We Coat Our Halloween in Sugar, Fire, and Yesteryears
There's candy corn stuck in the canyons of my molars — someday a cavity will catch me off guard and I'll try to find someone to blame. My brother and I count the chocolate pieces which create the October smile 8-year-olds have longed for since their teacher hung pumpkins and scented the room with the smell of a small town touched by 7 p.m.
The yellow part of the confection pyramid builds a monument on my tongue that the nougat of a Three Musketeers tries to tear down because everything practices envy. My Batman costume is filling out, yet I'm still more ravenous child than a brooding, parentless young man that dons a cape.
While my parents will leave, the cape will never come.
The piece of candy corn clinging for survival has finally lost its sweet essence and is chased by Snickers, Starbursts, Reese's, a call to “put your candy on the kitchen counter and get yourself to bed,” a gummy that looks like a hamburger (that blows my mind because how is this allowed?), and a rainbow of assorted jawbreakers dancing with the rhythm of a sugar cube raised in the country.
We’re both in bed now, pillowcases reunited with their partner pillows, earlier emptied of the high fructose corn syrup multitudes that the boy wearing a Batman costume devoured like a cub bearing his way through his first trout.
My beard is touching shades of 10 p.m. My 1-year-old son has no idea why the leaves orange and red before becoming a death-tainted brown, decaying in a crisp autumn air. An air that sweeps its cooling fingers over unclaimed pumpkins and claimed jack-o’-lanterns wearing smiles of puzzle pieces an eight-year-old has joyfully and purposely lost.
Someday my son will ask me to buy or make a costume for him so he can experience the highlight that comes with every American October. He will ask for the red candy apple on a stick that will result in an immediate reaction, good or bad. He will ask for the sugar cookies with a black spider web decoration on white icing I will have to immediately sample for inspection purposes. He will count chocolate pieces. He will ask to stay up late so he can reap the benefits of his hard work of asking strangers questions for candy.
And I will let him sing along to the song October makes, sing with the strength orange has when it's been summoned by Halloween’s sky.
