prompt: rise, title: what are you going as this year? in misc. flash fiction

There’ll be kids dressed as Pokémon, all around on Halloween, their moms dressed-up as the sex bombs they rarely ever get to be. Toilet paper hastily festooned from the trees, once rare as hen’s teeth, back in the time we were afraid to sneeze. Hen eggs cracked on windows, once in shortage joked more dear than if laid by golden geese. Up will be down and two ones will make three, but then the next morning, we’re all expected to be normal again. No real lasting change, just a brief pressure release, but the evening masquerade is quite the opposite of some frivolous deceit.

The trick to the treat of our secular spectacular is it’s the one day we admit we’re all in costumes.

The other “normal” three-sixty-four we’re all supposed to pretend the work-a-day guises we don are who we actually are. That’s horseshit. The shroud we’re stuck in most days is at least as fake as any Pokémon or soccer mom pretending she’s actually a dom, any blanket ghost or Party City ghoul. Nothing more fake than the monstrosities we pretend to be when trying to keep our cool.

You walk the streets by day in the garb of your jobs, of your cultural pretenses, performing roles of confidence or humility, femininity or masculinity, socio-economic fables foisted as if true but they aren’t you. We fake it for our comfort or for the comforts of others, pledging allegiances to arbitrary imaginary bands of brothers, identities or indemnities. Cloaks created for the benefit of the other folks, tattered and battered, no less silly, no more truth than those Ben Cooper toy-store costumes of my spent youth. Sharp-edged chintzy plastic masks you could hardly see or breathe through. Thin vinyl smocks reflecting none of the supposed model’s conceits. No Superman “S” upon your chest, just a rubber sheet of that hero saying “Trick or Treat”. Your every-day clothes and flesh and bones just as ridiculous a disguise, but don’t worry, so are mine.

What it comes down to is this whole life is one Halloween. We receive silly meat-costumes for a handful of scenes, there’s some scares, some thrills, some death, some treats, help the littler ones cross the street. Kinda real, but only within the context of this brief masquerade. We straddle the line before death in these squishy suits and we never know when the sun will rise on All Souls’ and then we’re done complete. Merely rags and tatters collapsed beneath bony feet.

Once a year, however, we’ll pretend as if we aren’t pretending, and on the precipice between the dark and light, on Halloween night, we’re just kids running freely again. Cavorting in our masks with our friends, binging upon joy, almond or otherwise. Not just the veil between the living and dead being lifted, the veils obscuring our true selves as well. If we could manage to remember it when waking on November First and lived our lives accordingly, though, that’d be the real treat.