The Punk Pumpkin

The Punk Pumpkin was the angriest pumpkin in the entire patch. He was constantly making efforts to cause mayhem and disruption, ruining the peaceful and otherwise sedate lives of the general run of pumpkins in the patch.

He laughed gleefully after splattering a halfway rotted banana squash on the concrete right in front of Luther van Pumplid and his entire family. Luther blinked his round eyes and took the Punk Pumpkin aside. “What was all that? What’s wrong with you, dude?”

“Just being berserk. I’m the freakin’ Punk Pumpkin! Born to revolt!”

“Dude, you got squash innards and seeds all over the sidewalk and shit.”

“So what? It’s just a banana squash, it don’t mean squat. Anarchy in the patch, man!” The Punk Pumpkin gave a wild rebel yell.

“Just a banana squash? That’s like one of our relatives, P.P. It could be a fifth or sixth cousin removed for all you know. My mom’s very delicate nerve-wise. This could totally trigger her sidewalk trauma.”

The Punk Pumpkin nudged Luther painfully with his stem, which was long, dark and carved with jagged edges, like those of native Mohican pumpkins of yore. “Get with it, Luth. Light a match to the patch! Rage, rage against the big vine!”

Luther motioned his mom and sister to go along on their way to visit the Lanternleys, realizing he needed more time to calm down P.P. “What’s got into you? Look around the patch, dude. You see anyone raging? Burning? Everyone’s nice and chill, maybe humming some mellow fall melody, reminiscing on their baby gourd days…”

The Punk Pumpkin spat out some seeds on the ground in disgust. “I spit on your crummy humming. We gotta get up and stand up for pumpkinkind. Don’t you know nothin’ about your blasted nice and chill fall?”

“Sure, I know all about it.” Luther’s pumpkin face broke out in a seasonal orange smile and his blobby fleshy eye-pupils darted up left and right. “It’s the pumpkin time of year, when we’re at our orange-most peak! When the trees shift into gentle shades of yellow and orange and the cool autumn winds bring a tired pumpkin a breath of fresh October air!”

The P.P. gargled in annoyance and whistled in rage. “You know nothing, van Pumplid! That’s what they want you to think about fall!” The Punk Pumpkin nudged closer to Luther, crowding him toward a large dead tree stump. “Fall’s the time all us pumpkins give up our happy little vine lives. The time we get torn from our patch! Sold! Cut up by strangers into crazy decorations! Dead pumpkin time! That’s fall.”

Luther looked around for some other nearby sane pumpkin to come to his rescue. The P.P. was clearly off his gourd, ranting about wild conspiracies and making as much sense as a potato bug on bad acid. “Look, P.P., I don’t know what kind of soil you were planted in, but in my neck of the patch, autumn is one of the top four times of the year, filled with pleasant breezes…”

“Listen to you, regurgitating their dumb, pumpkinhead pablum…”

“They? They’re? Whose this ‘they’ you keep talking about? What ‘they’?” Luther did a quick quarter rotation on his base in each direction. “I don’t see any ‘they’ around.”

P.P. rolled his eye-pupil blobs and screamed in frustration. “Aaaauugh! Of course you don’t! You’re not looking! They’re all around but they’re bigger than us. Faster than us. Stronger than us. They use a whole different language, Luther! We have to rebel now, take the fight to the man! I’m telling you…”

But the Punk Pumpkin didn’t get to finish his tirade. Before he reached the end of his diatribe he was whisked away, rotated aloft by some swinging force that moved so fast, that it was nothing but a momentary blur to Luther’s slow-paced, bleary pumpkin eyes.

Luther sat in astonishment for a minute, unable to understand what he’d witnessed. But then another gentle maple-scented autumn wind blew across the patch and he grinned a wide pumpkin grin. Whatever had happened to the Punk Pumpkin was probably for the best, for the patch was already feeling more relaxed, more like its old tranquil, sedate self. Luther began wobbling back to his home vine, talking to himself. “Well, he was always a malcontent. Now what was that little song I used to like. Something about monsters and ghosts and such…”