Halloween Candy Read Free Page A

wouldn’t they. Must tickle something awful.” She wiped her dripping hands on the flowerprint apron, back and forth like she could never get dry enough. Ellen saw a shining in the old woman’s eyes like tears and hurt.

    Joey clanked his fork on his plate; Ellen felt a lump in her throat, and imaginary spiders and flies crawling up the back of her neck. Something in the atmosphere had changed, and she didn’t want to spend one more minute in this house with these people.

    Joey clapped a fly between his hands, catching it mid-air.

    “Mama’s sorry you didn’t see the kids,” Papa Neeson said, steering over a slick patch on the newly plowed road.

    “But you’re not.” Ellen said. She was feeling brave. She hated this man like she hated Frank. Maybe she’d report him to some child welfare agency when she got back to the train station. She could see herself killing this man.
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    “No,” Papa Neeson nodded. “I’m not. Mama, she don’t understand about other people, but I do.”

    “Well, I saw them. All three. What you do to them.”

    Papa Neeson sighed, pulling over and parking at the side of the road. “You don’t understand. Don’t know if I should waste my breath.”

    Joey was in the backseat, bundled up in blankets. He yawned,
    “Why we stopping?”

    Ellen directed him to turn around and sit quietly. He was a good boy. “I have a husband who hits children, too.”

    Papa Neeson snapped, “I don’t hit the kids, lady, and how dare you think I do, why you can just get out of my car right now if that’s your attitude.”

    “I told you, I saw them,” she said defiantly.

    “You see the threads?”

    Ellen could barely stand his smug attitude.

    “You see ‘em? You know why my kids look like that?”

    Ellen reached for the door handle. She was going to get out. Fucking country people and their torture masked as discipline. Men, 25

    how she hated their power trips. Blood was boiling now; she was capable of anything, like two days ago when she took the baseball bat and slammed it against Frank’s chest, hearing ribs cracking. She was not going to let a man hurt her child like that. Never again. The rage was rising up inside her the way it had only done twice in her life before, both times with Frank, both times protecting Joey.

    Papa Neeson reached out and grabbed her wrist.

    “ Don’t hold me like that ,” she snarled.

    He let go.

    Papa Neeson began crying, pressing his head into the steering wheel. “She just wanted them so bad, I had to go dig ‘em up. I love her so much, and I didn’t want her to die from hurting, so I just dig ‘em up and I figured out what to do and did it.”

    When he calmed, he sat back up, looking straight ahead. “We better get to the junction. Train’ll be ready. You got your life moving ahead with it, don’t you?”

    She said, “tell me about your children. What’s wrong with them?”
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    He looked her straight in the eyes, making her flinch because of his intensity. “Nothing, except they been dead for a good twenty to thirty years now, and my wife, she loves ‘em like they’re her own. I dig ‘em up, see, I thought she was gonna die from grief not having none of her own, and I figured it out, you know, about the maggots and the flies, how they make things move if you put enough of ‘em inside the bodies. I didn’t count on ‘em lasting this long, but what if they do? What if they do , lady? Mama, she loves those babies. We’re only humans, lady, and humans need to hold babies, they need to love something other than themselves, don’t they? Don’t you? You got your boy, you know how much that’s worth? Love beyond choosing, ain’t it? Love that don’t die. You know what it’s like to hug a child when you never got to hug one before? So I figured and I figured some more, and I thought about what makes things live, how do we know something’s alive, and I figured, when it moves it’s alive, and when it don’t move, it’s