Well, here's my Halloween story. It's a romance between people who are both a little broken, as is my wont. There's not much sex in this one, because that's what the muses made me do. It's slow, but I like these people. I hope things go well for them.
Thanks for reading. If you have feedback or thoughts, please do share. I appreciate the time it takes.
Also, if you want to click some number of stars at the end to vote, I'd like that, too.
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1.
"Oh, you're such a cute ghost." "My, what scary teeth you have." "Yes, I've seen the movie, you look just like that superhero or princess or whatever." You don't need to be an expert at social interaction to know how to handle it when a four or seven or eleven year old kid rings your doorbell wearing some costume on Halloween. They're happy and excited at the beginning of the night and a little worn out at the end. They're usually accompanied by Mom or Dad (or a group of parents) standing next to them (in the case of the littlest ones) or out on the sidewalk (for the older ones), reminding them to say "Trick or Treat" and "Thank you" as they take one or two or however many you allow of the ever-shrinking candy bars you bought in the enormous bags from Costco or Sam's. Sometimes they're shy and barely mutter. Sometimes they're sixteen and wearing a costume they threw together at the last minute when they remembered that sometimes it's still fun being a kid. Some people complain about those kids. I don't. If giving a high school kid eight cents of candy brings them a smile, well, I'll do worse things with my life.
I didn't do much in terms of decorating my house, not like some of my neighbors. My parents never did, and I was new to home ownership myself, having just moved in this June. Before then, I'd been in grad school housing, and nobody trick-or-treats there. Well, not if you don't count some of the parties, and I didn't go to those. But I'd turned on the porch light and put out a couple of pumpkins I'd bought at the grocery store just so kids would know they could ring my doorbell. I was even thinking ahead a little to next year, thinking that maybe I'd get some lights or something inflatable for the lawn. It was strange to me, this whole adulthood thing - I mean, I'd been able to vote for nine years and drink for six, but there's something about buying a house and participating in these rituals of life in these United States that made me feel like an actual adult.
As the night passed, I even met some of my neighbors. I hadn't talked to many of them before. I was used to apartment life in the city, where I interacted with people as little as possible. I mean, I waved back if they waved at me, and I'd talked to the Jensens who owned the house next to mine a couple of times while I was out mowing the lawn at the same time as the husband was, but I was the new guy. I didn't have kids, so the neighbors with families weren't interested in me, and as a guy, I wasn't going to be the target for babysitting needs. I was neither handsome enough that any single women (or men - they didn't know which way I swang) were knocking on my door with Welcome to the Neighborhood gifts nor did I have an obvious "hook" to draw people in - I didn't shoot hoops in my driveway or do woodworking in my garage or anything. I went to work, I came home, I kept my yard clean enough. But everyone's social on Halloween, or at least everyone who's walking around the neighborhood is, and I thought that going forward maybe I'd at least not feel like a stranger as often.
We didn't have official Trick-or-Treat hours in my suburb, but I'd been told by some of the parents that people rarely came by after 9. The little ones were done well before then, and even the older kids usually had gotten their fill by 8 or so. Besides, I was told, even when the weather was good (as it was tonight - in the low 40's), it got chilly being out that long. When 9 pm rolled around, I hadn't had a visitor for a good half-hour, and I thought it was a reasonable time to turn off the porch light and dig through what was left of my candy to see what I'd much on. There was too much of it, and I was sure I'd regret how much I'd eat, but, I rationalized to myself (you rationalize a lot of things to yourself when you're 25 pounds above where the doctor tells you she'd like you to be), if you can't eat too much candy on Halloween, when can you?
I took off my jeans and sweatshirt and plopped myself down on the couch with the candy (lots of Three Musketeers and Kit Kats left - Timothy FTW) and some Maker's Mark to watch something Halloween-themed. I'd just started scrolling through the streaming services when the doorbell rang.
I didn't want to get up to answer it. I was just in my boxers and a t-shirt, and I was comfy (and I'd just eaten a mouthful of Skittles), when the doorbell rang again. Not wanting to be the victim of some Halloween-related prank or anything, I swallowed quickly and called out, "Be right there!" I grabbed my pants and quickly pulled them up, buttoning them and doing the belt as I opened the door.
I was expecting to see some late-arriving teenagers, maybe some who weren't even wearing costumes, and I was prepared to be more than a little grumpy with them, so I opened the door quickly, just as the bell rang again.
"Hold your horses!" I yelled, but immediately regretted it. On the porch was a youngish woman - about my age, holding a small child in her arms. The woman was on the edge of a panic.
"CanIuseyourphone?"
"What?"
She swallowed, looked at what I guessed was her kid, then tried again. "My phone died. I need to call 911. Can I use yours?"
"Oh shit. Yeah, come in." I turned and grabbed my phone from the couch to hand to her, punching in the code as I did and thankful that I hadn't been in the middle of looking at porn. "Do you want to put your..."
She took the phone from me, otherwise barely registering my presence, and dialed. After a moment, she spoke. "Yes, my son ate something with peanuts and he has an allergy. I think he's in shock or something."
She paused. "He's breathing, but it's labored, and he's all splotchy."
As soon as I realized what was going on, I spun and headed for my bathroom. My older sister had all manner of allergies, and it had become a family norm to have a collection of medications on hand in all our homes, from the basic antihistamines to - there, on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet - an EpiPen. I grabbed it and ran back out to the living room. I didn't know how long it would take for an ambulance to get here, not having needed one yet, and I at least wanted to offer it to the woman, just in case the kid was in bad enough shape.
When I got back to the living room, I froze. The woman had laid the kid on the floor and she'd started performing CPR on him. Fuck. This was bad.
"I-I've got this," I sputtered, holding out the EpiPen. She didn't react. All of her attention was focused on counting off compressions, so I knelt down next to her and put the pen in her field of view. "Can he take this?"
She nodded, not stopping, so I flipped the cap off and injected him. His body jerked, and at the same time, I heard a siren coming from outside, through the door that the woman had left open when she came in with her kid. I jumped back up and ran outside, ignoring the temperature and that I was in my underwear. I wanted to flag the ambulance down and make sure they got her as soon as possible.
The ambulance quickly pulled into my driveway, and as the driver hopped out, I gave her the three-sentence rundown of what I knew, which admittedly wasn't much. "Kid's in my living room. Mom is giving him CPR. I gave him an EpiPen." The paramedic nodded and rushed past me, along with her partner. I let them go and followed a few seconds after, staying a good distance back so I didn't accidentally interfere with anything they needed to do.
I couldn't see much, but I heard the basic rundown. The boy was breathing again - I felt my knees go weak when I heard that - but he'd had a really rough allergic reaction and they needed to get him to the ER. The rest was kind of garbled. His mom wasn't completely sure how he'd been exposed because Aiden (the boy) was usually really good about not eating anything his mom hadn't checked, even though he was only five, but obviously he had been.
They loaded Aiden up on a stretcher - I could hear him moaning for his mom, which I took to be a good sign - and wheeled him out the door. One of the paramedics said, "Good thinking with that EpiPen" to me on the way out, and then she and her partner - along with Aiden and his mom - were gone. From beginning to end, it probably took less than twenty minutes, and other than the boy's name, I had no idea who they were. I hoped he'd be okay.
My adrenaline had spiked, so it took me a while to get settled down and then fall asleep. I couldn't help but think about the two people who'd briefly popped into my life and then disappeared. They'd been in the middle of a crisis, and I had been able to help, it seemed, but I didn't know anything about them. It just seemed so strange.
2.
The next day at work, I was tired from my long night of laying awake, but I felt like I'd actually accomplished something. My life thus far had been pretty academic - I'd been a high-achieving student at school and I was doing interesting research at a national laboratory, but it wasn't the kind of stuff that was easy to talk about with most people, so outside of my colleagues, it lived in my head. I realized that I lived in my head a lot outside of work too. I had a handful of good friends, but none of them lived nearby, so we mostly communicated via text or social media, or on the rare occasions when we could game online together. I'd had a couple of girlfriends in grad school, but that whole part of my life was still relatively new to me. I'd been the stereotypical science geek outsider in high school, and while that had changed, I didn't have a lot of confidence with women. Both of my girlfriends had been people I'd known as friends first, and they'd each made the first move. I had been quite directly disabused of the idea that I was completely unattractive, but I still struggled to shake my internal self-image of "pudgy science geek."
I had worked a lot of hours most weeks my first few months in this job getting my research established while the lab was fully operational, but it was getting ready for a few months of scheduled upgrades and maintenance that coincided with the end of the year and the holidays. There was plenty to do, but without the crunches of the same time pressure, I would be working more traditional 40-hour weeks. Thinking about the extra time I'd have, combined with the experience I'd had the night before, had me wondering what I might be able to do that could directly impact people. My research mattered in the whole "understanding the nature of the universe" way, but not in the "help someone who needs it today" way, and I felt like I wanted to do something like that.
I had no idea what, though. I didn't have any special skills that I knew of, and googling volunteer opportunities gave me anxiety. There were just too many options.
