The Jack-o-Lantern Box

by Karen Joan Kohoutek

“I’m home,” Jessy hollered into the space just inside the door. There was a clump of sound from the other room, and her mom popped her head around the corner.

  “There’s brownies in the kitchen,” she said. “Only one.”

  “Karma’s here.”

  “That’s fine.”

  They went into the kitchen and took out little plates from the cupboard, cut out raggedy-edged chocolate squares, and then plunked the brownies onto their plates. They were delicious.

  “How was school?” her mom said, appearing in the doorway.

  “Fine.”

  “Anything new going on?”

  There never was, so Jessy just shrugged.

  “Your sister isn’t outside, is she?”

  The window in the kitchen looked plainly out onto the yard. Unless she was crouched hiding behind the overgrown rose bush, it was obvious that Twyla wasn’t there.

  “I didn’t see her,” Jessy said.

  “Mmm.” Her mom made a non-committal noise and left the kitchen.

  “My mom has a new Redbook,” Jessy said then.

  “Really?” Karma asked. “I hope there’s a quiz.”

  They loved Redbook, because it was the raciest of the women’s magazines. Every year they had a big quiz asking the readers about their sex lives, and it had been much more informative than most of the paperbacks in Jessy's stash, which were more suggestive, and tended to go vague right when they really needed the details.

  After the brownies, they went upstairs to Jessy’s room.

  “It's not fair that she won't let me get out the Jack-o-Lantern Box,” Jessy complained. “We could get a head start on the decorating.”

  “We can always make some new decorations,” Karma suggested.

  They hauled out a carton filled with scissors and glue and all the other craft supplies, and spread them out on the floor. There was a whole pack of construction paper, with different colors, and one that was nothing but black, along with a wad of paper sheets that were already partially used, leaving them full of strange holes, or cut into odd rectangles. A lot of the supplies used to be Twyla's, but she had cleared all that stuff out of her room.

  “I can use my new colors,” Jessy said.

  She had nagged her mom mercilessly for them when the school year started. They weren’t the official crayons on the official list, which was only the regular 64-count pack. Her mom would never let her get the super-giant pack, with all the extra colors, because they weren’t necessary for her classes, and besides, they were expensive. It’s true, the kids with the big crayon boxes did seem like show-offs, so maybe her mom had a point.

  This packet of crayons was totally different, though, a smaller batch of colors that were supposed to be fluorescent.

  “You can’t be drawing the grass neon-green,” her mom had said.

  “Why not?”

  “The grass is supposed to be grass-green.”

  That seemed like a very limited view of the world. Finally her mom had agreed to let her buy them, so long as she didn't bring them to school.

  Jessy sat on the floor, legs crossed in the lotus position, and opened the glossy cardboard edge of the crayon package. The colors were pastel, but bright, not the pale, washed-out colors she thought of as pastel, like outfits she'd have to wear to church on Easter Sunday. She ran her finger along the tops.

  “There's a lot of black construction paper left,” Karma said, flipping through the paper book.

  “Yeah. So, what should we make?”

  They thought for a minute.

  “Well,” Jessy said. “We have bats and cats and owls and stuff in the Jack-o-Lantern Box.”

  “Do you have the patterns?”

  The other decorations had been made with card stock patterns, that Jessy’s mom had gotten from a magazine. They traced around the shapes, onto the construction paper, then cut them out.

  “The patterns are in the box, too.”

  “Well, we could make new patterns, but I can't draw long-hand.”

  “Yes, you can,” Jessy said. “You can draw really good.”

  “There’s orange paper, too,” Karma added. “We could start with some jack-o-lanterns. They're easy.”

  “And we can make the eyes and noses and mouths out of the black paper scraps.”

  “What about the colors?”

  “We’re just going to have to try and draw some pictures,” Jessy said. “Some scenes.” 

  They each grabbed a book to use as a smooth surface, and spread a sheet of plain white typing paper on it. Karma started sketching in pencil before she colored. Jessy grabbed a pink crayon and drew a big blobby oblong. Kind of like a circle, but she wasn’t worried about how it looked, if it was really a circle or not. Then she filled in the circle with more pink, and used the green and the blue -- which was a disappointing shade, kind of watery -- to give the shape big, bulbous eyes.

  The colors were paler on paper than they looked in the box, and it was impossible to get the colors very dark, even when she went over and over them. Still, they gave everything an eerie quality, as if they might glow in the dark.

  “Weird,” Karma said, looking over at what she’d done.

  “What are you drawing?” Jessy asked.

  “I’m trying an owl,” she said. “Maybe I'll use the orange.”

  “That would look nice.”

  Karma’s concentrated really hard on her owl, staring at the paper, and muttering how the crayon wasn’t doing what she wanted it to do.

  After awhile they stopped and inspected their work. The owl looked great, filling the page with its big staring eyes, and detailed feathers on its body, brown and orange. Little hooky feet clutched onto the tree branch it sat on. Jessy's drawing was finally identifiable as a spider, with long, hairy tentacle legs, and behind it, an uneven red web.

  They both tried to draw skulls, but they couldn’t make the shapes right. So Jessy started drawing a witch’s head, with long stringy orange hair and a green warty face. The colors were perfect for that, and it didn't matter if the face was off-balance. Karma began an elaborate landscape, starting with a green horizontal line on the bottom of the paper. She drew some thin spindly trees and some oval-headed tombstones, and put a sliver of moon in the sky. In the sky-space behind the moon, she carefully filled in a thin violet color.

  “That’s beautiful,” Jessy said. It was. She wanted to live in that picture.

  “Where are we going to hang them up?” Karma asked.

  “All over,” Jessy said.

   They had some time before Karma’s dad would be coming to pick her up. Jessy’s parents were talking in the kitchen, and they ignored her when she went in to dig the Scotch tape out of the junk drawer. Then she and Karma picked spots to tape up their masterpieces, on the walls in the living room and the dining room.

  When that was done, they went outside and sat on the steps. It was already starting to get darkish early in the day. A slight breeze rustled the leaves.

  “We have quiz in Reading tomorrow, don’t we?” Karma said.

  “Yeah.” That meant it wasn’t going to be a fun class. The teachers didn’t seem to like the quizzes and tests any more than the kids did.

  Down the block, they could see Twyla coming down the sidewalk. She was walking with a boy that Jessy didn’t recognize. They were walking really close together, and when they got a little nearer, Jessy could see that he had his hand hooked around the loop on the front of her jeans.

  Twyla had a boyfriend for a while, but they hadn’t seen him around in a long time. Jessy didn’t know if they’d had a fight or broken up, or if it was just a coincidence.

  “Hey,” Twyla called when they got in heying distance of the house. “Whatcha doing?”

  “We’ve just been playing,” Jessy said.

  Twyla plunked down on top of the picnic table, between the steps and the cellar door. The guy just stood next to her, like he wasn't sure what to do.

  “Cool,” she said.

/>   “I gotta go,” the guy said.

  “Yeah.” She tilted her head back a little, and he leaned down and they kissed, hard, like they were really concentrating. If their mom or dad looked out the kitchen window right then, they could see the whole thing. Twyla didn’t seem to care at all, but the idea made Jessy very nervous.

  “See you tomorrow,” the guy said, and grinned. He raised his hand in a casual acknowledgement of Jessy and Karma as he left.

  “Who’s that?” Jessy asked.

  “A friend.” Twyla shrugged, and fiddled in the breast pocket of her jean jacket. She buttoned the unbuttoned one, and checked the other. She seemed to be holding something small, but then she quickly slipped her hand in the pocket of her jeans. Sleight of hand.

  “So what have you been playing?”

  “We’ve been drawing and stuff,” Jessy told her. Then, “Mom was looking for you before.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything.”

  “You were doing something.”

  Twyla gave her a look. “Don’t be a brat.”

  “I’m not,” Jessy said. “It's logic.”

  “I was just hanging out. There’s no law against that. Not yet.”

  They all sat in silence for a minute.

  “They're talking about a big bonfire down at the skating rink next weekend,” Twyla said suddenly. She usually updated them on the doings of the high school kids, like it was a TV show they were all watching. “After the football game.”

  “Will you go?”

  “Well, maybe. It depends on if there’s anything else going on. There’ll probably be some parties. Someone should be getting a keg.”

  High school sounded very glamorous to Jessy. It was always a party, always a drama. Elementary school was really boring.

  “We had to play the recorders today,” she said.

  “Oh, I hated the recorder!” Twyla said. “They still do that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s no way to teach music.” Then, “You know Mike?”

  “Mike who?”

  “He was just here.”

  “Oh, that guy,” Jessy said, like it was a matter of no concern.

  “He’s going to teach me to play the guitar.”

  “Really?” Both Jessy and Karma got kind of excited at that. Then, “Jinx,” they both said, and fast as they could, “One two three four five six seven eight nine ten.” And Karma punched her in the arm.

  “He’s going to let me use his old acoustic guitar, to practice on.”

  Jessy really couldn’t picture her playing an acoustic guitar, like she was Joan Baez or something. It was like Twyla could read her mind.

  “It’s not what I’d pick, but it’s free, and it’ll be a lot quieter to practice on.”

  “That’s true,” Jessy agreed.

  “My brother has an old electric guitar that he left in the garage,” Karma said. Everyone they knew had a crush on her brother Todd, who was even older than Twyla, and had gone off to college.

  “That’s right. He and Gene Sorensen had that band,” Twyla said. She gave a snorting laugh.

  “What’s funny?” Jessy asked.

  “Nothing.” She still looked amused though. “Maybe someday you guys will start a band.”

  Jessy and Karma looked at each other. What a thought. Todd had played a couple of parties, and once they did a school dance, but that had been the end of their career. Then there was the sister of another girl in their grade, someone who was the acoustic guitar type. She dropped out of school to join a traveling band of Jesus Freaks who played Christian folk music. That was really, truly glamorous, more than they could imagine.

  The sky was starting to get darker. It seemed like they should be getting called in to eat, or that Karma’s dad should be showing up any second. Leaves skittered suggestively on the sidewalk.

  “Do you remember when they used to have the bonfires at Grandma’s old farm?” Twyla asked, a dreamy look on her face.

  “I don’t know.” Jessy searched her mind.

  Before she went into the nursing home, their Grandma had lived on the old farm, although she hadn’t actually planted anything, or kept animals, in years. Behind the house, before you hit the scrubby scruff of woods, were some old run-down farm buildings, the paint long gone, everything a decaying grey. And there was a circle of scorched ground where they used to burn garbage, and a few big heavy metal drums of garbage cans, all of it surrounded by trees. Jessy remembered a weeping willow somewhere nearby, and a patch of evergreen trees, a silvery flicker of birches behind them.

  “They used to burn garbage behind the old barn,” Twyla went on. “And there were marks on the ground, where they obviously used to burn bigger stuff, like when they had cut down a lot of branches.”

  “I remember that,” Jessy said.

  “Well, one night when we staying there, one summer, I woke up in the middle of the night, and I could smell something burning. So I sat up, kind of worried, thinking there was a fire. I got out of bed and tiptoed into the hallway. And Gordon was already out there, in his pajamas.” Gordon was their cousin, a year older than Twyla. “I asked what he was doing up, and he said he could see something burning out his window. We were sleeping in the bedroom on the side of the house facing toward the highway, remember?”

  Jessy did. They always slept in that room.

  “And the boys were in one of the rooms across the hall. Anyway, he said he could see something red out in the woods. The house was quiet, just totally silent, like you weren’t even breathing. And it was dark, just a little light from the window in the stairwell. It was spooky.”

  Jessy and Twyla were hanging on her every word.

  “So we found our shoes and we tiptoed outside. It was kind of eerie, out there in the country, because there was no one around. No street lights, no house across the street, you know? It was just … us. In the dark. And the old buildings were all dark and empty and falling apart. Gordon was right. I could see the flicker of red through the trees. We just walked toward the glow. Every crack that the ground made underneath our feet sounded just thunderously loud.”

  The wind seemed to pick up a little bit. Jessy shivered. She should have worn her jacket, but she hadn’t, just because her mom would have told her to put it on.

  “When we got closer, we could tell there were people out by the garbage pit. We went around the corner of the old barn, and peered into the clearing. You remember there was that a kind of semicircle of trees around it? So it was open on the one side, and on the other, a ring of trees, like a screen from the sky. There was a huge fire burning in a patch on the ground, and they were all standing around the flames.”

  “Who?” Jessy demanded.

  “It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the light, but then I realized it was Mom and Dad and Aunt Bonita and Uncle Jerry, and then some other people I didn’t recognize. Neighbors, maybe.”

  “What were they doing?” Karma asked.

  “They were standing there, silent. Kind of swaying, making dark shadows against the fire. Then somebody I didn’t recognize lifted his hands above his head, and they started swaying faster, and they were kind of, I don’t know how to describe it.” She pondered. “Chanting.”

  “Chanting?”

  “They were mumbling, and saying something, but it didn’t make any sense to me. They started moving faster, like they were dancing, standing in place and shaking. And the chanting got louder and louder, and then I was getting really scared. I didn’t know what was going to happen. It looked like they were totally out of control. Then the leader guy raised his hands again, and he said some word, that wasn’t in English. And Mom and Aunt Bonita and the other women took off their tops.”

  “What?”

  “They kind of writhed, and they took off their shirts, and they threw them into the fire.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of the women were standing there, dancing in front of the fire, just wearing their bras.”


  “What were they doing?” Karma asked, her voice low.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t really understand what I was seeing. Aunt Bonita started dancing really crazy, and she was panting for breath, and then she just – tore her bra off, in this crazy gesture, and she threw the bra in the bonfire too. When that happened, the flames echoing off her skin, Gordon just gasped out loud.”

  Jessy and Karma both gasped too.

  “He gasped out loud, and they stopped, and turned to look at us.”

  Jessy’s whole body was tense.

  “What happened?”

  “I just remember some kind of commotion. The group seemed to kind of break up, and Mom and Aunt Bonita came over to us, and she was wearing a shirt.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I think Uncle Jerry must have given it to her, but I don’t know. Then in the morning, I woke up in bed, and you were asleep. I tried to ask Mom later what had happened, and she said I’d had a dream.”

  “Do you think it was a dream?” Jessy asked.

  “The thing is, it seemed like a dream. It seems more like a dream than like something that really happened. But when I woke up, I could smell the smoke on my hair, and on my pajamas. It was all oily smoky, just like a bonfire. But the grown-ups acted like nothing had happened.”

  “What do you think did happen?” Karma asked.

  Twyla leaned over toward them, and her voice got really, really quiet.

  “I think they were witches,” she said.

  Jessy and Karma sat there, stone silent.

  Suddenly there was a bang on the screen door.

  “Dinner’s ready!” their Mom called in the dinner-bell voice. Then, in a normal speaking tone, “Karma, you better call your folks.”

  Twyla darted up and went into the house, their mom saying, “Nice of you to join us.”

  Jessy and Karma half-dashed inside too. Karma called her mom, who said her dad was on his way. She’d barely put the phone down when they saw his car pull up. Jessy walked back out to the front steps with her.

  “She was making that up, wasn’t she?” Karma asked.

  “She had to have been,” Jessy said. “If she’d seen something that crazy, she would have told me about it before now.”

  “I knew she was making it up,” Karma said.

  “Me too.”

  But they both still sounded worried.

  At dinner, their mom waited until everyone was eating, and then she said, “I see we have some new art work in the house.”

  “I like it,” Twyla said. “Very original.”

  “Thanks,” Jessy said.

  “Yeah. I’ve never seen a pink spider before. Or a spider with antennae.”

  Jessy glared at her. “You’re not an expert on spiders.”

  Their mom looked at them, amused. “I’m not sure it’s exactly the decorating scheme I have in mind,” she went on. “And you know you need permission before you start taping things up on the walls.”

  “It’s only until Halloween,” Jessy said.

  Their mom sighed.

  “The colors are a little garish,” she muttered.

  “Oh, go ahead,” her dad put in. “Let her have her fun.”

  “You’re not the one who’s going to have to clean off the tape marks.”

  ****