And now, with the start of Fall, and Halloween right around the corner, I post for your reading pleasure one of my old favorites: a little piece entitled

My First Halloween

by Derek E Dykes

“Yet another disdainfully sunny day” I thought as my mother placed me in the stroller. Since my birth one year ago, I had been drowned in images of sunflowers and happy faces, clowns and small animals, and all sorts of bright, sunny, happy things; alas, I have had enough!

“Give me the gloom of a dungeon, or the stench of a rotting corpse, dear mother” I scream from my portable confinement. The woman must be deaf. She looked at me, smiling, and cooed a “that’s nice, sweetie” as a response. The fool had no idea of what I was saying, and my pleas for solitude and dark spaces go unanswered.

I looked ahead, and found what was sure to be our destination: the store. This place of fun-filled torture promised yet another afternoon of being forced into bright yellow clothes painted like the accursed sun, and long conversations with more grown-up idiots that, try as they may, cannot understand a single word that passes from my one-toothed mouth.

The air was crisp as we moved through the parking lot, and something deep inside told me that this was not to be an ordinary day. Of recent, the sun had set earlier (not to one word of complaint from me, of course), and the air seemed somehow cooler. The word “October” had come to my ears lately, although I had no idea what is was or what it meant. As we entered the store, I was about to find out!

The entrance to the store had changed recently; leaves of red, yellow, and a wonderfully dreary brown decorated the front doors, and to my amazement, my ears were not assailed by the usual sounds of women moaning pleas of lost love, or even worse; hammered organ music; not the usual “elevator music” as my painfully common mother called it. To my great joy and surprise, my ears were greeted with the sounds of people screaming in the distance.

“Is that a person being tortured, dear mother?” I optimistically asked, expecting gibberish for an answer.

“Maybe if you’re good”, the woman replied.

Could it be that the imbecile actually understood me?

We pushed further into this place of mindless commerce, past the usual $1.99 stack of junk, and through row upon row of large, perfumed women with bottoms the size of watermelons, admiring pants the size of playing cards. We passed the cameras, and the sporting department (I had lost interest as soon as I discovered they wouldn’t allow you to shoot the stupid people), and the fabrics and crafts…. And then I saw it.

Fantastic creatures of flowing white hung from the ceiling of a particularly dark aisle. Purplish light draped down from the fixtures above, giving a beautifully sickening look to all that came near. The screams were louder here, and now I could hear the sounds of things fluttering by, and deep voices with strange accents promising all manners of death and dismemberment to those foolish enough to test their will.

I had come home! As my mother, blissfully unaware of the obvious danger someone of her “happy” disposition was in, began her perilous trek through this place of glorious misery, I sat waiting for something to pop out of the darkened racks, and take her head off.

As we journeyed down the aisle, wondrous things passed before my eyes: bats and cats, witches and brooms, bubbling test tubes full of god – knows – what. This was truly a place of rapturous elation!

We went further down this tunnel of fantastic misery, and my mother, fully entranced by the hypnotic voices now coming from all around, began to fill her basket with things I never thought she’d purchase: black roses, for the living room, she said; a skeleton to hang on the front door; bag upon bag of tooth-decaying candy. The word “Halloween” sprang form her mouth more than once, and I futilely asked,” What is this ‘ Halloween ‘ dear mother?”.

“You’ll like Halloween, sweetie” the dumb woman answered.

Just then, I beheld a sight that surpassed all things I had seen until now. It was more morbid, nasty, and truly amazing than the witches, or cats, or skeletons, and yes, even more exciting than the bubbling test tubes full of god – knows – what. There, on the shelf than only two weeks before had held “precious”, sickening statuary of lambs before the slaughter, was a head.

Next to it was another head, and then another, and another! Joy of joys! This is what I had wanted to see! There they were, hundreds of them! Entombed in black boxes with their eyeless faces starring through their plastic windows, row after row of disembodied heads! How ghastly, fantastically morbid this was indeed! Maybe they do shoot all the criminally stupid people after all, and this is what they do with their heads! Just when I thought things could get no better, my mother, foolish, plain, common, idiot woman that she was, leaned over and asked, ” Which one do you want, my sweet love?”.

I nearly fainted. This woman, who couldn’t understand the simplest words that came from my mouth, had by her sheer nature as a mother anticipated my deepest desire. She was going to buy me one of these severed heads!

As we rode to my home, dear mother trying her unskilled best to control the direction of the vehicle, I sat strapped in yet another device of infant torture. Yet, unlike most of my previous journeys home, this trip I was content. In the bags at my small feet lay witches and cats, ghosts and bats, and bubbling test tubes full of god – knows – what. At my side lay black, dead roses, and a skeleton for my front door, and bag upon bag of tooth decaying candy. All these things were marvelous indeed, but in my tiny hands rest my greatest trophy of all: the head of Richard Millhouse Nixon.