Samhain or something like it
Twilight gathered in the gutters, puddling around wet leaves that looked more like damp postcards from summer than anything organic. I took the long loop past the post office; Murphy trotted ahead, threading through the cold air.
Kids drifted along the pavement in charity-shop layers: a bedsheet ghost with tennis shoes, a Batman cape over a puffer jacket, two witches, coats bunched under their costumes, struggling with supermarket pumpkins. LED street lights tinted everything to the same pale orange, while children rang doorbells with the fervour usually reserved for detonators.
At number 22 a window held a carved turnip lantern — scored lines, triangle eyes, stringy flesh still clinging to the lid. It glowed with a queasy, butter-yellow light, harsher than any pumpkin. The smell of singed root seeped through the cracked sash; Murphy issued a growl, decided against further commentary, and moved on. I logged the image without judgment — just odd punctuation in the evening’s syntax.
Back home the house smelled of beeswax and something stewing. Emma knelt on the bay-window seat, lighting two stubby candles: one on the sill, one on the hearth. A third, still pristine, waited on the table.
“Decoration?” I asked, un-clipping Murphy’s lead.
She shrugged. “Felt right.”
No plastic skulls, no string lights — just those small flames shivering in the draught-strip gap. I didn’t press. We’ve learned to let each other follow half-formed impulses.
In the kitchen an enamel pot muttered on the stove: carrots, parsnips, a fugitive leek. Emma checked it, stirred, then scraped the wooden spoon against the pot. “Read something earlier,” she said, almost conversational. “Old belief that the veil’s thin tonight. Not just ghosts — everything blurs.”
I told her about the turnip lantern; she laughed, said she’d carved one in primary school. “Reeked like a bonfire of old boots,” she recalled. We ate standing up, bowls cupped in palms, the dog orbiting for fallout.
Later I stepped into the garden with a mug of mint tea. The air held its breath: smoke from a neighbour’s chimney, damp timber, the iron tang of distant tide. Somewhere, maybe toward the headland, a single note drifted — low, resonant. Foghorn? A lorry brake on the coastal road? Hard to say. It didn’t come again. I waited a minute longer, listening to the refrigerator-hum hush of the town, then went inside.
One candle on the sill burned steady; the other had guttered, wick drowned in its own wax. No draught that I could feel. “They burn uneven,” Emma said without looking up from a crossword. I set the spent stump in the hearth grate beside the fresh, unlit one. Murphy padded over, sniffed, pawed the spent candle as if rearranging it for comfort, then curled tight, muzzle on tail.
The last of the evening settled like frost on a gate hinge — quiet, unhurried, a click felt more than heard. Upstairs the Roberts radio remained mute, the map with its red crescent slept beneath a push-pin, and the candle on the sill held its small position against the pane, refusing to measure the dark by anything so crude as hours.