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Trick or Treat

Don Raymond

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You’ll only get so many of these; try to spend them wisely.  Wisely or not, spend them you will: the clock ticks inevitably forward, and the seasons spill their colors across the trees, regardless of your choices.  Try to make the best of this.

You didn’t worry so much about it when you were younger.  Then, you were preoccupied with the coming night; hands jittery, nerves taut with the mingled mystery and excitement of the day, heart racing in anticipation of the sweet rewards to come. Your vision then was limited – not just by time, but by space: your thin rubber mask, smelling of plastic and sweat, has come askew, half-covering your right eye, and clinging to your face with damp sweaty stickiness.  Giddy from lack of oxygen, you peel it off your cheek.  You wince as you wait for the thin elastic string to break and snap against the back of your neck, but it never does. 

You peer around as best you can through the eyeholes, wondering what’s taking so long.  All day you’ve waited as the hours crawled by, the strange October sun inching across the sky, waiting for night to fall.  It’s finally here, but the adults seem content to chatter among themselves, as if every minute that passed wasn’t a minute wasted beyond recall.  You pace back and forth across the living room, as if the impetus of your motion might impel them to action: swish-swish goes the thin plastic tarp of your costume, one hand clutching, as if it were a talisman, a thin and suspiciously stained pillowcase too threadbare to be used for any greater purpose; too sacred to be used for any lesser one.

The time comes.  You want to fling open the door and rush out in to the darkness, eager to be about this business, but instead – as always – you open it slowly, its hinges creaking, and peer into the yard.  On a night like this, you can’t be too careful. 

Even then, you knew, somehow, that it was important to to bear witness: to stop and savor the burnt umber smells of the autumn night, to watch the shadows that flitted through the almost-darkness between the jack-o-lanterns flickering like uncertain stars in the suburban night. 

Knew you’d only get so many chances at this.

Finally, exhausted beyond the limits of your tiny body, you trudge home, the sack growing heavier by the minute.  Once you cross that liminal bridge to the smothering warmth of your house, you’ll find in you one last bit of energy, enough to suffocate yourself in chocolate and peanut butter, spun sugar, granulated sugar, tart citrusy sugar, buttery sugar, and honey sugar, sugar enough to last a lifetime – or, more likely, about two-and-a-half days. 

The time will come when you will tire of this, as hard as it is to believe at that moment, with your teeth glued together by malt and treacle.  The pillowcase will be discarded by thankful parents and you’ll find other – though not necessarily better – ways to fill this night.  You’ll trade this hallowed bit of equinoctial magic for the approval of your peers.  Later, you will come to regret this transaction.  This is normal; it’s called growing up.

You weren’t as conscious then, as now, of the changes each passing year wrought, on the world as much as you; that everything could change while standing still. It’s a little harder to get up now, each time there’s a frantic, arrhythmic knock on the door.  You open it to the susurrus of fast breath and muttered conversations, followed by a chorus of high-pitched appeals: “Trick or treat!”  You look over their heads, to the parents, like you, who wait in that not-as-mysterious almost darkness, and note while you’re at it that the jack-o-lantern’s gone out again.  This might be a metaphor; it might not.  Your hand dips and crinkles the paper wrappers of tiny candies as they slide against the slick worn plastic of a bowl you normally use for holding popcorn on movie night, now holding not-quite-food, in the not-quite-winter on this not-quite the same as any other day.

If you try, you can still feel the shape of something vast and secret moving just beyond the easy range of porch lights and litten windows; can still, once in a while, catch the ghost of a night breeze with the hint of that electric smell that filled those older nights, and that you still, years later, cannot identify. Spend these nights wisely, but spend them you will.

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Don Raymond lives in the hamlet of Alturas, CA, where he works as an accountant for the county, because his guidance counselors never warned him about that sort of thing.  You can read more of his work at Analog and The Saturday Evening Post.  He spends his free time arguing with the local wildlife.

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