11/26/2015 – Thanksgiving Day

The weirdest thing happened tonight.

While my significant-other was visiting family for Thanksgiving dinner (I’m a mostly house-bound borderline agoraphobic moderately paranoid recluse), I hear a timid knock at the kitchen door, which is a few feet away from my computer station.

I freeze (because I’m moderately paranoid and it might be the NSA), and then the timid knock repeats. I peek out the big window on the kitchen wall perpendicular to the door on that side of the house and spot a man in his mid-twenties standing in the road outside of my yard. I’m a little concerned at this point, but then I hear a very small child’s voice.

“I want to stop here,” the small child says.

“Nobody’s home,” the adult male says.

Side note: why is “says” pronounced as sez with a soft e and doesn’t rhyme with a hard a word like the plural of bay, which is similarly spelled? English is so royally fucking unruly.

Back to the story. I’m equal parts curious, paranoid, and concerned at this point.

And then I hear the child’s voice again. “But they’ve got two porch lights on, Daddy, and I can hear music from inside!” *

Knock, knock, knock.

So, I open the door. There’s a little boy, maybe five years old, wearing a Darth Vader costume with the plastic mask pushed up on top of his head.

“Trick or treat,” the kid says.

I sigh, feeling sort of like the Grinch Who Stole Halloween. “I don’t have any candy. Halloween was, like, a month ago. Do you like turkey meat or sauerkraut or cranberry sauce?”

“No,” the kid says, stomping a foot. “Trick or treat. I want candy! I find your lack of candy disturbing.”

Again, I sigh. “Halloween was last month, Anakin. Today is Thanksgiving Day, where we celebrate the hostile takeover of North America, featuring the decimation of native peoples by European folk who didn’t have the good sense to travel a paltry extra twelve-hundred miles south so harsh northern North American winters wouldn’t kill them. I don’t have any candy. Thanksgiving is not a candy holiday.”

The kid’s face screws up all mad and shit, and then he looks over his shoulder at his father, who is standing in the dirt street just beyond the you-people-drive-too-fast tire gully that serves as a curb in our neighborhood.

Kid says to Dad, “It’s really not a candy holiday?”

Dad shakes his head. “Sorry, son. No.”

The kid breaks down and starts sobbing.

I raise my hands in an exaggerated shrug and glare at the dad. “Why didn’t you tell him?”

Dad puts his hands on his head and clutches at his post-grunge hippie-length hair that’s in dire need of product. “Because I have to live with him for at least the next thirteen years and I don’t want him to kill me in my sleep!”

As it turned out, I had two full-sized Three Musketeers bars in my freezer, leftovers from Halloween. I gave them to the kid and told him that if he didn’t listen to his dad from now on, the Easter Bunny would hide mashed-up over-cooked asparagus in his candy next March 27.

Welcome to my blog, y’all.

–Mercedes

* Spotify writing playlist with much angst blasting from my Canz.