Halloween by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, short stories, halloween
ISBN: 9781607013204
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2011-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

“Neva has a new Halloween game she wants us to play at the party,” said Donny.

Juno looked across the room at her younger brother. “Say what, scrubster?”

Donny was barely thirteen. He surprised everyone in the family room by chiming in about the Halloween party, because he didn’t seem to be paying attention to them at all; he was staring so fixedly into the video game he seemed in another room, another world: his fingers clicking the controller, his hands jabbed it in the air, his shoulders wrenched this way and that—as if these contortions could help his Killflyer safely pass the ice spikes hurtled by the enraged Living Mountains.

Juno, Donny’s older sister, sat with the others at the breakfast table on the tile floor beyond the stained carpet of the game-dominated family room. On wicker chairs around the kitchen table were Donny’s wearily obese mom, Juno and her best friend Linda, and Linda’s always-smiling dad, Mr. Carpenter. According to Linda, Mr. Carpenter was “a heavily medicated soccer Dad.”

Juno looked at her brother, saw him flying, in his mind and on-screen, into the box of the videogame—

One of those sickening feelings of unwanted scale came into Juno’s mind again: she seemed to see Donny in the box of the TV screen, and the box was like a little puppet theatre in which he zipped around in a toy spaceship, shooting things; and that box was inside the box of the family room, next to the box of the kitchen, both in the box of the split-level house, which was in a grid of such house-boxes, in the Southerton suburb of Sacramento, in the middle of California, on the coast of North America—in her mind, she could see it all from space, the planet a ball in space: the boxes stuck to the big ball, the big ball itself hanging, in her imagination, in some vast transparent box that astronomers had failed to discover because they weren’t supposed to, because . . .

Stop.

Dizzy, Juno pulled her mind back, and focused on the kitchen table; the crumbs of breakfast, the bowl of chips, the homely, comfortingly ordinary faces of her family and her friend Linda.

Donny was muttering something again about masks for the Halloween party. Focus on that.

“So you’re, like, in on this Halloween party committee all of a sudden, scrubster?” Juno asked, fishing in the bowl for a taco chip that hadn’t gotten limp by sitting out all night. “Ugh. Mom these chips are, like, blue food.”

“Then throw them in the trash and put out some fresh, Juno,” Mom said, distractedly looking at Donny.

Mr. Carpenter nodded his head in silent agreement at that. He was smiling but something in his expression said, Spoiled kids.

Donny was still staring into the screen, jerking his body around in a burlesque of his Killflyer’s trajectory. He made it past the beetling visages of the Living Mountains, muttering, “Aw riiiiight,” and flew on into the Jurassic Swamplands, where he began to systematically strafe the Village of the Swamp People.

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