Halloween Short Story

Halloween always brought a flurry of activity to their otherwise routine schedule. The ability to devour candy bars, boxes of hard candy, bubble gum, and suckers, without having to share a single piece, was the epitome of childhood. For one night, each of the seven was the sole owner of enough candy to rot every tooth in their mouths.
The carving of the pumpkins seemed to ignite their creative energy causing them to lose all sense of control. The night before Halloween, Hanna transformed the kitchen table into a carving station. Max placed two pumpkins in the center of the table. Using a large kitchen knife, he cut the tops off each pumpkin. He drew faces on the orange skin, instructing the children to scoop the guts onto the newspaper using their hands or ladle. He watched the news in the living room, while he waited for them to finish.
Taking turns, they reached into the pumpkins, sticking their fingers into the cold, stringy slime that clung to the insides of the monstrous squash. Grabbing handfuls of seeds and stringy slime, they flicked it onto the newspaper. …show more content…
Store-bought costumes were too expensive so Max and Hanna outfitted each child with a costume created from their imaginations. A white sheet, torn into strips, transformed Beth into a mummy. Curlers in her hair with an over-sized bathrobe wrapped around her body, Katie became a housewife. Charcoal from the grill, rubbed on the face, created a variety of dirty-faced hobos. An eyebrow pencil drew long mustaches and eyeglasses made from twisted wire coat hangers produced absent-minded professors. Outfitting seven children with different costumes was no easy task. The wait was agonizing. Finally ready, they piled out the front door creating their own group. The seven, with Max and Hanna following behind, traipsed door-to-door, begging for copious amounts of candy, filling their standard-sized pillowcases to the point they could scarcely be