I’d never been trick or treating before. It wasn’t really a thing when we were kids. Instead of trick or treating you’d just run around in the dark throwing eggs and flour at each other over the park until the park keeper chased you away.
There was nothing more frightening and exhilarating when you were 14 than the beam of the park keeper’s torch sweeping through the trees and all of us scattering away into the night.
So this year, as my 40th birthday treat, we decided to go trick or treating. Proper trick or treating, with costumes and little buckets for the sweets and everything.
The most terrifying thing I could think of was being a teenager again so I was dressed up as myself from 1992: long greasy hair, a ned’s atomic dustbin t-shirt, an awkward straight limbed stance, a neck dotted with shaving cuts, several thousand suicidal thoughts per second.
My sister was dressed up as some sort of cat, and my mother was dressed up as the log lady from twin peaks.
The log lady isn’t frightening, I said to my mother. She said “Well, you can’t hear what the log’s saying.”
“I suppose,” I said, and shrugged in non-agreement agreement.
Cats aren’t frightening, I said to my sister. She scratched at my eyes and bit my throat out and then dragged me back to the house and left me on the doorstep for my father to find.
I didn’t really have an answer for that.
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Notes:
1. Written on September 9th, 2018
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