The girls stopped off at Jessy’s house after school one day, and when her mom heard them come in, she met them in the living room.
“It’s too early,” she announced, “and I don’t like it. But I give up. If I have to look at the neon spiders all day, we may as well get the Jack-o-Lantern Box out.”
She rustled around in the deep closet, behind several square Christmas cartons, and emerged with a tall, narrow cardboard box - - it had stood in as a pretend coffin in Halloweens past -- with a worn, partly dented top. Twyla had drawn a jack-o-lantern face on the cardboard with magic markers, its sharp black mouth, almost in fangs, peering out of a scribbly orange face.
Jessy and Karma dug into it in the middle of the living room, pulling out all the fabric. First came a big, oblong piece of rough grey cloth they used as a shawl. It had been cut but not hemmed, so the threads along the edges pulled right off it. There was also a shiny black Dracula cloak, too short for them to actually wear as a costume, but good enough to play with around the house, and an old Indian maiden outfit, with a string of beads, a bedraggled black wig, and a gypsy-ish skirt made of thin, multi-colored material.
They found the ghost candle, who looked like a white wax sheet with eyes, holding a small jack-o-lantern. It had never been burned, but the surface felt worn out, rubbed-down, by time. An orange and black plastic scarecrow was next. He wore an open pack on his back, showing that he was hollow inside. They suspected he’d once been filled with candy, but Jessy’s parents didn’t remember where he had ever come from. Then the puzzled-looking white ghost mask, the elastic strap completely gone. It was funny how often the ghost decorations looked slightly befuddled, but then, it seemed logical that a ghost would be confused about what was going on.
Karma fished out a small plastic witch’s hat, that Jessy usually put on the head of a small pumpkin, when they got them. Her mom wouldn’t let them try to carve those ones, because they were too small; they’d pretty much fit in the palm of Jessy’s hand. They had to draw on them with black magic marker, which seemed like cheating, for a jack-o-lantern.
Then they sorted and stacked all of the paper: the black cat cut-outs, the owls, the bats, the silhouettes of witches on their brooms, along with the patterns, cut out of card stock. Plus dozens of construction paper jack-o-lanterns: small ones a few inches across, big ones made of nearly an entire sheet, rounded orange paper, oval orange, oblong. On a lot of them, the paper was beginning to fade to a paler, grainier orange.
Twyla had made almost all of the paper stuff in the Jack-o-Lantern Box, and it irritated Jessy all over again how she'd gotten so scornful, like being too grown-up for trick or treating meant she had to turn her back on Halloween.
“Some of those are looking pretty shabby,” Jessy’s mom said, looking in on them. “You should throw them out.”
“Mom!” Jessy was shocked.
They also had some printed, store-bought decorations on thin cardboard: black cat cut-outs, with cruel expressions and sharp paper claws; a skull in psychedelic colors, pink and yellow, with bulging, flaming eyes. And a handful of paper bones: Jessy took the longest one and laid it out, the length of her own skinny arm.
“It’s Clarence, the Skeleton King!” Karma cried, pulling him from the coffin.
Clarence was a tall skeleton, with fuzzy green bones that used to glow faintly in the dark, printed over the top of thin black cardboard. His joints were marked with tiny round holes, rimmed with metal, so they could pose him in different positions: waving his hand, or bending his legs backwards into a jig. His neck was bent, though, and in danger of tearing, from having been used like a ventriloquist dummy over the years, his skull moved forward and back on the paper neck, to pretend he was talking.
Twyla swore it was Jessy who had started calling him Clarence, but she didn't remember anything about it.
They took the candle and the scarecrow, and the witch's hat, and set them up as a display on the living room end table. Then they got out the tape. Clarence and the other cardboard decorations went on the windows, so they could be seen from outside. And the things made out of construction paper went all over everywhere.
“How can it be too early?” Karma asked, as if she'd been pondering it the whole time. “The month's almost over.”
“I know. If we got it out on the 30th I think it would be too soon for her,” Jessy agreed. “Halloween is way too short as it is.”
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The Jack-o-Lantern Box Page 16
