Open Season

Your kid's at the funny farm. The Tea Party is having one. The woods have again been systematically purged of anything that doesn't walk upright. Your sister's friend is a mummy.

It's open season. Something's gotta give.

Traditionally what gives is your resolve not to open another bottle. Or five. But you're trying to go, if not straight, at least less...cattywompus. So you fire the Housekeeper and steal hydrangeas. You're too overloaded (you wish) to grow your own, so you steal them. At midnight. From a church. Good thing you're a drunken pagan atheist, or you'd have been dispatched forthwithly by a bolt of lightning.

The Housecreeper, er, Housekeeper finally turned over one too many of your cleavage-heavy Vanity Fairs, and you fired her ass. NOT!! Actually it was the Housekeeper's ass that did the firing, with a little help from your ass's bad attitude.

"I think it's time," her ass wrote, "we went our separate ways."

She left this ass-written note on the still-sticky-with-last-night's-alcoholic-mishaps kitchen table, along with an empty can of Scrubbing Bubbles, and went her separate way, presumably to the nearest nave, where she presumably got down on her housemaid's knees and thanked the lordourgod for having finally had the cajones to quit that evil woman's cleavage-and-icon-riddled den of iniquity, havemercyonmysoul, amen.

Not having a soul, your separate way took you directly to the nearest liquor store, where you stocked up on your own version of spirits. Speaking of which, did you hear about the woman who drove around with a mummy in the front seat of her car for ten months? It happened in California. Where people will do just about anything, and some people will do just about anything for the carpool lane.

When she lived in California -- yes, Dear Reader, she's one of THEM -- your sister used to know this...mummy. But that was another lifetime, as they say, not to mention another story. One for a dark and stormy night. Like the night you stole the hydrangeas.

You were working late -- the preschool where you teach is annexed to a church, of all places, canyoufuckingbelieveit? -- and the hydrangeas were beckoning to you under a crescent moon just beyond the window where you sat, christlike, cutting out bodies for the upcoming Meet My Family unit. Next thing you know you're out there in the moonlight, scissors in hand, wandering through the hedge of four-to-five-foot hydrangeas that skirts the building, ducking like a serial killer every time a car passed. You scored a couple dozen stiffs, er, stems, stuffing them into the back of the Jeep like corpses, and crept home along the back roads under the grinning moon.

Now the hydrangeas people your living room, their encephalitic heads bowed as if in solemn prayer, like so many cherubim, chiding you on your sinful urges and recent shameful stealing binge. From a fucking church! Of all places!

"You should be ashamed," they chide, "but it has been shown that you are a cleavage-and-icon-worshiping drunken pagan atheist and have no shame, so we shall take your shame unto ourselves and shall wail and lament on behalf of your sad and grievous ass forevermore, lordhearourprayer, amen."

But it's open season, everything's fair game. At least you're not a mummy. Yet. These days you're not even a mommy, but that's another story. There's always another story. Like the one you'll be telling the authorities when they haul your ass to jail for picking off hunters and Tea Partiers with a deer rifle from your perch atop the Old Clock Tower downtown.

"Just thinning the herd, officer, thinning the herd."

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.