And What Of the Ghosts On Halloween Night?

[Robert Crisman]

We ghosts are treated to alternate worlds in Halloween dreams. and people run hotter or colder, or younger or older, or wiser perhaps than they would if you'd eaten, say, liver and onions for dinner instead of the ribeye you'd cadged at the Dog House Cafe.

He came to a house on a corner, a wreck with a maw of a porch and the leavings of decades strewn in the shadows, among which were bones, perhaps of old friends who'd died of the cancers that we used to suck down like sugar.

He leaped on the porch like a cat with all senses sharpened, ready to run at the first snick of danger--and out of the shadows stepped Lorelei Jones, a girl that he'd worshipped when he was a boy, a blonde Slovak beauty, his delft-blue-eyed lover for one tick of time, now grown and unclothed in the soft, shadowed light who whispered, "It's time you learned wisdom."

He was a fool: all he'd heard was a promise of sex, but when he approached her she turned toward the door with what seemed like reproach, and only then did he see the shackles and all the red welts on her back.

Something inside him caught in his chest and sirens went off and he could not breathe, and then in his ear--

A raucous saxophone laughter, spitting visions of sex as the hissing of apes in their suits outside church and the screaming of all the ripped children...

[Gita]

Just when I think the horror can't get any thicker along comes "and only then did he see the shackles and all the red welts on her back." Get me out of here!  Excellent. 

[Jamie Hogan]

Every time there's a phrase. Most of the time there's several, and there are several in this one, but "saxophone laughter" is amazing, man. That is as perfectly aural as you would ever want it to be.

[Angela]

OH!  Good reason to stay home.

Nicely, tightly crafted, Robert.