by Sam Cooper
Here are the weedy stores popped up in malls and strips, signs not solid but melted vinyl banners in black and orange, dripping words and snapping in the autumn breeze, and inside injuries and skins and deceits, auxiliary faces and fluids and bizarre one-use artifacts, and chirping mournful noises from somewhere in a forest of hanging fabric, and threadbare carpet embedded with twinkling, and lights flashing in the periphery, and from above novel songs you know by heart and you can’t remember where you first heard them and cinematic mnemonies and ambience that rises and falls and you are comforted by its rhythm, and smells like sweet glue and vacuum cleaners in the folds of the racks, and grotesqueries leaned against the wall and when you pass them you still can’t shake the childhood fear that one of them will move and you will embarrass yourself, and other human beings there with you averting their eyes but watching you warily like the disguises they are considering are revealing their secrets and deviations and desires and you realize that that’s exactly what’s going on but this thrills you instead of making you self-conscious about your own browsing, and too-many clerks who do not avert their eyes but desperately try to catch yours and just want to assist so they can break the tedium and mind-numb of spending temporary weeks scanning a landscape of unchanging gore and bad jokes and their heads tingling with loops upon loops of the same 80-minute soundtrack and they want to help you really just so they can talk to someone. But you imagine you are already disguised, and will not talk, not yet.
Here is a driveway scarecrow in the rain, stuffed and tied clothes like sausages, wet and lumpy, straw needles stabbing outwards through tiny holes and tears, a body slumped in a white plastic patio chair, darkening and slumping more with every passing minute and falling droplet, its head a pillowcase and crowned with a baseball cap, sitting for a week and a half now and removed tomorrow, unappreciated by trickortreaters more worried about the hems of their costumes quickly dampening and precipitation infiltrating the paper wrappers in jack-o’-lantern totes and printed bags, silently endurant of early frosts and lateral wind and rain like this rain for eleven days. When the scarecrow’s head, sodden and heavy, falls from its body, its cheeks are still tempera pink and its smile does not falter.
Here is a photograph of Keith’s Biggest Haul Yet, taken last year by his dad at Keith’s behest, in its glossy plane a mound of treasure as big as the boy himself or maybe it’s just a trick of the lens, but still it’s quite a Haul regardless, heaped in a way to suggest victory like the spoils of some battle, but neatly quadrisected and sorted taxonomically, Chocolate and Things Like Chocolate the biggest pile and deposited by Keith’s filmic left arm, and next to those Fruit Flavors and Bright Colors, and under those the Miscellaneous hill bristling with raisin boxes and hand-tied cellophane bundles, and Sour and Strange the smallest and farthest from him and under the Chocolate, and the boy sitting cross-legged and leaning forward with arms out like he’s trying to embrace his plunder, grinning hugely and eyes studded with red, and his mom’s leg in the background, practically saying itself did he know how far past his bedtime it was?, even though his face is flushed from just coming inside. In the photo, Keith’s costume is already off.
Here is a blank him or her spending the evening quietly and alone even if with other hims and hers, but in no way not celebrating or letting the night go by unmarked, answering the door and doling out candy from a battery-operated bowl with a motion-activated zombie hand in the middle that he or she bought at discount at one drugstore or another, and maintaining the decorations that he or she is very proud of every year, but mostly observing internally, deliciously aware of something different about tonight, something in the air and all around, something like an unfocused image approaching but never attaining clarity, a tangible sense of mystery, not a question mark but a state of defined and complete being, more satisfactory and inclusive and right than any other he or she knows, a sense of being able to see through to some other side. His or her prayer is a long walk alone and silent under the moon and bony branches after the streets have emptied.
Here is Alexandra’s bee costume that hangs in a closet in her mother’s house, not exposed to anything but dust and darkness but still fading and becoming brittle even with such little time, collapsing in on itself, stripes of yellow and black both moving towards an eventual middle ground of dull brown, except now her mother realizes it has been some time since it was worn, and it was only worn three times, one day in the school pageant and once at a party and once on the Night Itself, some time since its handsewn hems were filled out with flesh, a little too tight in places but not too bad at all her mother thought, after all this time the felt and taffeta jealously holding the powdery bubblegum scent that was Alexandra’s when she was a little girl, hanging still and imploding incrementally, wrinkles deepening and sparkling wire wings shrinking and tights pulling up into themselves, slower than any perception, ignorant of the many years past, and the lives constructed and gone on with, and the unfailingly unringing phone, and the front door closing and opening and closing, and the temperature dropping, and the trees continuing to stretch heavenward. Soon, the bee costume will lose its retained odor and take on the smell of cedar shavings and lint.
Here are the leaves that crackle electrically under your feet and against each other as they waltz in the air, that are skeletons and gauze, shriveled and many-colored, landing on the ground softly with a sound that is more thought than sound. The shredded, outgrown, discarded skins of a season.
Here is the flickering scrying mirror of an art house screen, tattooed in silver and black 24 times every single second, the faces displayed huge and silent and pocked with dust and scratches, lips moving but no voices heard, dialogue divined in humorless and inky cards intruding periodically, the only soundtrack coming from the theater’s speakers a prerecorded plinking piano accompaniment, and the theater very small and the seats mostly empty, the audience nineteen in number and near-uniformly young, six watching unaltered and undistracted, five watching either high or drunk or both, three high or drunk or both and not really watching, two separate couples totaling four making out unabashedly in the next-to-last and last rows, and one homeless woman asleep near the exit, the eldest by far among them, all the faces illuminated by the screen’s reflected and strobing rays, blinking when the screen goes white and then darkens with the next presentation of the triple feature. When the theater lights go up no one will speak, having forgotten the shape of human speech.
Here is the house that Michael was so scared of one year, the one with the two guys in prefab-tattered polyester robes who stand sentry at either side of the door every year, the one with the blacklight in the porch sconce, the atmosphere and surfaces of porch not glowing but seeming to suck in light hungrily and this negative illumination somehow still luminous and beautiful, and the two guys not moving one inch but holding what Michael knew of course to be plastic axes but was scared of anyway and their angular robes fluttering slightly, haloed aurally by the noise of a sound-effects CD on a stereo inside the house sifting through the screen of a window, and the house is at best unassuming and at worst ugly and made of garish brick and faded shingles and ornamented with patchy lawn but was all the more frightening to Michael for these stanchions of normalcy so twisted and decorated nightmarishly, but still his fear balanced by his fascination, his unbeatable desire to go and stand between the two unmoving guards and say the three words that are one word and hope that nothing happens and hope that something happens, and he stood in the empty street and tried to decide, and an older kid in a hockey mask snuck up behind him and grabbed him and he screamed and almost peed his pirate pants, and the older kid ran off laughing and Michael found that he was laughing too and he went up to the sentried house and recited the spell and received his prize from a witch lady inside and nothing happened and he went to the next house and the next. That one year, Michael was nine.
Here is a party, and all its noise and light and life, variables and details too many to catalogue, an organism itself, breathing and secreting, stretching out and curling back in, broadcasting a tuneless and tidal symphony into the night. It falls asleep at dawn.
Here is where Lily stands, abandoned and crying, fist clutching the handle of a woven plastic sack half-filled with lumps of sugar and color, eyes searching the groups of kids in her field of vision on doorsteps and sidewalks but trying to look like she’s not looking, and her princess costume is now hot even though the air is cold, and she can feel how ridiculous it is, how stupid and ugly she is in it, feel it on her skin, and her tears flow thickly with the sensation in the pit of her stomach, the angry nausea that was born when she first realized that they had left her, growing when mix-up turned into a joke turned into cruelty, and now she scans the bushes with eyes and ears for vibrating shadows or stifled giggles, and resolves if she finds either to simply turn bravely and either go straight home or up the walk of the nearest house and get some candy by herself she can’t decide, but sees nothing and nobody, and takes a few steps one direction and then turns around and takes a few steps in the other, then reverses again and runs. Next year Lily will suddenly be too old to Trick or Treat.
Here are apparitions of unfound razor blades, apples never weaponized, candy never poisoned, Tricks never played, souls far from lost or even really tempted, lawsuits never filed, children not taken or lost, windows and mailboxes and trees and gardens intact, tears not shed, Satan unsummoned, cavities never saccharinely bored. All seen wandering in the black windows of dead dark houses and the caged eyes of uncostumed kids.
Here is the best Halloween you ever had. Never forget it, ever.
Here are houses, lining strands of streets in webs of neighborhoods, all adorned with trimmings of fear, windows bearing cutout shadows of murderers and bulbous oversized rubber spiders and dripping blood, doors shadowed and hung with chains and gargoyles and cardboard bones, lawns strewn with limbs and viscera and overgrown with tombstones, bushes covered in stretched multicolored webs, architecture glowing antinaturally in green or red or blue or purple blacklight or blinking in the machinegun flash of a strobe, corners and crannies and dead flowerbeds attended by upright forms of demons and killers and reapers and monsters statuesque and grimacing, porches bathed in fog, skulls in the trees, pumpkins grinning and screaming and looking shocked and miserable and curious and devious or else wounded with the illuminated representational lines of bats and ghosts and vampires and castles and celebrities and words and shapes too varied and numerous to attempt to index, pumpkins everywhere. In the daylight the houses look not sad or funny but merely waiting, even if the Night has already passed.
Here are things that people call ghosts, spirits, phantoms, specters, entities, whathaveyou, drifting without affect, their most central core essence no longer human, this kind of ghost invisible, and there are visible ones, but this kind invisible save for a slightest outline of refraction in the crisp air, too subtle to be observed or measured by anyone or anything, and traveling in groups or singularly but never interacting, incapable of real interaction amongst their own and other kinds alike but not really minding, incapable also of minding, and carrying with them, propelled by an energy like that of memory and a feeling like the last plummeting moment before sleep, drifting through some border more permeable tonight, drifting up into lightbulbs and candle flames and in the branches of trees and into dark pumpkins and out in open spaces, and passing through houses and touching the living who look over their shoulders and crack their knuckles and maybe even shiver, drifting away to destinations unknown. If you could see them, they would be the color of the spots on the moon.
Here is a different New Years Eve, more appropriately positioned it seems than The Real New Year’s Eve, closer to a middle point, to a momentary straightening of the earth’s drunken, tilted circumnavigation around her furious star, crawling along a border of lightness and darkness, heat and cold, a private holiday unspoken and outwardly unmarked but one felt bodily, an annual sea change, a turning of the year and a turning of age more profound and meaning-full than any Dec 31st/Jan. 1st or birthday could ever hope to inspire, but this New Years is backwards from the calendar’s and its peaks and troughs are confused, its Big Moment is opposite, not tragic or sad but definitely no cause for celebration because the night’s enchantment and potential should never come to climax or denouement, and the black of the sky at the transitory hour is empty of fireworks because all fireworks came earlier in a joyous cacophony on the sidewalks and on doorsteps and inside houses and everywhere at once but quickly silenced in unison it seems, but the whistle of the wind down an empty street is more than enough for anyone because it is the moan of contentment and happiness and real magic and something you can’t put your finger on, not ever, and the sound is there because there are ears to take it in, unseen and ecstatic. When midnight comes, it comes too soon.
