Pumpkinhead

Pumpkinhead dummy No. 1 sat at the card table just off the sidewalk leading to the front porch. I, with my own pumpkinhead, sat a few giant steps back in the shadows. I moved forward and back throughout the evening, picking my times.

I was just standing behind dummy No. 1, when a smartly dressed woman walked by with a little girl in her Halloween costume and her candy bag in hand. Young daughter’s hand in her young  mother’s, to my eye. The woman turned back toward the two pumpkinheads and she saw me move when she was already on the steps. I saw her smile in the porch light and she called back to a guy out on the sidewalk. “You remember that guy that scared the shit out of me back when ...”

Another large group of parents and kids came up and I couldn’t follow all of them through my eye holes. Then the mother and daughter were standing just ten feet in front of me. The little girl, her head not even as high as my waist, let go of her mother’s hand and stepped boldly towards me.

I crouched to a knee, and pulled my mask away. We were eye to eye. I could have reached my huge hand out and touched her pretty red dress with the white polka dots. She wore matching ears perched on top of her brown hair. Her button of a nose was colored shiny black.

 “I’m a person,” I said, holding my pumpkin head to my heart.

She did this little girl thing where she half-shrugged her shoulders and tilted her head slightly to one side – and she just giggled.

I could have a stayed there looking into her face for the rest of my life, but it doesn’t work that way. After a few moments, in which she explained to me that she was Minnie Mouse, she turned and went back to her mother.

I put my mask back on and backed into the shadows.

I watched her walk down the sidewalk holding her mother’s hand, looking back at me over her shoulder. From that distance, I was little more than a shadow to her eyes. But will she tell her daughter about me one day?

Of course, I also scared or startled quite a lot of other kids tonight. A few mothers. You should have seen that one young woman suddenly turn, her mind and feet not quite her own for a few steps. And there was laughter. I really was something unexpected for a short time in their eyes when I played my part just right, variations on uncertainty all night long. I could see it in their painted faces and hear it in their excited voices. One not so little boy produced a terrific scream. And now there are memories of moments already receding into the shadows.

Two boys from up the street who had seen this show before, called dummy No. 1 ‘Bert’ and walked right up to him and poked him in his stuffed shirt. When I step out of the shadows, they turned and jumped into my monster arms.

As far as I know, I play the double dummy Halloween game as well as anybody. You wait, and you wait, they look carefully at dummy No. 1 - someone says, “He’s not real.” Then suddenly Pumpkinhead dummy No 2 takes two slow, halting steps toward someone or just barely gives a wave. I have a terrific audience.

But I would have sat out all night on this cold All Hallows Eve just to be a person for Minnie Mouse. For a moment, I was as good as I would ever be. And tomorrow I’ll try to be a person for somebody else.

Halloween 2011
Video/essay about the neighbor girls and Halloween wrtten in 2013