I Wish in October (1)

1

I wanted to be inside of that television orange.

I was sat on a bench by a pond, the great volume of which had dried out, leaving turned mud and thinning puddles, and submerged trash and plastic bags, and threshed cans of Lilt, Coke, and Tango that blew in place of reeds and lilies. The ducks still splatted about the pond. They slid down into it over the lax root of a ghoul tree devoured of its lifeliness and colour, matched to its soldiered siblings positioned along the road that never had any cars because cars were not allowed, though the people would still not walk on it and would march the flanking pavements; it was matched too to the stone tired hue of the road, and of the cloud, and of the just living bushes and pall of field, and of the great many other smooth barked trees in the park with rusted numbered medallions nailed into them. I remember that the trees that year had either lost their leaves early, or that the leaves had not even started to brown; one of these noted oddities, though I do not remember which, just that there was, I noticed, some oddity.

The season had been black and orange since I was very young. I believed that this was thanks less to the world that I existed in, and thanks more to the world that I most often lived in, which was behind a screen. In this world the sidewalks were curled with brushed leaf, and the Halloween children got into trouble and used magic, and found aloof strangers living dustily in the derelict houses on the edges of town, went to dances at school, went house to house and bucket to bucket, kicked in pumpkins, threw pumpkins, wore masks that turned sinister and evoked the latent desire to terrorise the neighbourhood.

Even very young I believed that I was missing out on something, that there was something I was not quite getting at. We put on Halloween costumes for school, I am sure. Though it was not quite right. It did not feel like the very distant sensation I had detected inside the screen.