Halloween Masks: A Trio of Tales by Thomas Jeffrey

Author:Thomas, Jeffrey [Thomas, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jeffrey Thomas
Published: 2011-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

OCTOBER 3 2 nd

I drove home from my second shift job at eleven-thirty PM, during the most depressing part of Halloween night.

This was when the magic drained out of the streets like smoke wisping from a blown out jack o’-lantern. This was when the orange of October threatened to char overnight to the gray-brown of November. With a decisive creak, the earth turned on its axis from autumn toward winter. Yes, the magic was still out there, like a storm front on a weather man’s map, but it was migrating south, toward Mexico, where tomorrow they would have their Day of the Dead. So the gate between the living and the dead was still open...just shifting, like the moon, from one sky to another. The two realms were still in communion, overlapping. Our reality and another, the material and the spiritual, yin and yang.

But in the wet streets my car sloshed through, there was no more festivity. In fact, I had missed it altogether, having gone to the pharmaceutical company where I punched in every day for three PM. But I remembered the holiday clearly, fondly, from my childhood...and I knew what had been lost as the hour trudged – like a trick-or-treater through piles of leaves – toward midnight. It was now just five minutes away, according to my wristwatch with its numbers and hands glowing a faint fungal green.

At least I had had a tease of the magic on my way to work. There must have been a Halloween party at the Brown School. As I passed the old brick Wright Plastics building, where I used to work as an injection molder, I saw four children in Halloween costumes waiting to cross the street. They had their backpacks on and had either taken their masks off entirely or wore them pushed up on top of their heads, but at least I saw the wind-blown cape of a vampire, their bodies under their winter coats shiny orange, satiny purple, glittering green. Even the elderly crossing guard, whom I saw there every afternoon on my way to work, seemed to be in the spirit, wearing a bright orange jacket – though actually he wore that every day, no matter the season.

I had slowed and stopped as the old crossing guard shuffled out into the street, glaring at me with pugilistic menace as though daring me to try to dart through the white lines that barred my way before his charges were safely conveyed through them, as if filing along a narrow bridge that spanned a yawning chasm of black asphalt. But I waited patiently, as always, as he held up his stop sign like a king brandishing his scepter and ushered the children across, like spirits being invited into our world from their own.

I wished I was one of them.

But now, there were no more trick-or-treaters walking these sidewalks I passed alongside. Leaves that had earlier been piled crisp in the gutters, fluttering about in the brisk breeze like locusts, were now soggy, matted into something close to a slime.

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