Cold Halloween

A short story

Hello readers, new and old! Welcome to Kindling.

I hope the week’s been good and kind to you all. The mornings have been cool, and my daily walks with the dogs have been orange hazed, half lit as the sun breaks over the horizon.

I finished outlining a novel for the first time, and started writing the first chapter today. All of it is unsure and giddy and nerve wracking, but I’m tempering my emotions with the reminder that no one else is reading it. At this stage it can be anything. All first drafts can be forgiven.

Fall is always nostalgic for me. Is that universal? Maybe the start of school—that childhood routine—holds the season in relief from the rest of the year? Whatever it is, I’ve been remembering. Today, I’m bringing you a Halloween memory in honor of the season. Please share yours if you celebrate, or any fall memory if you don’t.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

To my unnamed dear childhood friend. You are my Halloween.

It was a winter cold that tore through my cheap Cleopatra costume, but we were determined to get candy. Plastic bags held out and waiting, fingers numb by the end of the block. We went to the rich neighborhood, the one with big decorations and jump scares and full size candy bars. Answered the “what are you supposed to be’s” and said Trick or Treat and thank you on cue.

We ran with the best of them, dodging older kids with masks that dripped blood and a wild energy that felt close to violence, something I knew and you didn’t. You had your own version of suffering. Our households were close, but worlds apart.

And when the cold became too much, we hopped into the back seat of your mom’s Isuzu Trooper, the same spot where we put her old lab down when she was too sick to make it in to the vet.

Did we drive to her boyfriend’s, the one who was into the occult and kept a house that leans in my memory like a Tim Burton creation, stacked with books on black magic, and with curtains always drawn to keep out the light? Or was it after he died, when your mom had moved back to her own place, and we would watch horror movies we rented from Blockbuster in the living room?

It’s funny how the aftermath—candy spilled out on the carpet, the horror movies playing on TV—rolls in my mind like a film montage, each year distinct, each image a different house, a different room. But always with you. I only remember trick or treating from that year. The rest, forgotten, fades to black.

Running, fingers numb, past mansions we would never live in, gathering piles of sweets to take home and eat greedily by the handful while our parents smoked and looked at television sets, feeling none of the magic of the night, only the cold.