Tag Archives: Halloween

The ones who don’t say “Trick or Treat”

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Halloween is my favorite time of the year. When else can we go door to door, jeer at and veritably threaten the people who answer the summons, and still be met with candy? Candy! Oh the season of candy. It brings me such joy. This is my Christmas and Thanksgiving. Imagine if I wandered up to a stranger’s house in July, rang the bell and shouted, “TRICK OR TREAT!”Odds on, they’d call the cops.

But there are those who knock on the stoop year round, most particularly salespeople and religious proselytizers. I don’t have sympathy for the sellers of goods I don’t want.… Read the rest

Blood ties

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Clarissa Drew pulled her dress tight over her rounding belly. “This fits too well,” she muttered.

Her husband went on shaving. “It’s driving me crazy.”

“My dress?”

“No. You know.”

“Owen, he’s not some Dickensian waif you can pluck up like Oliver Twist. He’s your nephew. He has parents.”

“Horrible parents.”

“His parents.”

“They aren’t fit! God only knows what the kid sees. Pot, sex, meth, whatever walks in that trailer door.” Owen drew an even line through the foam on his cheek and shook the razor in the sink.

“You don’t know that.”

“You mean I can’t prove it.”… Read the rest

Or Treat

Posted on by February 25, 2020

“Of all the rotten goddamned days to die.” Richard Larks stared around the room, waiting for his wife to come to bed. She wouldn’t, of course. She was somewhere between Tyler Memorial and Beckman’s by now. Richard was left with a room full of her things, every object a phantom of the woman herself.

He palmed her opal earrings as the doorbell rang “Mrs. Larks! Trick or Treat!” called a querulous voice.

“She doesn’t hear you,” Richard muttered.

He found a needle and an ink pen among Sophia’s things then went to the kitchen for ice. Wasn’t this how they did it in the old days?… Read the rest