The Halloween Moon

by Joseph Fink

  “No, Mom, not her.”

  “Sasha, do not be a brat. Esther, honey, it’s dangerous to walk alone. Hop in.”

  “That’s okay, Mrs. Min,” she said, and Sasha sighed in loud relief.

  “I don’t know what your parents are thinking, letting you walk all that way by yourself,” Mrs. Min said, just loud enough that Esther could hear. Edward threw one of his toy trucks from the back seat into the front seat and laughed.

  Esther didn’t get the big deal. It was a ten-minute walk. She didn’t know what kind of great dangers Mrs. Min thought might be lurking in the lazy sunlight of a Southern California afternoon, but the most threatening obstacles Esther had ever encountered during the day were those same parents, too busy scolding their children while driving to notice Esther crossing the street.

  The way home wound by a series of quiet cul-de-sacs before dipping through a bit of wild land that had been left by the real estate developer as a combination vacant lot and low-maintenance park. The truth was that the developer hadn’t wanted to shell out the money for bulldozing the little canyon into submission. And so there was this pit of land full of narrow trails, some put there half-heartedly by the developer and some etched by the eager feet of children as they sought out every hidden cranny and secret clearing. The stream that ran though the center of the canyon was just gutter runoff on its way to the city sewer.

  When the sun was out, the canyon was a playground for the neighborhood’s children, and Esther loved it for the adventure it offered, only a short and steep dirt path down from a suburban street. But the moment the sun went down, the safety of the canyon disappeared, and it became the domain of all sorts of creatures, from roving coyotes to, most worrisome of all, high schoolers who were known to use the secluded areas of the canyon for late-night parties. The canyon was where the older teenagers did whatever they couldn’t do in the streets and empty parking lots. Esther was wisely cautious of the feral animals, but it was the older kids and their parties, parties that felt to her both grown-up and wild, that put a pit in her stomach as big as the canyon itself.

  As she walked home that afternoon, the canyon was still in its daylight form, a pretty bit of nature between tract homes. She took the path through the center of the canyon, across the wooden bridge over the gray gutter runoff pretending to be a stream, past the low-hanging branches of a white flowered plant she knew was called “mule fat.” (This plant and its name are real. Look it up.) Her father had taught her the name on one of their walks when she was little, and it had always stuck with her, even as she had forgotten every other plant he had taught her.

  Past the mule fat was a tunnel that went under the main road. The walls of the tunnel were made of corrugated metal, so passing though it made her feel like water running down a drain. In the middle of the tunnel the air got cold, no matter how warm the day. It was the only part of the walk home that Esther found unnerving. The shadows in the middle of the tunnel were deep, seeming to promise secret side passageways leading even farther away from the warmth of day, passageways that a child would never find their way out of.

  She and her friend Agustín had grown up playing in the canyon. They had made up a game called “The Feats of Strength.” One of them would announce that the game was starting, and then they both had to get through a series of feats before the other did.

  The first feat was climbing to the top of the tunnel entrance and sitting with your feet dangling over. Then, you had to crawl through a narrow pipe in the drainage ditch. Third, you made your way carefully (and often painfully) up a steep slope covered in cactus, running along a secret path that the two of them had formed by passing over it so many times (the path was directly against the back fences of nearby houses, and the dogs in those backyards would jump and bark as they ran), to the site of the final and as yet unattempted feat. This was leaping from a ledge into a pond full of runoff water below. Neither of them had ever completed that last feat, mainly because the height of the jump scared them both, but also, and this was the reason they said out loud and chose to believe, the pond was absolutely disgusting; brackish, algae covered, and full of who knows what from the city gutters.

  But Agustín wasn’t with her on this walk, so she hurried through the tunnel to the other side, where the trail grew broad and flat, winding along the fake stream until it rose sharply back up to the gate that led to her street. She came out of the gate and turned the corner, passing Mr. Nathaniel’s house.

  Mr. Nathaniel was washing his car. He washed his car constantly, even though there was usually a drought declared in Southern California. And he never seemed to drive it anywhere, so the car never got dirty. It was a Ford pickup, stationed always in the driveway. Not only did Mr. Nathaniel hose it down a couple times a week, but he also liked to spray down his driveway and the sidewalk in front of it. It drove Esther’s father crazy.

  “We’re in a water shortage, and he’s watering the sidewalk,” her father would say, peeking through the blinds of their front window at Mr. Nathaniel, who was stubbornly spraying the concrete like it might sprout and grow.

  Once, Mr. Nathaniel had even gone out in the middle of a rainstorm, standing outside without an umbrella or jacket, his shirt clinging and turning see-through, spraying water onto a driveway that had already become a waterfall after two days of rain. That time Esther’s father had been too angry even to speak.

  “I . . . ,” he had said to Esther, waving his hand. “Well . . . ,” he had said, and then he had gone to take a nap. Sometimes when Esther’s father got too frustrated, he would just take a nap.

  Esther didn’t like Mr. Nathaniel. Not for the same reason as her father. She also thought that his constant car and sidewalk washing were wasteful, but the real reason she didn’t like Mr. Nathaniel was because there was an aspect about him that unsettled her. Nothing specific, but on a gut level, he didn’t feel right. She hated walking by his house when he was outside, which he often was, hair mussed, wrinkled face sullen and blank, checkered shirt loose at the collar with a white tuft coming out of it at his throat. As long as she could remember he had seemed the same age, and that age was very old.

  She walked quickly past him. He ignored her and kept spraying his car, although she swore that he aimed the hose intentionally so the water bounced off its side and sprayed her. Now her socks and shoes were all wet. She hated Mr. Nathaniel.

  Two doors down from Mr. Nathaniel was the Gabler house. The Gablers were perfectly nice people except for one great crime that outweighed every pleasant “Oh, hi there, Esther” and friendly wave. The crime was this: Mr. Gabler was a dentist, and so on Halloween night, they put out a bowl full of toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes.

  Esther didn’t require that everyone love Halloween as much as she did. She didn’t require that everyone participate. Some people turned off their lights and pretended they weren’t home when Halloween came around, and that was fine with her. As long as there were always some houses with lights on and jack-o’-lanterns lit, then the nonparticipators were merely background noise to her Halloween experience.

  But to actively spit in the face of all that Halloween stands for by getting every passing trick-or-treater’s hopes up, only to have those hopes dashed by a plastic bowl full of what could only be described as the moral opposite of candy? This to Esther was a crime without pardon. Her only solace was that the toothbrushes usually ended up scattered all over their lawn, and the toothpaste tubes were often put on the Gablers’ front walk and stomped until they exploded, a little mint rainbow on the concrete, left to dry to a chalky lump by the next morning’s sun. Once a year, on November first, Mr. Gabler looked like Mr. Nathaniel, carefully going over his driveway with a hose.

  “Oh, hi there, Esther,” called Mr. Gabler. He often came home for lunch, since his office was only a ten-minute drive away. Right now, it looked like he was on his way back to his car for an afternoon of rooting around in people’s mouths.

  “Hi, Mr. Gabler,” she said, trying to sound
as pleasant as she possibly could. She knew his heresy against Halloween wasn’t really his fault. He just didn’t get it. She could, and did, and always would forever and ever, hold it against him, but she still tried to be polite about it. In any case, the truth was that the toothpaste wasn’t what bothered her most about Mr. Gabler. The main issue was his absolute mundanity. There was no adventure that she could see to his life, and it seemed such a waste of the freedom adulthood gives you to spend it staring in strangers’ mouths and watching TV news every night. It was the opposite of everything Halloween stood for to Esther. The toothpaste was only a symptom of the utter boredom of Mr. Gabler’s life.

  “Say hello to your dad for me,” Mr. Gabler said as he got back into his car.

  “I sure will,” she said, to the slamming of his car door. She sure wouldn’t. Toothpaste. Ugh.

  As she reached her corner, she heard strange music in the air. She had never heard music like it before. It was the warbling chime of an ice cream truck, but the melody wasn’t any of the happy and annoying melodies those trucks usually blared. Instead, the music sounded sad, or even angry. The song was complex and long, and a little off-key. It was the music an ice cream truck would play at a funeral, if anyone was ever eccentric enough to have an ice cream truck at their funeral.

  The source of the music came trundling out of the cul-de-sac with worn tires and a hood belching puffs of black smoke. The ice cream truck, if that’s what it was, was filthy, and along the side of the truck there was the faded image of a jack-o’-lantern, drawn so crudely that it barely resembled any jack-o’-lantern she had ever seen. In chipped and badly applied type around the jack-o’-lantern were the words “Queen of Halloween Pumpkins. Get yours while they last!”

  An ice cream truck that sold pumpkins. What an odd idea, but she also found it cool. More everyday institutions should be changed in October to celebrate Halloween. Schools should teach ghost stories. Every house should be haunted. Every dream should be a nightmare.

  The driver gave her a long look as he drove by. His hair was greasy and combed down over his face. What she could see of his expression looked sullen, like he hated not only his job, but the whole world too. Suddenly the idea of the truck seemed less cool. She decided it was best to get through her front door, and quick.

  By the time she got inside and up to her room, she was already forgetting about the creepy man driving the ice cream truck that wasn’t an ice cream truck. Because it was only one more night until Halloween, and there was so much left to do.

  “ESTHER!” HER DAD SHOUTED.

  “Esther!” her mom shouted.

  “Oh, you wanted to talk to her too?” her dad said.

  “You go first,” her mom said.

  “No, no, please.”

  “Esther, I want to talk about Halloween.”

  “Oh! That’s what I wanted to talk to her about too.”

  “We should have discussed this beforehand, shouldn’t we?”

  Sometimes her parents were so helpless at parenting that she loved them all the more for it. They had three children, with her in the middle, and they still hadn’t figured out conversations like this.

  Continuing to chatter away nervously about their lack of plan, her parents sat her down by the grand piano in the living room. Her dad led a wedding band for a living, and so he had instruments of all kinds scattered throughout the house. This week he had found a used saxophone online and was trying to teach himself to play it, much to the dismay of everyone else in the house, even Esther’s three-year-old sister, Sharon. Each family member had their own way of expressing this displeasure. Her mom smiled even more than she regularly did, but her smile had a lot more teeth than usual. Esther’s older brother was always over at his friends’ houses, whiling away sunny California afternoons in dark bedrooms playing video games for five or six hours at a time. Her sister threw tantrums and cried about Daddy’s new fart horn. And Esther expressed herself the same way she expressed herself about anything: by preparing even more seriously for Halloween.

  “Esther, we know how much you love Halloween,” her mom said.

  They didn’t, though. Oh, they understood that she liked it a lot—clearly they detected a real affinity for the holiday. But they did not understand how for her the year revolved around the end of October the way it does for other kids around Christmas or summer vacation or their birthday.

  “And we’re glad to see you excited about something,” her dad said. “Excitement is . . . exciting.”

  Her parents didn’t seem to know who should say what. Her mom paused for her dad to jump in, and then he didn’t, so she started to talk just as he noticed the pause and started to talk and they both spoke at once and then paused. Finally her mom said, “Esther, you’re thirteen now. You’ve had your bat mitzvah. You’re an adult.”

  “Mom, I think both of us know that I’m not really an adult.”

  “You are in some ways,” her dad said. “You’re getting there. And being an adult doesn’t mean you have to give up being excited about hobbies. Look how excited I’ve been about learning the saxophone.”

  Her mom and Esther grimaced in unison.

  “But,” her dad continued without noticing, “it does mean that you have to think about how your hobbies affect others.”

  “Yes, yes,” her mom said, nodding at her dad with real annoyance. “Everyone in this house should think about how their hobbies affect others.”

  “Exactly,” her dad said, satisfied that finally he and her mom were on the same page.

  Her mom was a court reporter, a job she despised but tolerated. The pay was decent, as were the hours, and so she constantly said that she had no reason to complain. She would say that again and again, until it started to sound to Esther a lot like complaining. And her mom was not particularly sympathetic to Esther’s creative excesses around Halloween.

  Her dad, being someone who played music for a living, should have been more understanding. But working in a creative field only made him constantly aware of how much basic business sense and wild luck were required to turn an artistic pursuit into a job, and so in many ways he was more serious than her mom.

  “Anyway, this has maybe gotten away from us a bit,” her mom said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re not always good at stuff like this.”

  “Oh?” said Esther.

  “But it comes down to this, Est,” her dad said. “We think maybe this is the year you don’t go trick-or-treating.”

  Her heart made a move she had never felt before. Like it had shrunk but also relocated somewhere into her knees.

  “. . . what?” she whispered. Her voice didn’t sound like her. Who was that hoarse and timid weakling using her mouth to speak?

  “Oh, honey,” her mom said. “I know you love trick-or-treating, but that’s something for children to do. And you’re not a child anymore. That doesn’t mean you have to stop having fun! Maybe you could answer the door in your costume. Give candy to the kids. It might be fun to be on the other side of that equation for the first time.”

  “Or we could have a little Halloween dinner. Make pumpkin cupcakes or something,” her dad said.

  Esther felt that she needed to lie down. This was horrible.

  “Whatever you do tomorrow,” her mom said, “we just think it’s time you stopped trick-or-treating. It’s not fair to the kids who are young enough to do it, and people are going to start being, well, weirded out when a teenager shows up at their door asking for candy.”

  “I’m not a teenager!”

  “You are, though,” her dad said. “Believe us, we’re no happier about it than you are.”

  “Okay,” she said, looking for some angle to bargain with, “I see what you’re saying, and I understand. This will be the last year I go trick-or-treating. It will be hard, but you’re right. After this year, I’ll be done.” She didn’t mean any of that. She would be right out there next year, but it would give her twelve whole months to figure out how to work
around her parents.

  “No, honey, you’re not hearing us,” her mom said. “Last year was the last year. You’re not going trick-or-treating this year. This isn’t optional.”

  “I hate you!” she shouted. That wasn’t what she meant to say. She didn’t hate them. But she couldn’t believe they were doing this to her, and she didn’t know what other words to use to communicate that utter disbelief. Lately she had been feeling more emotions than she had words to express, and if that was what being a teenager was, then count her out on that.

  “Esther,” her dad said, shaking his head in disappointment.

  “You don’t hate us,” her mom said. “You also shouldn’t make strong statements like that if you don’t mean them.”

  “I do!” she said. “I do hate you.” She didn’t hate them. She didn’t even know why she was saying it, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  “Alright, hate us,” her dad said. “You’re not going trick-or-treating either way. That part isn’t your choice. Your choice is if you want to be angry and miserable about it, or have a good night instead.”

  “Honey, listen, you can still do something fun,” her mom said. “We’re going to let this tantrum you’re throwing right now slide because we know how hard this is for you.”

  “We are?” her dad said to her mom. “We do?”

  “Yes, we do and we are. Oh! I know. Why don’t you go with Agustín and his mom to the movies?”

  Of course. That was it. Agustín would be her way out of this. She forced herself to smile, take a few breaths. She wanted to trick-or-treat, and so she would. Her parents’ wishes would not get in the way of her own.

  “You’re right, Mom, Dad. I’m sorry I said all that.” She wasn’t sorry. “I’ll call Agustín and see if I can go with them. Thanks for suggesting it.”

  She got up and walked to her room. Her mom and dad looked at each other, trying to figure out if they had done the parenting thing correctly there or not.

  “That probably went as well as it could,” her mom said.