Page 54 of A Better World

“It was nothing like I thought. They keep their records differently. They showed me, and it all made a lot more sense,” he said, getting into bed. “I’m tired. I love you.”

“I love you,” she said.

Probably because he was drunk-snoring, she couldn’t fall back asleep that night. She wandered the main floor of the house. It felt different at night, foreign. Sunny was easy to see, her white feathers glowingin the moonlight as she foraged for burrowing creatures across the drought-resistant Kentucky bluegrass.

Linda ate some gluey spanakopita, picking away pieces of the dish from the pan with her pincer fingers. She opened the package containing the most recent altar offering: a bruised red fruit. The insert described it as a pomegranate.

She copied what she’d seen in other people’s houses and cut it in half, then placed it directly in the hall altar, below the Geiger counter. Small, fetal-like seeds stuck to layers of white rind. Red juice bled down from the burst parts.

A kind of nighttime logic overcame her. She prayed, like she’d done when she was little, and it was not clear to her to whom she was praying. “Thank you for helping us settle in. Please let Russell win his case. Please let things go on as they’ve been going. Please let us stay.”

Who’s the Big Bad Samhain?

Put your hands together and clap, ’cause it’s Samhain!

According to the Plymouth Valley Chamber of Commerce, all residents can expect pumpkin deliveries by this Friday.

Need more lights? Want a smoke machine and some scary blow-up monsters? Call the volunteers—we’ve got plenty and are happy to help you set up.

Some reminders: All residents are required to hand out treats from 4–7 p.m. Otherwise, expect some naughty tricks!

The Labyrinth is open from 8–10 p.m. at Caladrius Park. This year’s serious. Beltane King Keith Parson plans to scare your pants off, so enter if you dare!!!!!!!!

Samhain

During the weekleading up to Samhain, PV radio tittered with excitement. The hosts ofNewsHour, a dinnertime weeknight radio show, fielded tongue-in-cheek call-ins over whether the Beltane King would frighten someone into a heart attack, as he’d apparently done the previous year. “Oh, itwillhappen!” said a milky-voiced Southeasterner. “Iknowit!”

“Would you bet your beef ration on it?”

The lady paused, and Linda pictured her sitting on a porch on Gal’s side of town, a retired octogenarian who still remembered when Sirin’s had been a church, and the northern farm had been flat plains. “No. I don’t think I would bet that,” she said, scandalized by the question, and with her answer to it, too. “I love my steak!”

Samhain was a big deal. The Beautification Society turned the Labyrinth into a haunted maze. Then, the Beltane King and scores of volunteers dressed up and scared people inside it. During the weeklong lead-up to the holiday, volunteers posted photos all over town of Keith wearing an eerie all-black costume. He’d made it himself, apparently, and was supposed to be the personification ofdeath. Linda would be walking along Main Street or parking at the hospital or waving to Sally, and there he’d be, thick necked, that pitch-black costume over his face, wearing a crown of bones.

“Who had a heart attack?” Linda asked. She and Rachel talked a few times a week. Sometimes it was about the clinic, but more oftenjust to touch base. Rachel was her best in the mornings and Linda always tried to catch her then.

“Some old guy with a bad heart. He was like a wrinkle bag, so I’m going to guess he was over a hundred,” Rachel said. “I could have stashed three bottles of mead in those folds. Crazy part is, he lived. He’s still alive. He’s probably going back for more this year. Listen, the people here build this thing up, but your street in Kings was probably scarier. It’s a thrill for people who’ve never had anything bad happen to them. For the rest of us, it’s entertainment.”

By the morning of Samhain, every house in town was festooned with lights, billowing vampires, zombies, and cornucopias. The Farmer-Bowen house had accepted all offers of help and decoration, meaning the whole thing was ablaze with lights, blow-up night crawlers, and graveyards. Even Sunny’s shelter had a headstone over it.

Linda’s friends had made all kinds of costume suggestions: zombie (Rachel), one half of a historical couple like Marie and Pierre Curie (Daniella). Anouk was very clear that she should not be a caladrius, which carried too much Hollow significance. After much consideration, Linda went with her old standby: sexy black cat. She wore a stretch black leotard, applied eyeliner for whiskers, and pinned a black yarn tail to her bottom.

All afternoon, she answered the door to adorable children and their equally adorable parents. Several neighbors came inside to chat. A few expressed admiration that she’d become an integral part of Plymouth Valley so quickly.

“You’re on the fast track to a ticket,” Kim Jackson, the PV K–12 principal, told her.

“Are we?” Linda asked.

“Absolutely!” Kim answered. “I’m from Palo Alto. We had a lock there. Twelve more years and I’d have gotten a golden ticket. But when this chance to live in PV came along, I grabbed it.”

“Is PV that much better?” Linda asked.

“The other towns have no culture. It’s all work all the time. This place has a sense of fun. I hope we get to stay. They’re sending me to Boston for a week of recommendation-writing training. But I don’t know if it’s enough. Would you have lunch with me sometime?”

Linda noticed that (a) Kim was very nice and (b) no one else was talking to her, or to her family. Though she’d been in this town longer than the Farmer-Bowens, she was still getting hazed. “I’d love lunch.”

Between meeting, greeting, and handing out candy, she and Russell took turns helping Hip with his costume. He was going as the diminishing plastic island in the ocean, but the soymilk containers kept falling off, and so did the trash bags. Linda glued more precisely, held the plastic pieces to the glue for a longer time, to let them adhere. Russell drew on the cardboard sandwich board base in Sharpie, labeling each thing, so people would know the kid was Plastic Island and not a random pile of garbage. Despite all this effort, he nonetheless looked like a generic pile of garbage. “I can’t leave the house like this! I look like the stupidest loser in the world!”

Russell, having spent a lot of time on that Sharpie sign, left the room in annoyance.

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