Not This Year

For Halloween this year my husband and I bolted the doors and doused the lights and rounded up the canine fur-bearer and tiptoed past the ghosts on the landing to the third floor where we lit the candles and pulled the curtains and burnt incense and streamed Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" and ran an old black-and-white movie with the sound off then pushed aside the skeletons in the closet and staged a fashion show with purchases from a recent shopping spree we undertook to update our eighties wardrobes but first we got stoned.

In honor of the black-and-white movie and the black-and-white holiday and life being anything but black-and-white I declared shoulders once again haute couture and installed MAG16X football pads into each new sweater and paraded around through the wafting air in cigarette jeans and fuck me pumps like some JC Penney Frankenstein until the cobwebs in the corners started to smoke and we cracked the windows to equalize the pressure and saw that the street outside our haunted house was massing with children but none of them ours.

Now it was up to us to keep the fur-bearer preoccupied lest she notice the wandering urchins and commence to agitate so we ratcheted the soundtrack and threw caution out the window and played hide the bone where's the bone the bone is hiding where could it be? until the rafters rang and the bats caved and we drowned out the greedy demands of the masked tricksters infesting the neighborhood where all these years I've been firing up the pumpkin and lighting the lamps and answering the door in a witch hat and cackle but not this year.