The Horror

It was a beautiful Halloween evening. Small children were moving through the neighborhood, collecting candy. There was no moon visible on this Halloween and most of the trees still had their bright colored leaves. The night was unusually warm and gave no hint of the horror that was to come and the forces that would conspire to take a life in its prime.

I awoke to find what was left of him in the road. A flattened mess of guts and gore. He had been struck by a vehicle and the force of the impact had elongated his squat frame. He had been lying there for awhile judging by the moisture that had gathered by his corpse. Surprisingly, were no skid marks.

I have pieced together this accident as best as I can. Here is my version of it, it may be too gory for the average reader. Read on at your own risk.

“He was a drunkard. He enjoyed his beer and liquor. Occasionally he got into the harder stuff like Mad Dog 20/20 and Wild Irish Rose. On this evening he was watching the kids going up and down the street trick or treating and drinking Pacifico. After 8PM the kids left the neighborhood and he opened the twist top on his tenth beer in the last two hours. The bottle stuck out of his maw at a grotesque angle as he sat there with a wise ass smirk on his face. He was teetering back and forth on the railing of the porch as he worked on number twelve.

He saw what looked like a bird fly into the chimney, and as he craned his head to see what it was, he fell backwards off of the porch railing.

The force of the five foot fall shattered the back of his head with a sickening sound, the bottle lay next to him, spewing its contents onto the grass. Fate conspired against him yet again. The front lawn is a hill and he rolled gathering momentum on his way down the lawn. He was semi conscious at the time, but couldn’t move enough to combat gravity. He rolled further down the lawn, hitting a small rock and losing a piece of his head. Then he got to the wall. It is only three feet tall. He fell off of it, again smashing into the hard ground. He rolled another three feet and was lying in the road, unconscious from falling off the wall.

What happened next, he doesn’t know, thankfully. A truck delivering apples from the cold storage place down the road, hit his motionless body sometime that night. I’ll guess that at least 9 of its 18 wheels hit him. He was dead. There was nothing anyone could have done at all. It was too late. When I found him in the morning there was nothing I could do but scrape him off the road and thrown him into the weeds. Wasted life, cut down in his prime.”

He was “Archie,” my albino pumpkin, that rolled into the road, and was squashed like the fat gourd that he was. At least he went out in a blaze of glory.

Rest in Pieces my hollowed out friend.