair of them had hauled the Scarecrow off to the cornfield and stuck him up on the pole to frighten birds.

“I did not like to be deserted this way. So I tried to walk after them. But my feet would not touch the ground, and I was forced to stay on that pole. It was a lonely life to lead, for I had nothing to think of, having been made such a short while before.”

It didn’t seem like there had been anything special about his creation. Would anything with a face drawn on it come to life in Oz? I had a Sharpie in my bag, and thought about decorating a rock to see what would happen, but stopped myself. The thought of that rock, just sitting there, motionless, thinking thoughts for eternity made me shudder. If the farmer knew what he was doing, the guy was a fucking monster.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The Scarecrow continued his story. A bunch of birds had flown up, but they’d thought he was a real Munchkin and left, which made him proud. “By and by an old crow flew near me, and after looking at me carefully he perched upon my shoulder and said: ‘I wonder if that farmer thought to fool me in this clumsy manner. Any crow of sense could see that you are only stuffed with straw.’ Then he hopped down at my feet and ate all the corn he wanted.”

“So the birds here can talk, too? Can they talk to anyone? Or just scarecrows?”

The Scarecrow, of course, had no idea. The one bird told the other birds he was a fake, and soon there was a whole flock feasting on his corn. So now he felt like a failure.

“But the old crow comforted me, saying, ‘If you only had brains in your head you would be as good a man as any of them, and a better man than some of them. Brains are the only things worth having in this world, no matter whether one is a crow or a man.’”

So basically, some bird told him that brains would fix his problems, and that was enough for the Scarecrow. “By good luck you came along and pulled me off the stake, and from what you say I am sure the Great Oz will give me brains as soon as we get to the Emerald City.”

“I genuinely hope he does,” I said. The movie ended with some kind of vague platitudes about him having had brains all along, and then the whole thing turned out to be a fever dream back in a sepia-tone dustbowl. But they changed the ending of children’s movies all the time. Like, in the original story, the Little Mermaid dies at the end. The truth was, I had absolutely no idea how this was going to turn out for him.

“Well, we might as well get on with it. Here, take my pies.”

We continued down the road in silence. There were no more fences on the roadside, and fewer houses and fruit trees. The farther we went, the more dismal and lonesome the country became.

Something about the utterly arbitrary nature of his entire existence was upsetting me. Some farmer wants the crows to leave his crops alone, so he stitches together a living being with thoughts and feelings and desires? What if I hadn’t come along? He would have just been stuck there for… how long did an average scarecrow last out in a cornfield, anyway? Would he have eventually just rotted away? All the time yearning for more?

I know it was all just a stupid story, but I decided that I was going to get the Scarecrow his stupid brains if there was any way I could.

Toward evening we came to a great forest, where the trees grew so big and close together that their branches met over the yellow bricks. The branches all but shut out what little daylight was left. I remembered being genuinely afraid of the dark, foresty parts of The Wizard of Oz when I was a kid. Also, I was pretty sure the Wicked Witch was in those woods somewhere.

“If this road goes in, it must come out,” said the Scarecrow. “And as the Emerald City is at the other end of the road, we must go wherever it leads us.”

“Yup,” I said.

We ventured forth. After an hour or so the light faded away completely, and I was stumbling in the darkness. Toto seemed okay, though, and the Scarecrow insisted that he could see just fine, so he took me by the arm and led the way. The way his light, lumpy, wiggly arm pulled on mine made the whole experience that much more terrifying.

“Um, is there, like, anywhere we could stop and camp out for the night?”

“I see a little cottage at the right of us,” he said, “built of logs and branches. Shall we go there?”

“Jesus Christ, yes.”

So the Scarecrow led me through the trees until we reached the cottage, which was thankfully empty (or, the random sentient automatons that inhabited it were blissfully obscured by darkness, at the very least). I found a bunch of dried leaves piled up in one corner and settled into them to sleep, with Toto curled up alongside me to keep away the shivers.

The Scarecrow, who assured me he was “never tired”, stood up in another corner and waited patiently until morning came.