A Fine Creation

That October would mark seventeen years since his passing. Marie could always remember the exact day he’d died because it fell on the 30th, the day before Halloween. CVS and Home Bargain had been ransacked of their multi-buy bags of fun sized Smarties, Mars and KitKats. Momentum, the gym that faced Morningside Park was advertising ‘Spooktacular savings’ for new members, and the smoothie bar the backed onto it had joined in with ‘Stake through the heart’ blood orange shakes and ‘You give blood a bad name’ Virgin Daquiris. Paper ghouls had been hung from the windows of the ground floor apartment on 115^th Street. On the windowsill was a large glow-in-the-dark witch whose eyes darted back and forth with rapid curiosity. They never truly settled on anything. Sami always held Marie’s hand extra tight when they passed that window, as if the witches’ eyes would falter and finally settle on her. See into her delicate seven-year-old soul. Gobble it up with its filed down plastic teeth.

“Who’s it looking for, Mom?”

“It’s not real Sami,” Marie reassured Sami, giving her daughter’s hand a soothing squeeze. Sami wasn’t buying into the whole pagan palooza, wouldn’t bite at the chance to go door-to-door with treats slung in her pumpkin bucket. Back when St. Luke’s Elementary had mailed out the flyers for ‘Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin: Jive and Jingle’ the idea of dressing up had started to surface. Sami had coloured in the outline of the Peanut’s characters on the front of the flyer; scribbling wildly over poor Woodstock’s face. The crayon swayed outside of the lines, here and there and all over the page, even onto the kitchen counter at one point.

 “You could go as Peppermint Patty!” Marie had suggested, giving her daughter a playful nudge on the shoulder, “you love the Peanuts, don’t you Sunshine?” Sami hadn’t reacted, not even with a shrug. Perhaps, Charlie Brown was right and all adults just made that ‘wah, wah, wah’ sound when they opened their mouths.

On Wednesday the 28^th, two days before the incident, Marie had taken Sami to Party City on 47^th Street and 8^th after ballet rehearsals. ‘You can pick out any outfit you want,’ she told her daughter. Marie had been saving for this, stowing away her measly tips from her early morning shifts at Grey Dog’s Diner and the extra shift she’d picked up on Thursday afternoons. Just because Art had been made redundant from his job at Remy’s Insurance didn’t mean that Sami had to suffer, had to be any different than any of the other girls that attended St. Luke’s Elementary. When nothing took Sami’s fancy, Marie made a reasonable counteroffer: ‘you could just go as a ballerina.’

It was her father who had changed everything, had spruced up the festivities. Art was one of those men that were larger than life, a personality of great stature. From about his mid-thirties people had been telling him that he’d fit right into the ‘Mall Santa’ role. It wasn’t that he was going grey or had aged quicker than his peers. It was the laugh. A bellow might have been more accurate a term. When he got going his whole body would wobble and shake, his stout beer belly rocking forward, his palms pressing into his gut. Sami liked to compare her father to The Ghost of Christmas Present from ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’. The comparison delighted Sami to such a degree that Art had taken to calling out: ‘come in and know me better man!” whenever she arrived home from school. His beckoning call would be followed by the patter of socked feet on linoleum floor. A few seconds later the child would launch herself through the air and Sami would bounce off Art’s great chest like a trampoline. Without fail the two would burst into fits of unrefined laughter.

 It had been that very same Wednesday that Marie had drawn Art’s attention to his poor eating habits. “You have to have a cut off time, set some limits for yourself,” Marie had reprimanded Art when she’d found him whipping up a soft-cheese bagel ten minutes to midnight. “If you eat after nine o’clock you’ll just keep packing on the pounds.”

Maybe it wasn't just children that heard that 'wah, wah, wah' sound come out of her mouth. Hindsight was twenty-twenty. She should have tossed that soft cheese straight in the trash, should have bought whole-wheat instead of white, bought the twenty percent less sodium cans of spaghetti hoops. No. What she should have done was drag Art out on her Sunday morning speed-walks around Morningside Park, should have made him run until he puked. The set of weights she’d bought him five Christmases ago collected dust next to the fireplace, earning their keep in the apartment by becoming outstanding toe-stubbers.

               “She didn’t want any of them,” Marie relented to Art as they stood next to the toaster and the open pot of Philly cream cheese on the counter.

               “Why does she have to dress up?”

               “All the other girls at St. Luke’s are.”

               “I don’t want our girl to be like those lot.”

Art was always doing that – idealising Sami. His Sami wasn’t like anyone else, she was perfect from the moment he took her home from the hospital, changed her diaper and was consequently pissed all over. Even then, covered in pee, he split himself open laughing. That was the first time Sami had seen him bellow, the last would be at about 5:37 PM on October 30^th.

October 30^th , 2002

Art rocketed the front door open, its hinges squealed like a fat porker. Pumpkins – two of them. One was the size of a bowling ball and the other, a honeydew melon. Kicking past the mail in the front foyer, Art made his way to the kitchen. The pumpkins thudded on the kitchen table, making the fruit basket in the centre bounce. “Come and get ‘em!” – it was pointless for Art to holler because Sami was already at his heels.

          “We’re going to eat them!” Directed Art with as serious face.

          “No,” giggled Sami.

          “We’re going to reach in, pull out their slimy, squirming guts and feast on their insides!”

          “No!”

         “But first we must kill them!” With vigour, Art took a knife from the stand next to the cooker and stabbed the first pumpkin at the crown of its skull. Marie rolled her eyes and watched the man she loved decimate the top of the two innocent pumpkins. With soup spoons the father and daughter scooped out the pumpkin’s brains and guts, spewing them across the wooden table top with glee. The kitchen was now an operating room from two criminal masterminds - experts of destruction. Art popped a couple of the pumpkin seeds in his gob and released fire, one after another. Marie protested, holding up her open palms as shields. She made him pick each and every one of the seeds up off the floor (including wrestling one from Sami’s curls). Despite his best efforts to de-seed the kitchen, Marie found one of the seeds stuck to the side of the herb and spice cupboard a week later. The little seed was mixed with equal parts grief and contentment.

         “Now that we’ve scooped out their brains, they need a face.”

Art was painfully bad at creativity, at anything considered artsy or crafty. This even boiled down to the sloppy Valentine’s day cards he bestowed on Marie. Usually the heart would be wonky, the penmanship sloppy. It was a pure gift in itself if she could even decipher his acclamation of love. Most of the time she would just nod, laugh and throw her arms around his thick neck. He could always be heard saying, ‘You think since I’m called Art, I would at least be able to draw for godsake!” It was a nasty joke that’d followed him around for most of his life, rearing its head anytime a creative activity revealed itself.

The faces were abysmal.

Sami had regrettably taken after her father when it came to creativity. The most the pair could muster up were small circles for eyes, triangles for noses and large crooked mouths. It was as if they’d seen the standard image of a pumpkin in a newspaper and decided there was simply no other acceptable design. It was reminiscent of the way young children drew houses, of the blobs that kindergarteners called cats, of the four semi-circles that apparently equated to a daisy.

Art smirked down at his miniature: “a fine creation.”

Marie didn’t know whether he was speaking of the pumpkin or his daughter, she liked to think it was the latter. She retrieved some tea candles from the knick-knack drawer in the hall, lit and placed them inside the pumpkins. With unyielding pride, the pumpkins were paraded to the front door. Once on the doorstep, their all-seeing eyes scoured the opposing building on 115th street. Staring. Watching. Observing. With the flickering light behind their small circular eyes they confronted the green witch and held its stare.

Loyal guardians of the household; perfectly imperfect creations.

Marie didn’t like to remember what happened next – it was a haze of limbs, of the front foyer coat rack crashing to the floor, of Art’s big paws that would normally have been placed around his laughing belly, instead, clutching at his chest.

October 30^th, 2019.

Marie steadied herself as she climbed the third set of stairs – she’d begged Sami to go for an apartment on a lower level, one more accessible to her unfit mother. It was pointless. Even when she’d dropped Sami off for her first week of Ballet Camp during the summer of ’05, she’d scrambled to claim a top bunk in the cabin. The elevator in the building had been on the fritz for a good month and the fear of being suspended in a box with utter strangers was enough for her.                

Not today, she thought, I’ll take the stairs.

She wasn’t that old, not yet at least. Pressing forward, the fire door swung open and Marie exited out onto the third-floor landing. Someone on the floor had draped witch-themed bunting from the moulding, stretching the Halloween décor from one end of the hallway to the other. Erratic, unsettling eyes looked down on her. Instantly, she was drawn back to the green witch and the last time she’d witnessed its shifty movements. The woman who had owned the ground floor apartment on 115th had vacated the premise years ago, the people that had replaced her were young and vibrant. Not the kind of people to spruce up the place with bargain bucket Halloween decorations. Gentrification, she’d heard someone call it; something that apparently happened when the younger one’s nested in the area and brought their money with them. Marie shook herself out of the nostalgia and turned left down the hall towards Sami’s apartment.

Even before she turned the corner, she knew what she’d find waiting for her there.

Outside the front door, tucked in close to the welcome mat was a pumpkin. It had two small circular eyes, a triangle nose and a large jagged mouth. From inside, a warm light glowed. Marie took in a sharp breath. On the other side of the front door didn't come sobs, didn't come lamentations or tears. Instead their came the loud, bellowing laughter of her husband's daughter: Sami.

        “A fine creation,” she said, knocking the door.