So I sat there at the kitchen table and carved a pumpkin. It was the first pumpkin that I had carved in many years. It was kind of fun. My pumpkin had one round eye and one triangular eye and a not-very-bright witchy smile.

She cooked a wonderful dinner of sweet red cabbage and sausages and had some apples baking in the oven.

Then she carved her pumpkin while dinner was cooking beautifully away. Her pumpkin looked very modernistic when she was through. It looked more like an appliance than a jack-o’-lantern.

All the time that we were carving pumpkins the door bell did not ring once. It was completely empty of trick or treaters, but I did not panic, though there were an awful lot of Chiclets waiting anxiously in a large bowl.

We had dinner at 7.30 and it was so good. Then the meal was eaten and there were still no trick or treaters and it was after eight and things were starting to look bad. I was getting nervous.

I began to think that it was every day except Hallowe’en.

She of course looked beatifically down upon the scene with an aura of Buddhistic innocence and carefully did not mention the fact that no trick or treaters had darkened the door.

That did not make things any better.

At nine o’clock we went in and lay down upon her bed and we were talking about this and that and I was in a kind of outrage because we had been forsaken by all trick or treaters, and I said something like, ‘Where are those little bastards?’

I had moved the bowl of Chiclets into the bedroom, so I could get to the trick or treaters faster when the door bell rang. The bowl sat there despondently on a table beside the bed. It was a very lonely sight.

At 9.30 we started fucking.

About fifty-four seconds later we heard a band of kids come running up the stairs accompanied by a cyclone of Hallowe’en shrieking and mad door bell ringing.

I looked down at her and she looked up at me and our eyes met in laughter, but it wasn’t too loud because suddenly we weren’t at home.

We were in Denver, holding hands at a street corner, waiting for the light to change.

Atlantisburg

There were a couple of pool tables in the back and a table full of drunks nearby. I was talking to a young man who’d just gotten fired from his job and he was happy about it, but bored with the evening and the thought of looking for work next week. He was also quite disturbed about his home situation and went into it at great length.