Midnight Masquerade [Antología Halloween ☽﹡☾].

1 ✴︎ LynnS13

Author/Autor: ❅✴︎LynnS13

English:

A whistle in the dark.

"If you're ever alone and hear whistling, you should run."

-Famous proverb from people with common sense. However, this story happens...

Somewhere in the South, during the 90s

Sweets to last a couple of hours and dollar store trinkets, that's all a little boy needs to know the day would go wonderful, and he had both. Mrs. Stevens had brought them Halloween candy earlier in the day. Hand-painted sugar skulls and waxy corn mixed with Jordan almonds, all nested in a plastic pumpkin. It was not the most delicious offering, God knows chocolate would've sent him spinning, but those sweets he held on to guarantee the school day moved fast enough.

A couple of hours of detention, which had been properly rechristened as "required tutorials," and Ciaran's debt to society had been paid. He was eager to get in trouble somewhere else, but in trouble, he'd get.

The sun was just beginning to set. Although, in a town like Grafton, especially during the fall, it was difficult to determine the exact moment when light disappeared over the horizon. The mountain range to the north of the town bathed the valley in a bluish mist that began to spread, albeit thinly, around midafternoon, and didn't disperse until the rise of morning.

Ciaran didn't know why the mountains behind him and the mist around his ankles looked like a soft, blue haze. After all, he was just a third-grader. They'd leave him in the dark for a little longer, allowing him to fancy everything as a work of magic. Middle school was meant to burst that particular bubble. There, he'd learn that the forests, considered woodland reserves, have a considerable density and the trees release enough isoprene to alter the atmosphere.

To internalize something like that at nine years old, would be a crime.

It could be said that the day had perfect circumstances. While in other places winter temperatures began to hit in late October, in Grafton the breeze was chilly, but gentle.

Ciaran thought about stopping by Lena's. They had seen each other at school that morning and the girl seemed a little distracted. The reason was common knowledge. Lena's father got a job in Maryland. It wasn't exactly a great job, but the pay was substantial enough to make him consider leaving their tiny Georgia-Tennessee border town. Ciaran's mother, who was both a hairdresser and a frustrated poet, told her son that truckers were destined to roll, and eventually, the Harringtons were going to have to leave. They were birds of passage.

Birds of passage in a town like Grafton can be considered three generations or fewer living on that soil. In the tiny mountain county, only a handful over a thousand inhabitants, at least four families, including the Sutherlands, could say they arrived in the vicinity just after the Battle of Culloden broke up the Scottish rebellion of 1746.

Ciaran understood little about Scotland, much less cared. The truth was, their lives had nothing to do with lochs or castles, let alone kilts. They were barely five steps over dirt when it came to being poor. The Sutherland boy's saving grace was that his father was a mechanic and his mother a hairdresser. If his interest in school remained as lackluster as ever, he would become his father's apprentice, given he'd not be lucky enough to receive a football scholarship...

But the time to think about staying or leaving Grafton was years away. This night, there was no better place to be, to dream of an eternity of childhood games to play, in a world painted in shades of blue.