The Jack-o-Lantern Box

by Karen Joan Kohoutek

Over the weekend, her dad went to run an errand. It wasn't supposed to take very long, so her mom fidgeted around the house, and finally, sick of waiting, she went out for groceries by herself. When she came home, Jessy helped her take stuff out of the crackling paper bags.

  “Pineapple-coconut juice?” she said, looking at a tall curved bottle. It was white like milk, but almost see-through.

  “It’s something new,” her mom said.

  When the bags were empty, Jessy smoothed them out and folded them carefully, before tucking them into the spot between the refrigerator and the wall. She had a lot of uses for good paper bags this time of year. Then she tried a little glass of the pineapple-coconut juice. It seemed thicker than milk, but somehow thinner at the same time. The taste made her think of the time she and Twyla had sprawled out on the grass in the summer, trying to imagine a color they’d never seen. Because how would they know what it was like, if they’d never seen it?

  If I'm going to be a writer, she thought, I have to figure out how to describe something like that. It wasn't all describing cobwebs in the doorways of haunted houses. The characters had to live places, and do things, and eat things. That was really the hard part, even though that seemed totally backward.

  When her dad came in the door, he was carrying a cardboard box with a dirty cover. Her mom instinctively looked horrified, but when they went out to help him unload the car, she tried to put on a cheerful expression.

  “What do you have there?” she said. Jessy could hear the needly sound in her voice, but her dad didn’t seem to notice.

  “Joe Storvig had a couple of pieces to give me,” he said. “But he wanted to get rid of it all as a bunch. I said I’d haul it away, and he was happy to give them to me for free.”

  Jessy knew some of the Storvig kids. There were a bunch of boys; one was in Twyla’s grade, and Jessy had played intramural basketball with one who was a year younger than she was.

  “What are you going to do with all this stuff?” her mom said.

  “I can sort through it, and see if there’s anything worth saving. If there isn’t, I can bring it to the dump.”

  “You still have stuff in the garage to take to the dump.”

  “Oh, that’s hardly enough to make it worth a trip.”

  Jessy didn’t know why it bothered her mom, since she never went out to the garage. Her dad went into the garage and got the car, and then he pulled around in front of the house to them pick up, whenever they went anywhere. Since her mom never even saw the inside, why did she even think about it? But she obviously did.

  “I’ll have this all out in a couple of days,” he said. Her mom looked skeptical. “I will. I promise.” He looked over at Jessy.

  “Here you go,” he called. “Grab a box.” He found one that wasn’t too heavy for her to carry. The flaps were crossed on the top, but starting to separate. It looked like there were papers inside.

  “Those boxes are going to be full of spiders,” her mom said. “Maybe mice.”

  They set the boxes down in a stack in the dining room.

  “Want to see what I got?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Jessy said.

  “And the mice are going to have baby mice all over this house,” her mom continued, to no one.

  It was another box, but long and wooden; something real, not cardboard. He pulled on a lever and a top came up. Then he pulled at something, and a kind of shallow drawer opened up, separated into a row of little crannies.

  “It’s a portable desk,” he said. He ran his finger around a circle that was cut into the upper right hand of the surface. “See, this is where you’d put your ink bottle.”

  Jessy touched the long groove underneath, where a fountain pen would go.

  “It’s like the Little House on the Prairie books,” she said.

  “I’m going to strip all this off, and sand it down and repaint it. It’s going to look great.”

  Their mom had to help him lift an old dresser out of the car, complaining the whole time. It came with a big mirror that was supposed to be attached but wasn't, the glass mottling into dark patches. Jessy was thrilled that their dad opened up the cellar door, which protruded from the house, like it was erupting out of the ground. That was always such an event, like the rare times when they got to light the old kerosene lamps. Dried leaves curled up in the corners of the cement steps, all the way down into the basement, where the workshop was.

   Besides all the furniture their dad was working on, there was a wall of preserves and canned goods, lined up on rough wooden board shelves, and then shiny metal shelves filled with toilet paper and paper towels and everything their mom was afraid they’d run out of. Nothing was ever going to catch her by surprise.

  The biggest part of the basement was full of their dad’s workroom, where he spent most of his time. A bunch of scary-looking tools hung on pegboard, over an old rusty cupboard that leaned against the wall, full of jars, and cans of paint and finish, and mysterious oily smelly liquids. Her dad wanted to start some kind of business refinishing furniture, and he kept buying old wooden pieces at auction sales. Jessy and Twyla were absolutely forbidden from going in there, even though they always had to help him wrestle stuff down the stairs.

  Twyla had already started digging through the boxes, and she pulled something out of a bigger carton.

  “Look at this,” she said. It was a rolled-up window shade, made of heavy paper.

  “There’s some real junk in here, isn’t there?” their dad said.

  “Can we have it?”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. We can do something with it.”

  Jessy came over and kneeled on her knees. She wasn’t sure she was part of Twyla’s “we,” but it was worth looking into. Twyla handed her the roll. The texture of the screen was like linen, and it was kind of linen-colored, slightly darkened. Not exactly yellowed, but browned.

  “You want it, that’s fine,” her dad said.

  That evening, Jessy and Twyla huddled over the floor in Jessy’s room. Both their doors were open, and a record was playing loud enough in Twyla's to hear the music in both rooms, but not so loud that their parents would yell at them from downstairs.

  Jessy picked the window-shade roll up and weighed it with her hand.

  “It’s kind of like a scroll,” she said. “I bet you could roll it up so it would look like, maybe something Egyptian.”

  “It could pass for papyrus,” Twyla agreed.

  The paper unrolled from the top, and had a slightly ragged edge on the bottom, which was sealed up, laminated, but had cracked a little and unraveled. In the center of the bottom hung a circle, like a donut, covered closely with yarn.

  Twyla pulled the paper down with the circle, and then she rolled it up again. She seemed to be testing it out. Then she pulled the paper down again. It made a satisfying rustling sound.

  “I think it's haunted papyrus,” Twyla said.

  “Paper can't be haunted,” Jessy scoffed.

  “Who says?”

  She took a pencil off Jessy’s desk and started sketching a big picture on the surface of the shade. The bottom was the ground, and on it she drew a big house. A haunted house. In the upper story she made a triangular protrusion, and a window she covered with thin spider web. The other windows she drew in, and then added lines to show they were cracked or empty. And in one of them, a thin, unformed face.

  “It’s like the Addams Family house,” Jessy said.

  “Yup.”

  On the horizontal line representing the lawn, Twyla added a spindly, sickly tree, and Jessy put in a tombstone shaped like a cross, that was leaning slightly, like the Tower of Pisa. Then Twyla drew some crooked bats in the sky, and smoke coming out of the chimney that turned into a shape that might be a ghost. In the background, there was a curved road leading off in the distance, like the Yellow Brick Road, only Jessy colored it orange.

  “It’s too bad this needs some kind of rod,” Twyla said. “Or we cou
ld make it a real shade you could put on your window.”

  That shade was the same shape, but the material was more plasticky. It wouldn’t work to write on it, and her parents would kill her if she tried.

  “But maybe you’ll find something to do with it,” Twyla added. Jessy didn’t know what to say. It looked really cool, like the cover of a spooky book.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Well, your fluorescent drawings really liven up the living room,” Twyla said. “So I might as well help the cause.”

  ****