“This is how far you’ve fallen,” Joe whispered to himself. As clouds of self-recrimination swirled around, Joe began to cry. Not the dramatic sobs of a soap opera star or the whimpering of a teenage girl on the occasion of puppy love gone awry. Joe’s tears began deep, deep within the cavity of his chest, and though they never wet his eyes, they succeeded in creating a monsoon within him. It was a storm of regret and shame, blown by the unforgiving winds of lost hope and despair.

Joe finally looked up through eyes that needed to cry but couldn’t and stared at the recently risen moon as if an angel might have graciously hung an answer there. Artemis, in her lovely lunar cape, simply returned the silent and ominous stare, all dark craters and sharp edges cut into a crescent. Though she remained still and did not whisper encouragement or consolation, the moon did arrive at his pity party with a gift. She bathed the pumpkin patch in soft light that etched the landscape into silhouettes. Joe stood and looked out to the horizon, thinking once again what a crazy old bat the man was and how he was desperate and crazier still when two dark figures dove from one row of tilled soil to another roughly twenty feet ahead of him. He was skittish as a two-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs as he strained to locate them again in the dark.

“Hey!” he called out. “Who’s there? This is private property.”

Gathering his balls from somewhere near his throat, he pushed them back to their rightful place between his legs and began to walk toward the row he guessed they were now hiding in.

“Stupid kids,” he assured himself in a mumble as his cowboy boots trudged through the deep, soft soil. A rustling of leaves from behind made him spin around too quickly and land squarely among a cluster of pumpkins with a painful thud. He had no intention of making a fool of himself, and took several deep breaths as he constructed a plan. Obviously there were more than just the two; likely a car full of pranksters had ventured into the field for the night. Faster than his eyes could follow, one of the trespassers cut a circle about fifteen feet in diameter around him, leaves and vines quivering in his wake. “Come out,” Joe demanded of the field, “or I’ll have you arrested!”

He tried to push himself up on his elbows but his hands sunk what felt like a foot into the topsoil. He could feel the chalky grit grinding itself under his fingernails. Suddenly the quivering circle of leaves and vines gave way to dark figures with pumpkins raised high in the air. Without ceremony or so much as a whisper to each other they pelted Joe, leaving him unconscious.