prompt: "signal", title: "rocktober" in misc. flash fiction

Autumn sneaks up and pounces like lightning, like a starved lion looking to fangoriously devour a gazelle caught unawares, one moment you’re daintily lapping at some idyllic pond, the next is all claws and then nothing at all. The fall will signal itself in little ways, nonetheless, if you can watch closely enough, the rime of light frost in the morning, the leaves just starting to turn. Pay attention and it won’t be so shocking when the season of heavy metal comes upon us yet again.

For how heavy metal is it to stroll through a world festooned with dead corpses, in pilings by the curbside or strewn about porches? For how heavy metal is it to traipse through dying corn fields at night drawn by horses, to sip at hot crushed-apple blood fermented like a wine while lit up by torches? The whole thing is very metal, that’s all I’m saying. Our autumns are so heavy metal.

Bounding together, romantically crunching up leaf corpses under foot hand-in-hand, what in the hell could be more totally brutal than all that? Brutally cute. Cutal. Totally cutal. You can go out leaf-peeping in those oceans of wilted leaves and come back with pumpkins for disembowelment if you please. Go home and get your sharpest knife, chop off the top of its head, pull out its guts with your bare hands and replace its internal organs with fire instead. How very cutal!

Do you want that gourd to look like a monster? Do you want it to look like a rotted-out skull? Do you want to roast the gourd’s insides and eat the pieces hull by salted hull? Good for you! That’s what we do every fall. Just stop pretending that our approach to it is innocent or child-like or safe and soundly settled. The autumn is not whimsical, it is brutally totally heavy metal! You may as well have Slayer or Cannibal Corpse sitting in the back of the mini-van, scoring your adventures.

Don’t reject that death-black dripping truth, embrace it! Wake up to pancakes drenched in maple tree blood and stuff it in your silly angry faces! Dress up like ghosts and ghouls and try to invade other folks’ personal spaces! Steal apples by dunking your heads into ambiguous fluids! Or pass out treats to fellow night-travelers as if you were all affiliated druids! It is all a vast party when you try to apply it but it’s quite heavy metal, don’t try to deny it. It’s truly cutal. Full-on trutal.

Autumn sneaks up and pounces like lightning, one minute it’s green-shiny and balmy, the next is all dank dark and frightening. Still, worry not, soon all of these autumnal brutalities will pass and Christmastime will then arrive with an alarming expedience, with Santa the magical burglar who demands all the world’s children’s obedience. But that my friends is a whole other story, though no less terrifying and at least twice as gory. Winter? That’s a whole other level of horror.