After raking some more leaves in Karma's yard, and a whole new scene of Johnny the Hangman, where the mayor tried to talk down the angry mob, they gathered up the big slabs of broken-down cardboard boxes that Karma's dad had gathered together for them. They traced the shapes of bat wings onto them, and then her mom insisted on cutting them out with her special craft knife.
When that was done, they colored them black with poster paint, leaving each side propped up, separately, to dry. Later they'd string twine through holes in the wings, and tie them in place around their backs.
“If it snows, they’ll still fit over our coats,” Karma said, approving.
“We'll be fat bats. Maybe we drank too much blood.”
“I wish we had fangs,” Karma added.
“It would be great to have fangs,” Jessy sighed. They practiced saying “Trick or treat,” then sticking their teeth out in a snarl.
“We have to get our bags together, too,” Karma said.
Some kids had the plastic jack-o-lantern trick-or-treat buckets, bought from the dime store, and some had the decapitated black cat heads. When Jessy had first seen them in the store, a few seasons ago, she had begged and begged her parents for one, but they said they were way too expensive for something she’d only use one day a year.
When they were actually trick or treating, and met up with some kids who'd gotten the plastic buckets, they seemed awfully small next to their grocery bags full of goodies. The cat heads especially seemed really tiny.
“It’s the volume,” Karma had said.
Sometimes their parents were right about things, even if they didn’t know it. Jessy still liked the look of the jack-o-lanterns, who were both cheerful and kind of creepy with their blank painted smiles. But she didn’t want to use them for their actual purpose.
So every year, she and Karma hunted up good-sized paper grocery bags. They tried to find ones with handles, but for some reason, those were getting rare. Instead, they took spare bags and cut them into strips, which they used to make their own handles for the bags. Elmer’s glue stuck the homemade loops on the sides of the bags, and then they swiped Karma's mom’s stapler to give them extra support. Then they worked on decorating them.
Jessy made a big paper pumpkin, with a face kind of like the one on top of the Jack-o-Lantern Box, to glue on her bag. Then she used Karma's mom's cardstock alphabet pattern to spell out “Happy Halloween,” even though that was a lot of cutting. Everything on her bag was orange and black. Karma cut tombstones out of grey construction paper, using the edge of the paper for the bottoms. Then she made a few cross-shaped ones, taller than the oval-topped ones.
Neither of them said anything about what would happen if it started to rain, or snow. None of their homemade bags had ever survived long enough to make it into the Jack-o-Lantern Box, but odds were they'd at least survive the night.
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The Jack-o-Lantern Box Page 25
