Little Orphan Annie

The brain felt warm in our hands, and Ricky Marsden was the first to swallow. Halloween, 1990, we sat in my parents’ garage while my mother, the witch, told Ricky it was completely inappropriate to eat it. Tastes like tomato, he informed her, and the others giggled. The others—witch, devil, G.I. Joe, football player, bum, knight, princess, Spider-Man— sat in a circle and awaited the next body part which my mother was soon to pass. Ricky was sent to the bathroom to wash his hands of the tomato.
And now…the eyeballs!
In the pitch black of the garage, we saw nothing. We heard echoed voices reflecting off of my father’s pegboard and motorcycle, but the voices seemed to belong to someone else. I was nine-years old, and this was my Halloween party. The eyes were held in fingers, squeezed, passed, and Ronnie Putson, the knight, apologized, said he thinks he squeezed too hard and made one of them burst. There were more giggles and my mother, who was becoming increasingly frustrated, said that if we couldn’t do this right, then we’d never get to the rotting flesh. That shut everyone up.
My father was in the living room with the other parents, and he stirred the witch’s cauldron while another one of the father’s attempted to toss the block of dry ice into the pot. Mothers sat beside one another and gossiped about school, about their children’s grades and how the teacher was to blame for the low test scores. They whispered about Chloe’s mother, how she hadn’t made it to the PTA meeting in weeks, how her wine tasting havit had veered into something else. The fathers, helping themselves to Miller Lite’s from the fridge, took the cans and cracked them open, taking long first sips as they plotted the next phase of my party: the haunted woods.
My mother had sent out invitations written on yellowed paper with red marker. It was supposed to look like pirates’ blood, but to me, it just looked like ordinary blood. “Pirates’ blood is darker,” I had whined, but she said that we would just have to make the most of it. Ten invitations and all had arrived except for Chloe Patterson. At school, she had bragged about her costume, how it was sure to be like nothing we had ever seen before. Ricky Marsden had replied that it would never top his, but as it turned out, Ricky was a devil that year, and he had eaten the brains, and it was easily topped.
When Ricky came back into the garage, the light from the door erupted the scene and for a moment, we were all sent back into the reality of things. Glancing down, Gina the Princess held the olives in her hands and said so. “Olives.” The others whined and my mother, furious, stood up and said that if they weren’t going to take this seriously, then she was done. Standing, she walked back into the house and nine of us sat in a circle in the dark garage and listened to the tick of the furnace. Ronnie had a flashlight, even though he wasn’t supposed to, and he flicked it. The room erupted in shadows and half-monsters, half-radiating under guises, under masks.
“See these spider dwellings,” Ronnie said, hunched over, beyond the furnace, peering down into glossy webs. “There must be like a hundred million spiders.” We stood over them, pointing at the different sizes, betting on which ones would be poisonous. Daddy longlegs and widows and others, we could not name all of their species. We were not afraid, and yet none of us volunteered to wipe the web away.
“Just leave it,” Gina begged, tilting her princess crown. “They’re not hurting anyone.”
“If Chloe were here, we’d make her do it,” Ricky said. The others laughed. None of them liked her the way I did, and maybe, I only liked her because of the way she made me feel after Ricky or one of the others made fun of me for one thing or another. Friends, we were all friends, but Chloe was just better than the rest of us, knew more, said things louder.
My father walked into the garage, dressed in an enormous gold chain and a Mr. T mask. We screamed. The mask fell to the floor and he laughed, pulled up a foldout chair and sat us down again, promised to read us a scary poem that had “scared the shit outta me when I was a boy.” My friends liked my father because he said things like that and didn’t know better.
“‘Little Orphan Annie,’ by James Whitcomb Riley,” he said, clearing his throat. He began reading with a deep voice, then a high pitched one, and they were equally scary. Then, he read very slow:
Once there was a little girl who always laughed and grinned
and made fun of everyone, of all her blood and kin,
and once when there was company and old folks was there,
she mocked them and she shocked them and said, she didn't care.
And just as she turned on her heels and to go and run and hide,
there was two great big black things a standing by her side.
They snatched her through the ceiling fore she knew what shes about,
and the goblins will get ya if ya don't watch out!!The knight screamed, and so did Spider-Man, and my father laughed again, finished the poem, told us that tonight, we would all fight the goblins together.
“Assemble your finest men and women. Meet in the kitchen in five minutes, right next to the bobbing for apples bin.” And so we did, stopping for bathroom breaks and handfuls of candy corn, sticking the candy onto the edges of teeth like fangs. The G.I. Joe realigned his camouflage face paint and the bum smudged ash from our fire place onto his cheeks. The parents ignored us, except for my mother who went into the backyard and lit a path of jack-o-lanterns which she and my father had spent all afternoon carving. The pumpkins seemed to twitch when lit, their faces cowering and shrinking and growing with the girth of flame. Gina ate a piece of pumpkin pie and the whip cream covered her lips but nobody would tell her. In the background, Halloween sounds from a mixed tape my father made, incorporating his own demonic laughter with the sounds of squeaking doors and banging of pots and pans. He had manufactured the sounds himself, and I, his assistant, followed him around with the tape recorder. He knew I was scared of these types of things, and said that maybe if I saw where the noises came from, then it wouldn’t be so bad.
It was a cold night, the night before Halloween, and a stack of Starter jackets and other coats piled on the blue-flowered couch cushions. My mother, the witch, checked her hat, her fake wart, and stalled by making us sing a Halloween song while our fathers took to the woods. The men laughed, hit each other on the backs, and placed masks on their faces and wandered into pitch darkness. The wind touched their skin as they opened the door that night. A smattering of scratchy winds clung to their beards.
“Tonight…you will enter the woods where few have dared to enter. A haunted woods, with goblins and the goblin king himself. You must outwit them with your super powers. Among you are a devil, a G.I. Joe, a princess, and many others. Together, you shall prevail!” Too anxious to head to the woods, we scratched at the glass door and stared at the laughing jack-o-lanterns outside. I slipped on my monkey mask and clasped the tail to my butt.
“Happy hauntings!” my mother, the witch, said, and we were gone.
My backyard was dark to begin with, and the candle light dripping from the cut lips of pumpkins only intensified the contrast. Something changed for us when we left the safety of the house, and our laughter and screams quieted. Walking in a huddle group, we all fought for the protection of the middle. One by one, our fathers frightened us, screaming and jumping from bushes and trees. In the distance, the banging of sticks, high whitsles, dogs howling.
“Guys, can we go back inside yet?” Ronnie asked, and none of us laughed at him.
“But…the woods isn’t done yet. I know my dad is still hiding for us. We just have to keep walking and then we can go…”
“I really want to go back inside now,” he replied. The others nodded.
“What? You guys can be such babies,” Ricky chided, but really, we were all babies, too young for Halloweens like this. Ricky and I were left to the darkness of the woods, the same woods where we had spent entire summers constructing forts a if it were our sole preoccupation. Woods where we had peed and dug holes for bobby traps and set trip lines with vines to keep out any intruders. Though we never actually saw an intruder, we liked to think that they came at night, on summer nights, and that when we woke and took back to our work in the mornings, the only reason for the integrity of our work was due to our traps.
Ricky and I held hands in the wood that night, and tried to think of the pumpkin pie that awaited us on the kitchen counter. Throats still soggy with the taste of apple cider, the devil and the monkey set out deeper into the woods. We could hear our fathers growing restless, the laughing creeping from the edge of the thickets, and we were about to go to them when Ricky had a better idea.
No, he said. Let’s get them back.
We climbed in the ditch beside my house and waited. Any minute, Ricky whispered, and so we waited for the right moment, waited to jump out, to frighten our fathers, for revenge.
But it was then that we found Chloe, skull bloodied, mummy costume ripped to tatters, and unmoving. Her eyes were half-opened, and if it weren’t for the blonde sheen of her hair, we probably would have never seen her at all. In the ditch, by my house, buried in thrush and underbrush and cattails. The body of a little girl, a friend who had not made it to the party, in costume still, but not the way she was meant to be. The mummy wrap sopped up the blood and it dried on her forehead.
Ricky did not scream, and either did I, and he took out his flashlight and clicked it on her body, and the light died, and he hit it, but it would not come back. Chloe. Chloe. We whispered it like a quiet chant. The sound of our fathers’ footsteps receding from the woods. Halloween noises dripping from the tape player in the living room. Peering up from the ditch, I could see my friends inside the window of my house, jumping at one another, regaining their confidence after the scares.
“Ricky…what do we do?” He stared at her and began to cry.
“I didn’t mean it about the spiders, really. I didn’t want her to put her hand in those webs because…because I was just joking. The goblins must have gotten her, Ben, don’t you see? Like Little Orphan Annie, you know. The big black things must have snatched her and put her in this ditch and…”
My father’s voice trailing, and the voices of other men. They laughed, and I could see their work boots and shoes as the walked towards our house. We did not jump out to scare them. Did not want to scare them any longer.
Dad! Hey Dad! I called when recognizing his boots. He stopped. Dad! Down here, in the ditch. We…we found Chloe, and we think the goblins were here.
Crawling down beside us, he stared at her pale body, put his large, thick fingers to her throat, felt something, and then told us to go back in the house, right now, that he had to call an ambulance. But we didn’t move. We didn’t move a muscle, and years later, we still would not regret our decision not to leave her. Ten minutes later, the ambulance came in a flood of lights and bathed us. All of our friends— the G.I. Joe, the bum, the witch, the football player, the knight, the princess and Spider-Man— stared down at the devil, the monkey and the mummy, and tried to make sense of it all, as they slid her body into the back of an ambulance. A cattail clung to her mummy wrap, and Ricky and I clung to the side of the ditch that no longer held anything for us.