All Hallows

Wolves of were howl,
And the cold winds blow.
The nights tick by shorter
Now.
The sky tastes snow.
The nights are sable.
Halloween quick and hurry
Now to me.

I had been running. The kind of running a person does for a long time without being aware of it. It was two days till Halloween. There had been ghosts on my neck and on my hands. Ectoplasm filled the nights and chilled the mornings. Staid did not know me. I was loosed and did not wish to be. Something was coming after me. That kind of quiet horror whose blood trail of memory I had picked up mid-summer, though its slow sprint coming for me for much longer than that.

Seasons do not stay long. November snows promise. Keep still and run is the way I have done it for so long. The stay is story and the stories I've read and written even have picked their way to this pace so the thing behind me kept even with me, even when I thought the trails were overlaid and I had outwitted it. Me, outwitting anyone? Ten-cent mind. Sad parcel of a body. Nights when I masturbated and held still as though pleasure were not allowed even there.

I am a single man. I was once a single boy. I have never attracted even horrors at my heels, though sometimes I scared myself into trying. I sleep little now and read Poe often. I feel the melancholy hands at my hot tea before I can even touch it. It seems there is a thing after me that calls in a voice that once knew and once knowing thus having power over me. The night is cold and I shiver, wrapped up in blankets sitting in my living room postage stamp size and dim orangey, perfect for the season rushing from the northward climes. I am naked under these blankets in the room I have left cold and I take my tea in my hands, second-handed, as I sip in the shadows and wait for the thing to catch up with me. Or rather, the thing ahead of me, to double back in forest black and drier, and turn round a second or third time to spy me out and call me to account:

For what I don't know. I caress my penis hard with my right hand now, my cup on the coffee table before me. I touch my balls and feel them and my penis chill. There has always been something about uncertainty that makes me feel like a child, and I am always uncertain. I wish I knew what the next morning would bring, if I could have a spy glass like in the Lemony Snicket stories, I know I could zero in on the moment that I missed by, that said this is your death and your life in one single second, one single minute and you will know everything about the little drubs that have ticked on you trick and treats. When my mother forced my out into that Halloween march with other kids who either ignored me or pushed by me or took my candy and hied to the world of dark streets I was never brave enough to travel.

I feel the world of horror now. I feel the hackles. I have read the horror novels erotic and though I do not understand them intellectually, if I understand anything, intellectual or other wise, but the body of me understands, wishes to be chastised, wishes to be noticed, naked. Though the thing I am to meet tonight, soon and sooner still, will not be impressed of course, I am a zero, but something of flesh and bone and I wonder if even in that I will presuppose some power, some bit of existence, which will make the monster stop for a moment before he bites my neck or rips me apart or toys with the things that I once held dear and makes them more than they ever were and showers their forever absence on me in cold green ice shackles which is the cruelest thing I can think of.

I wonder if I masturbate now, if it will come immediately as I do and what will it be? Tentacled and Beelzebubed or short and haired and fanged and bestial? Will it be a revenant or something that I produced long ago without knowing it, a malformed twin? To seek revenge on me? Or me the malformed twin it has come, perfection itself, still to seek a kind of fervency and feasting because sometimes these passages must go on whether they make sense or not. I lean back on the couch. I spread my legs under the blankets. I feel the warm on my naked body as when I was a child and sick with winter happiness and deep at night, thinking, oh the ego of children, the wilderness of me. Is this why it wishes to kill me? If it does wish that? Or to make me like him or it? If that is it's or his pleasure? And why he? Why not she?

I have a nice penis. It is a bit longer than six inches. Though I wish I had a foreskin. But I have tight balls and I like to tickle them as I wait so foolishly for my fate. Do I have even a fate? Will that be excised from me or was it never part of the package? I think of silver Christmas and a smiling face that once looked in my direction. I grip myself and hold making it warm. I take the lubrication and rub it in, getting that silly sad sexual feeling in me. Will this thing that is here now, I feel it, and fear it so, will it laugh at me? Will it be some moment of time that I hold a treasure and find has not been that at all? A memory bursting in my brain and the straws of it come crashing down round me, as I drown once in what held me up and hopeful as I could ever be? And I cum. I feel the warm stickiness on my hands. I am breathing hard. I put my hands over myself in preternatural attempt at protection as old as the animal kingdom, knowing it will do no good.

I no longer run. I close my eyes. I feel like a child on Christmas Eve going to sleep, hoping against hope that tomorrow I will be someone—anyone. I lean my head back on the sofa and slide down a bit. I find myself infinitely tired from this entire running I never knew I was doing. It is good to quit. To turn the clockwork mechanism off finally and for all. I turn off the lamp on the table beside me. I hold my still somewhat tumescent penis in my hands as I pull off the blankets and feel the sting of the cold room.

Something is in here with me now. A presence. A moment. A memory. A shadow. A movie monster. A Lovecraft monster or Poe's or Bierce's and I lean my head back further, baring my neck for its teeth, great grating yellow sharp as razors teeth, to bite my neck all the way through, or to put leeches on me or to steal my glass eyes and let me know that I am the robot or the alien from some distant planet I always thought, like all kids think, but grow out of; I never did grow out of it. A warmth. A movement. Something on the couch with me. I prepare. A vague memory of the Lord's Prayer, when it all seemed to be so simple in such complexity. A thing of arms touches me. A thing of hands. Of some sort of arms. Of some sort of hands.

Going to hold me. Crush me. Kill me. Finally. Yes. Thank you. Finally. As the shadow of roughness peels down my chest, cutting me open? Gutting my intestines? No. A certain opening expands below and at my penis. It is going to unman me, as if that really ever mattered. And the warm thing engulfs my penis and it is hard, going into the tunnel of death and then there is certain moistness, blood? Mine? No, the gulf of space closes round me and the colour out of space encircle my penis and begins to suckle it. It whispers. It sighs. I am safe. It is almost Halloween. The thing has caught me. And it was worth if for this moment even if it exists for this moment alone.

I begin to work myself in and out. Its hands, of whatever kinds, are gentle and stroke my legs and I begin to feel myself cumming and for the first time I am not lonely.

And perhaps for the first time, neither is this being who taught me two days before this Halloween of 2007 that sometimes running without even knowing it can end in peace, in surcease, in contentment.

They will I think find my body when I don't show for work after a few days. But it won't be me. I shall be elsewhere. Where the wolves of were howl and the cold winds blow, the days tick shorter, and the nights are sable now, the sky tastes of snow—for me, for us, for ever.