All Days Are Halloween
This year Halloween is a big deal in New Zealand.
(It never usually is.)
It’s a big deal because it is now a lifeline. This year people grasp Halloween like it is the line on the back of a jetski and they are water-skiing. There are pub quizzes and special meal deals and more people go trick-or-treating now that it is prohibited. Handing out candy to swathes of people and moving house to house to house. It’s exactly what the powers-that-know strongly recommend against doing. So this year everyone does Halloween.
I have never been more aware of what I touch. I’m aware of the plastic orange pumpkin basket in my hands. I’m aware of when my nose itches inside the mask, and I shift my focus to the way gravel crunches underneath my foot until my brain forgets about it. I’m aware of when I check my phone because I’ve just contaminated my hands. Phone screens have fecal matter on them, I read once.
I tell my little sister to hurry up, don’t fall behind. She is dressed as Scout dressed as the ham from To Kill A Mockingbird. No-one gets her highbrow costume. I saw another kid dressed as Coronavirus personified. He jumped on his friend and said he should now die and fall to the ground. Harmless fun, but for a moment I thought of that scene in the Hunger Games film where little rich Capitol children mimed spilling each other’s guts out on the polished floor with toy swords. Because, you know, we’re that far removed from it.
I tell my sister to hurry up, let’s not visit this house. Let’s visit the one at the very end of the street. The house we pass has thuds and crashes coming from it. Just a few. I hear some door — maybe bedroom door, bathroom door, cabinet, perhaps, if it was slammed with enough force — being slammed. Then something wooden is thrown against something softer. Then something softer falls to the ground. That’s all I hear before my sister and I walk out of earshot. I know the woman in the house. She bags groceries at the supermarket ten minutes from our house.
The first time I heard these sorts of noises from that house, a gnawing sort of dread filled me. Imagine if you took a fine-toothed comb and scraped it down the inside of your stomach lining. (Imagine first that doing this is physiologically feasible.) The next time I saw the woman bagging groceries, I had asked her if she was okay. If the bruise on her forearm was healing alright. If she needed my help. She had narrowed her eyes at me and told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about, even though I hadn’t even said anything. I was just asking questions. It was like her mind had jumped ahead in the conversation and she’d responded to the future script. Like she’d already played these talks out in her head.
The house my sister and I stop at give us wrapped chocolates. We thank them and walk off their driveway back onto the footpath. The next house is empty. It’s empty because the wife has been keeping her husband company in hospital. Her husband had a mild heart attack. Mum told me this. The wife put out a bowl and a note telling people to help themselves but moderate their candy-taking so there’s enough to go around. The bowl is empty. There’s not enough to go around.
Two more houses. Lollipops and Fruit Bursts. I really have to exercise discretion when choosing the houses to visit. Most people don’t have candy to give out. Did they not get the memo that Halloween is big this year? The next house we pass is empty too. It’s empty because no one lives there at present. The old family were nice and loud and generous. They would have had so much candy to give away. The owners of the house are forking out for renovations to attract richer tenants. The door is off its hinges and power tools are lying around. I suspect they kicked the old family out because rent prices went up.
My little sister wanders into the empty hallways of the empty evacuated house. The stuffed thigh bone that sticks out of the bottom of her costume wags left to right behind her. Little kids are so easily entertained. From the gaping, glassless windows, I can see other groups of trick-or-treaters. Witches, devils, vampires.
I love Halloween. It’s like all the monsters I usually see on TV have crawled straight out of the screen and onto the streets.
It’s sad to think that once today is over they will return to the six-o-clock newsreel.
Aimee Lew, China-born and New Zealand-raised, is a student at the University of Auckland studying Physics, Politics and Chinese. You can find more of her writing here at Villanesse: https://www.villainesse.com/writers/aimee-lew.