The Haunting of April by Halloween

It was the first thing I saw. Not the burnt smell of pumpkin flesh, not the faint movement I caught under those jagged eyes, not that it was the 30th of April and someone had made a jack o lantern and left it out on the porch where my son used to sit and tie his shoes. I knelt down and rested my hand against the bumpy exterior of it, almost as if checking if something was cooking on the stove, and it was hot. Almost as hot as if something was living inside of it for days. Like the heat emanating from inside your mouth.

A pumpkin that has a lit candle in it should not have felt warm on the last days of April in a town that just melted its snow cap three weeks ago. I want to point that out. Because I will attempt to tell you the rest of this in as reasonable a manner as possible and I want the first event I witnessed to be on record as not reasonable.

I live on Larch street. At the bend where the road curves toward the lake. In the small town of Avernsly. Where most of the monies they collect are spent on pretty flower buckets hung along the front of houses and most of our pride goes into our volunteer firefighters. It's not the type of town that interesting things happen in. Sad things happen to people here but nothing remarkable. Nothing remarkable happened when my son went to the local shop to buy Halloween candy on the 31st of October and never walked home. We held a candlelight service and went back to living our lives. As always. It always happens. Towns are a rolling mechanism and loss is transported to the end of the line and moved onto the next truck.

This happened six months and one day before I saw that pumpkin.

I didn't make that pumpkin. My husband didn't make that pumpkin. He left in March which was another out of season event. Why would a man leave his wife in the spring? Who does that? None of my neighbors could say they saw anyone making it. I asked them all. I stood on each porch and asked them from my robe. Acting like a madwoman. Twice now in one year I have acted like a madwoman. Mrs. Okafar looked at me from her porch like she knew that I was responsible. I get it. Grief makes you forget that you ate. That you showered. What month it is.

It was April. I'm sure of that. Checked four times.

So I took it inside. I didn't know what to do with something that wasn't supposed to exist so I placed it on my kitchen table and sat across from it until the flame gave out. Around 2am. And I swear to God that it breathed. Or maybe I imagined that but I will try to be fair here and tell you the facts of how that pumpkin got into my home and what else transpired.

Two nights later another one appeared on the 1st of May on the porch of the Kowalski household. Down three houses from me. I know this because Marta called me. She was trying to be calm. I could hear her forcing her voice to remain steady.

"Did you see anything last night Jo. Was there someone you saw out on the street."

No I told her. I asked her what the issue was. But I already knew what it was.

"We have... decorations on our porch. Halloween ones." She hesitated. "Fake cobwebs and one of those plastic headstones you see in stores. REST IN PEACE it said and it has Tomaszs name on it."

Tomasz was eleven. He passed away in February. From flu. Which progressed to something more. He was taken out of our little town and placed at a hospital for children about forty minutes away. He was not ill during the fall season. It had nothing to do with October but on the 1st of May someone left Halloween decorations on that family's porch with his name on them. The year he died was listed as well. On that little headstone.

I did not tell her about my pumpkin.

I don't know why. Some primal part of me wanted this to only affect me.

Now that I have stepped back and reflected I wish I had told her right away. That we lost another three days trying to piece together the puzzle by ourselves.

Three more days of houses getting these unwanted visits. By May 7th we were at six houses.

The Kowalskis. Myself. The Ferreira family who lived at the end of our dead end street. Their child Danilo died the prior October on Halloween night. His vehicle drove off the icy banks of our little town pond at 60 miles per hour. On an ice that was not supposed to be forming till winter. (Another odd occurrence that no one seemed to correlate to this new series of events). Then there was the Abernathy family who lived two streets away from us. Their daughter Priya drowned the week before Halloween that year. Close enough that many residents would consider it a Halloween death. Even though she never died on that day.

Each of these households lost someone towards the end of that October. Or suffered grief as that month faded away into winter. And each of these households had decorations that corresponded with that individual. Not just any decoration. Specific. Painfully accurate ones. One said a nickname that was known only by family and closest friends. Another jack o lantern had that childs smile on it. They had just lost a tooth that week and they carved it just like that.

It was almost cute if I didn't know the context behind these displays. It was like someone sent me a card on my sons birthday. Except its been six months and they're dead.

Our little community did it's best to act rational about this situation. We met at the town square and discussed the obvious culprit. Kids. Probably some kids with a bunch of Halloween decorations that they wanted to scare people with and thought leaving it on other peoples porches would be funny. I wanted to believe this too. Kids are malicious like that. But those kids wouldn't know the spaces between each tooth on a little boys face. They wouldn't have Danilo's Saint Christopher pendant on his mothers door. He always wore it and it was never found in the pond. When they tried to pull his body out of it at least. It wasn't retrieved with him. So someone pulled that pendant out of our pond and put it on that womans door? No. I don't think so.

We didn't solve that mystery that evening. Everyone left their homes depressed and likely couldn't sleep.

But here's where I begin to lose you.

On the ninth. I woke up to the smell of a camp fire outside my house. It was 71 degrees out and leaves weren't falling anywhere. I got up and went outside. I didn't turn my porch lights on. Now this wasn't smart. But I feel as if some thing in my grief made me brave. Like I already lost the scariest thing I could lose and nothing else can compare to that.

When I made it to my kitchen table my jack o lantern had a new candle burning inside of it. I didn't light that candle. I didn't replace the old one that died weeks ago. Something inside me didn't want to extinguish it. Didn't want to. Maybe like a scent you want to keep from your loved one that you miss.

The light was not orange like you would expect from a jack o lantern. It was dimmer and bluer. Like that of a camp fire you can see through foggy eyes. The color that a jack o lantern glows when they are on the porch on October nights and your son is 13 and alive. And begging you to let him stay out a little bit longer. You do. Because its October. And your child deserves that night out. Everything about that night tells you that its safe to let your boy wander around until 9pm.

He never made it home at 9. He never made it home period.

But here I am. Six months later. Being allowed to look at my kitchen table and see him as if that moment will happen again. One more night of him roaming around in that glow of orange.

I watched it burn down to nothing that night. I didn't speak to anyone about it. Not my ex husband. Or anyone. I won't go into detail about what I saw in that flame. Its not something I can share. I feel like those images were sent to the families that received their pumpkin on a clear night to only experience. To understand that they are not alone.

By the 11th of May it stopped. There were no more jack o lanterns left on our porches or decorations. The headstone that was left on the Kowalski's porch crumbled into dust once Marta picked it up. It blew away with the autumny wind that wasn't coming from any autumn. Danilos medal remained. He's currently worn by his mother. No one knows why that stayed but the items that were meant for the households stayed and the decorations returned to the dark they came from.

I asked Marta one day in June. She was sitting on her porch tending to flowers that bloomed at the appropriate time of the year. Do you think it was a ghost or a blessing.

I'm not sure how she came to that decision. Maybe she thinks that some force pulled that energy from October and left it on our porches for us to see our loved ones one more time.

I don't have a theory that fits the situation. I have grown to accept that Halloween decorations can appear on any day and that's okay. What scares me now is a October that passes by without them. Something feels incomplete when my porch isn't decorated. I don't know.