Happy Halloween! From issues past...

We thought you'd appreciate a little Halloween themed prose! This piece was featured in HFR issue #40. Enjoy!

Loom

-B.J. Best

The 1983 Halloween, I was the red Pac-Man ghost. My mom made the costume, dyed it a color named Wine and stitched the squiggles of its agitated face like railroad tracks all akimbo.

In 1986, she stood ironing in our brown living room. The TV was on. The Challenger had exploded. They kept showing it again and again, a perennial flowering of fire.

I took pictures of swans on her camera during the spring of 1992. It was as if they had risen from ice, bobbed for a while, then flew away.

In 1972, she and my dad smoked dope they called Wauwatosa Wacko.

Tonight, she invited Erin and me to dinner. Erin was going to aerobics. I was going to drink and write with my friends. We had already eaten dinner. Erin is at aerobics. I am writing and drinking with my friends.

In 1997, I told her the quarter moon cut me like a scythe. It was the one thing she wished she had told me sooner.