I Pass Like Night by Jonathan Ames

Author:Jonathan Ames [Ames, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-19T13:00:00+00:00

TRICK OR TREAT

Joy came over and when she kissed me I told her to leave. She had put her tongue in my mouth and the taste was terrible. She must have smoked a cigarette as she walked over and I had told her in the past never to smoke before she saw me and so I yelled at her, “Get the hell out of here. I can’t stand the taste of cigarettes.” I pushed her out of my room and slammed the door shut.

I looked at her through the peephole and she was standing there and her face was all distorted, her forehead was humongous and her chin was almost non-existent. She started crying which made it worse and she must have realized I was watching, because all of a sudden she shot out a grossly enlarged fuck finger right up to her side of the peephole. I reflexively jerked my head back in shock and when I ventured to look again she was running down the rickety, dirty stairs. But I knew she’d come back in a few days, it’s a vicious cycle, and I wondered to myself, “Why does she want me? Can’t she see what I am?”

When I turned away from the door I spotted the Daily News on the floor and there was a big ad that said, Halloween is coming! And whenever I think of Halloween I get this image in my mind of a woman in a kitchen. She’s middle-class heavy in a house dress and apron, has large glasses, wears her light brown hair conservatively on her head and her kitchen is white and spotless. (I must have formed this picture from a very early school film on careers that said: “This is a housewife.”) And in my vision she’s at the sink and she’s putting razors in apples, but because her back is to me I can’t see how. She has a whole bowlful ready to go when the doorbell rings. She wipes her hands on her apron and goes to the door. A chorus of ghoulish, smiling kids sings, “Trick or treat, trick or treat,” and she smiles back as she hands each one of them an apple. They are bathed in the yellow light of her porch, it’s only six-thirty but dark because it’s October, and she watches them run happily across her lawn and then shuts the door.

When I went around as a kid I was always eyeing each lady trying to figure out which one would put razors in apples. Every year we were warned by our parents and teachers not to eat anything until we came home and had it inspected. We were warned that many children died each year. But in my neighborhood we never got apples, though every Halloween I hoped for one. I wanted to be the one who got the apple with the razor and beat the person at their own game: I found the razor! So after thinking about this for one second I realized why Joy and the others have wanted me, I’m an apple with a razor inside.

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