Our Halloween

Since yesterday I was busy most of the day so I didn't have time to post my story. I wrote a Halloween themed short story. I actually really like this one, because it's pretty basic and simple, but it's still got this substance to it that makes it rad. Of course I'll let you guys be the judge of it.

It's a well-known myth that All Hallows' Eve is the best time for the spirits of the dead to “come to life,” so to speak. Several cultures revolve the last day of October around the notion that they can communicate with the deceased, connect with a loved one, or that the evil spirits will run amuck and terrorize those still living. I'd always been open to the beliefs and ghost stories I'd hear come every Halloween. I found everything supernatural so intriguing and buried myself in that sort of information. It became a fascination―not so much an obsession like my peers called it―because I'd always hoped there was something greater beyond this world.

For as long as I could remember, Jeremy and I would spend every Halloween together since we were kids. We started out trick-or-treating in our neighborhood, graduated to school dances, eventually moved on to costume parties at friends' houses, but then we lost interest in the same old happenings with the same people we saw all the time. When we were in high school and college Halloween just became a night to have parties, get drunk and hopefully hook up with some random guy or girl whose name was never learned. That's when we started doing our own thing, just the two of us.

It was a tradition from our younger years that we would bring the candy that each other liked. It had become a problem when neither of us would get the specific candy we liked when we trick-or-treated, so to make sure that by the end of the night we would be snacking on the candy of our liking, we'd exchange a bag of the candy we wanted. The first time I bought Jeremy his bag of Snickers I had to sneak money out of my piggy bank when I was seven and ask my older sister if she could go to the store and buy it for me―and not to tell mom and dad. I hid the candy at the bottom of my bag and right before we would turn onto our street and Jeremy and his dad would go down theirs, we'd sneak each other our bags of candy―Jeremy would get his Snickers and I'd take home a bag of Recess Peanut Butter Cups. We felt so dangerous at the time.

Jeremy and I didn't have to secretly buy each other the bags of candy as we got older and could go to the store by ourselves. In college, we couldn't even wait until later that night, so we would bring the bags of candy to school. Our friends thought we were weird, carrying on a silly tradition from our childhood, but as Jeremy put it, “without silly childhood traditions, we lose the simplicity of life.”

When parties and hook ups got too overrated and became the normalcy of our friends, Jeremy and I started spending our Halloween nights watching one movie―It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown―then we would walk around in our neighborhood and go to a small park, where we'd sit under an aging oak tree, exchange our candy, and just spend the rest of the night enjoying each other's company. He would always ask me to tell stories of a supernatural creature, a different one every year. Since it was my area of expertise, I never denied some storytelling.

Jeremy, who would often go off and think out loud about the spirit world, would start talking about the deceased and how he hoped that they still got to have a Halloween every year. He wanted to know that he could still spend October 31, sitting under an old tree in some park, getting sick on Snickers and talking with me for hours. I told him that I didn't know for sure what would happen after we died, but I knew that we would be together, enjoying each other's company.

The second year we would spend Halloween at the park, Jeremy brought along a small little box, as tiny as a jewelry box you give as a gift. He told me, “Make a wish,” as he handed me a small slip of paper and a pen. In Jeremy's mind, special nights called for special wishes, and Halloween was definitely our special night. We'd write our wishes down then he would put it in the box, bury it under the tree in the spot where we would sit, where it would wait for us to come back the next year―another one of our traditions. The last time that we wrote our wishes down, something was different about the way Jeremy acted. He stared at his piece of paper for a long time, then after a while, he flipped it over and wrote something else on the back. I asked him what he wrote down but he refused to tell me. The deal we'd made was that we wouldn't ever read each other's wishes, but one year, when the time was right, we would go through all of our wishes and see if any of them had come true. I asked him, “How're we gonna know when the time is right?” Jeremy just looked at me and said, “We'll know.”

The following summer Jeremy got pushed into traffic when he tried to stop a fight that was going on between two groups of guys on a busy street downtown. He didn't know any of the guys involved in the fight, but that didn't matter, he still tried to stop what was going on. There was a big moving truck speeding down the road when Jeremy got pushed out onto the road. He fell on his back and didn't have enough time to get back up before the truck hit him. He died instantly.

The first Halloween that I wouldn't be spending with Jeremy was the hardest. He was my best friend for life, and all of a sudden I had no best friend in my life. I almost decided that I couldn't do my normal traditions of this time of the year. It felt like I would be continuing on with something that was mine and Jeremy's: it belonged to the both of us, and without the other, it just didn't seem right. But something inside of me―maybe Jeremy's voice that I often heard when it was real quiet―told me that I should still go through our Halloween traditions.

I watched It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown by myself, laughing and smiling quietly. When it was done I walked to the grocery store to pick up a bag of Snickers and headed out to the park. It was deserted, at eleven-thirty at night, with most people already home or still busy at parties or out in the city. I walked along a dark road that lead me to the neighborhood park that I spent lots of my time at as a little girl. When I got close to the oak tree we'd sit under, I couldn't walk any further. I stood a good thirty feet away from it and chose to sit on the faded green, wooden bench for a little.

Light posts were scattered around the park, but only a few, since it was a rather small playing area in our town. You could see the orange and yellow leaves hanging onto the branches, and the sound of the rustling leaves echoed when the wind would blow through the trees. I closed my eyes and sat silently for along time, breathing slowly, and remembered all the times I'd spent with Jeremy on that night years before. My head finally felt calm, after three months of mourning over the loss of Jeremy, and my heart felt like it was at peace.

I brought along with me a small shovel and a new piece of paper. I wrote my wish down and folded it in half then stuck it in my pocket. I carried my backpack over with me to the tree, walking very slowly as I eased my way toward the oak tree. When I got closer I could see that the dirt that our wish box was usually buried under looked like it had been dug up. The ground was loose around it, and like a classic Halloween cliché, I felt a shiver go up my spine.

I didn't really need the shovel to dig up the dirt, but I used it anyway, and found the small box, its gold color faded and dirty. I took the bag of Snickers out of my bag and placed it against the trunk of the tree. Seeing the unopened bag of candy in front of me was so unusual; Jeremy would rip open the bag and devour those Snickers before I could get through five of my Recess Peanut Butter Cups. I held the small box in my hand and stood up. I figured that it was a good time to open it and read our wishes we had written down, and that's when I saw it. I took a few steps to the side, around the trunk of the tree and saw a bright orange bag of Recess Peanut Butter Cups, just sitting there on the roots and grass. Hesitant, thinking that I was imagining all of this in my mind, I waited a few moments until I picked it up and sure enough, it was real.

I frantically looked around the park, expecting to see someone walking, maybe even running away from the area. But there was no one around, not a single person in the park but me. And even if there was someone there, how would he or she know about our candy exchange? Neither of us had told anyone about it; even as teenagers and young adults, we still liked having our secrets just between the two of us, just like when we were kids.

Without thinking, I called out his name. “Jeremy?” I was surprised at how much my voice cracked as I said his name. It was shaky, and quiet, almost too soft for anyone to hear me.

I got no response. I was hoping for some kind of sign―a gust of wind, the lamps to flicker―but only silence surrounded me.

I walked back over to the other side of the tree, sat down and put my bag of Recess Peanut Butter Cups next to the bag of Snickers. I opened the small box to see a stack of little folded pieces of paper. We had put the most recent wishes at the bottom of the stack, so all I had to do was start from the top. The first few wishes made me laugh. I had written I wish I had enough money for an iPod and I wish that I will get into my #1 college. Jeremy had wished for the perfect summer after graduation and to see his older brother graduate from the Air Force Academy―both of his came true. I kept reading the rest of the wishes and noticed that as the years went by, some of Jeremy's wishes sounded more like fantasies.

After we graduated from college, Jeremy would talk a lot about starting a new life, moving to a new place and doing whatever he wanted to do. He had this romanticized view on life and the capabilities of humans. He and I both weren't satisfied with our mediocre lives we lived in our small town underneath our parents' thumbs, but unlike Jeremy, I didn't think that taking a risk like leaving town and starting all over was worth it. I got to the last wish he had written the year before and almost didn't want to open it. If I kept it closed without taking a peak as to what it said, it might have been as if our Halloween traditions had never come to an end. But again, I heard a voice inside me that told me to open the slip of paper and read it.

Almost immediately after I read the words written in Jeremy's handwriting, straight but wispy letters, I began to cry. Never in a million years did I expect to read such a wish:

I wish that Alice won't ever feel alone even after I'm gone.

It was haunting, to say the least, that Jeremy had written that as his last wish the Halloween before he died. It was almost as if he knew that something was going to happen, something that would break up our partnership. I put his last piece of paper on my knee then took the one I had written earlier that night out of my pocket. It was ironic, the things that Jeremy and I would do; sometimes we did things that twins do, sensing each other's emotions and behaving similarly, on the same wavelength. I looked at my wish, wiping my tears dry: I wish that Jeremy knew how much I missed him. And in classic Jeremy fashion, anticipating things to happen is a cosmic way, I saw what he had written on the back of his last wish: For Halloween 2009: Alice, I know.

All of a sudden, I started laughing quietly to myself. We had been through so much together that I should've known even if we were ever apart, nothing could separate us. “Things work in mysterious ways,” as Jeremy would often tell me, “you should know, Miss Supernatural Queen.” I would roll my eyes and playfully punch him in the arm when he told this to me, but it wasn't until that first Halloween without him that I really experienced what I had read so much about.

I had no idea how the bag of Recess Peanut Butter Cups appeared by the tree that Jeremy and I would sit under on Halloween night. No one was around and no one knew of our secret tradition. I couldn't explain his last wish he wrote down in 2008, and I definitely know why he wrote on the back of that wish, addressing it to me. Jeremy was special, to say the very least.

I set out on Halloween night afraid of dishonoring traditions I had with my best friend for life. It was such a struggle to go on and do our things without him by my side, but to forget our things and not continue them would be even worse. I put away all our wishes back into the box and reburied it beneath the old oak tree. I tore open my bag of candy and ate about six Recess Peanut Butter Cups, with Jeremy's bag of Snickers sitting next to me. When I finally left the park early in the morning on November 1, I left the bag of candy under the tree, but I took with me a new understanding of my friendship with Jeremy. He might not be walking beside me every step of the way anymore, but he's always watching over me, wherever I am. And every Halloween, we'll have our showing of It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, our exchange of Snickers for Recess Peanut Butter Cups, and new wishes will always be made.