A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous by ed. Shane McKenzie Read Free Book Online

burner, and then ratcheted on the gas flame.
    SALLY IS TEN YEARS old. It is nighttime and she peers through her bedroom window. A man stands in the yard below—a shadow with just a smudge of pale where his face should be. He lights a match, revealing coarse, familiar features, and lifts it towards the cigarette in his mouth and the fire catches in his eyes and they burn like a rat’s eyes, and she sees his lips spread away from the cigarette butt, rising at the edges into a horrible smile. He clamps onto the cigarette with his prominent front teeth and the cherry of the smoke burns the same color as his eyes and Sally feels dread like streams of ice on her back. She leaps away from the window and races to her bed. With the covers over her head like a shield, she squeezes her eyes closed and breathes heavily and curls into the smallest ball she can manage.
    THE WATER BOILED. SALLY checked the digital timer on the range. She pinched the phone between her shoulder and ear, listening to her mother babble on about the holiday, and Sally mumbled and grunted, agreeing with her mother while forcing herself to hear nothing the woman said. A big family event. Everyone will be there. The whole Carter clan. Mitchell and his family. Cousins whose names she couldn’t keep straight—was Kelly the one with epilepsy? Or was that Karen? Had Jim just returned from Germany or was that Jimmy, Jim’s second cousin? Her aunts. Their husbands. And Henry.
    Sally had asked her mother to rescind Uncle Henry’s invitation, but her mother had wanted a reason for excluding the man, and Sally couldn’t give a reason.
    To make matters worse, her appeal to keep Henry out of the holiday had caused an inquisition, which she was in no condition to face. So, Sally had decided to keep her branch of the family tree—her Eric, her Mary—at home. Naturally her mother had refused to let it rest. She’d gone through Eric, had played her guilt games and the bullshit family-is-everything card, and Eric too had wanted an excuse from Sally, and she hadn’t provided one. No reason. Nothing she could verbalize.
    The eggs boiled. Sally looked through the bubbles at them. One of the shells had cracked. A thin white tail grew from the slit, tried to rise on the scalding tide.
    Sally suddenly felt ill, and she covered her mouth with a palm. She looked away from the pot.
    Her mother prattled on like an adult in a Peanuts cartoon, all warble and distortion. Sally grunted and said, “I really have to get back to the eggs,” noting another three minutes on the timer. There was no rush to finish the eggs; she wanted off of the phone. She couldn’t bear her mother’s shiny, happy voice and her exhilaration of reunion with the various spawn of the Carter family. Sally believed the only thing to celebrate regarding her family was distance.
    “Happy Easter, honey,” her mother said. “We’ll see you soon.”
    Happy Easter . Now there was an oxymoron. A grotesque joke. An impossibility.
    Did her mother even know what she was celebrating? Really? The woman thought it was a grand celebration of Christ’s rebirth, but Easter had been celebrated long before the Christians had co-opted its lunar date. Tammuz. Semiramis. Ishtar. Ester. Those were the first deities recognized with springtime bacchanals.
    But the Christians had invaded pagan lands. Strategy and weaponry had given them victory, but they wanted more than compliance; they demanded converts. Faith had to follow flesh into submission. Like all good molesters, they presented the pagans gifts to make them compliant. They offered to allow, even encourage, the pagans’ festivals of spring, but over time added their own philosophy to the goings on, and eventually the church absorbed the power of these events.
    And so Easter was born, with its bunnies and its bonnets and its marshmallow candies and its eggs.
    The egg.
    A symbol of fertility. Of actual birth, not rebirth.
    And what did the fucking misguided children of