Once upon a time, there was a wee middle-aged lady who loved Halloween. Her eyes began to glint upon the arrival of pumpkin beer in August. Her smile got wider when she was able to order her first pumpkin spice latte of the season. She gleefully sprinkled every meal with cinnamon and counted down the hours to the end of daylight savings time. Her house was covered in fake spider webs and horrendously cute fluffy spiders by mid-September. She played spooky music from dawn ‘til dusk. She planned no less than three pre-Halloween parties every year, peeling grapes for bowls of eyeballs and dying spaghetti pink for bowls of brains. She spared no expense in her costume preparations, which she starts planning every year on November 1st.
But our wee lady had one small problem. She never got home on Halloween night in time for the trick or treaters.
She always meant to. It was, she maintained, the most important part of the holiday: sharing freely of teeth-rotting sweets, building community spooky vibes, and showing off your great costume-planning skills to the world. But the one thing she always forgot in her Halloween preparations was a simple, small bag of assorted candy. Year after year, she could be found rushing through the supermarket just after dinner time, rooting through the empty aisles until she held aloft the last available bag of fun-size candy bars and scurried toward the self-service tills. But always, she was too late. She would arrive home with the candle in her jack o lantern burning low and an empty silence hovering around her door. She always waited and waited before she went to bed, just in case, but it was no use. The next day, she would disappointedly eat all the fun-size chocolate bars herself.
The neighborhood kids started to notice. “She says she loves Halloween, but when it comes down to it she doesn’t even answer the door to trick or treaters.” They were all very well-behaved children who would never even think of embarking on Halloween tricks. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and the lot of them felt they’d been driven to extreme action. When the wee lady began planning next year’s costume, the neighborhood kids began planning next year’s trick.
The year passed with little ado, though the wee lady noticed a subtle increase in the amount of side-eye she received from the children who regularly passed her house.
Come October, the side-eye was getting aggressive. The wee lady was starting to worry, but quickly became distracted with her many Halloween plans and pre-Halloween parties.
Every morning that October, though, she found a single piece of candy on her doorstep.
A reminder.
A threat.
What happened that fateful Halloween night, you may ask?
No one knows.
The entire neighborhood was wrapped in a thick fog from 2:30pm onwards. Only the bravest souls emerged from their houses to trick or treat, and they were never seen or heard from again. The wee lady didn’t even leave her house for her annual last-minute candy shopping trip. She had quite a collection of sweets going at that point; she’d been saving up the offerings on her porch with the hope that she would be able to distribute them to sweet little costumed girls and boys, and maybe then they’d stop giving her the side eye. But even though she was ready and waiting at the appropriate hour, still no one came, due to the impenetrable fog.
The neighborhood kids were confused. They had been waiting, hoping their hand wouldn’t be forced; that the wee lady would break the cycle and they could go about Halloween as they were meant to: happily munching on a communal bounty. But the fog had scuppered their plans, well-meaning or otherwise. There were no tricks. There were no treats.
The next day, to the surprise of everyone, the wee lady was found unconscious in her backyard, covered in a sticky pile of candy wrappers. Her neighbor spied her over the hedge and hurriedly called 911. She was rushed to the local hospital, where all record of her treatment is unavailable due to HIPAA.
It’s been twelve years since that strange Halloween, but now our wee middle-aged lady (who is advancing on into little-old-lady territory) never forgets her bucket of sweets for the neighborhood children. But whenever she opens her door for the trick or treaters, they’re greeted with an odd, sweet-smelling chill that they find hard to shake after they leave with their candy.