The pumpkin wouldn't rot. We had promised Benjamin that it could stay on the step until it started to smell, but it looked better than ever. The scuffs I made trying to get the top off had healed up. It must have been the cold weather.
One day, I left the house to find it glowing in the dark December morning. I looked at it, and it turned towards me, and its horrid little mouth said "Merry Christmas". My boot went out to kick it away, but I stopped myself. We promised Benjamin.
A week into the job, I still hadn't met a person. I was working my way through the induction training: uncanny voiceovers about health and safety and data protection, backed up by questions a block of wood could answer. Automated emails delivered accounts, reassurances, and promises of tasks to come. Then payday came, with payslip but no pay. With no manager to my name, I found the head of HR on the company website and fired off an email. No reply. Looking longer, her photo was uncanny: an emptiness behind the eyes, and not in the way of my last job's HR manager. I searched her up, and a few other staff, and found nothing. Fake people, fake company, fake job. Lying in the next day, I still felt guilty.
The alarm had been ringing for twenty minutes, but nobody knew what it was for. "It has the rhythm of catastrophe," opined Jeremy, "but not the timbre." Jenny closed her eyes and raised a finger for quiet. "I heard something like this once before," she said after half a minute. "I think it was for 'man overboard'." We were not at sea, but we thought this got us closer. We decided to take five minutes to write down our ideas. Then we would reconvene and discuss. But it was very hard to think with all that noise going on, and by the time we came back together, it had stopped.
The ghost-hunter had a battered buzzing gadget, a metal thing from the seventies with a chunky handle to support the weight of its huge batteries, and a wand on a coiled wire. He said the tricky thing was calibrating it. The dead are everywhere, you see, so it takes just the right level of sensitivity to find the spirit you're looking for against the background haunting. He traced the shape of a frail young body in the air, the piezo howling. What do we do now we've found it? we asked him. He shrugged, and tucked the wand back in its holder. Just sit, and know she's there, he said.
A nail half in. A board primed and unpainted. A window open, just to let the air in, with the snow blowing through. Pencil marks on walls and a dust sheet on the floor. A glass, empty but for the fine white residue that clings to it. A radio still playing. A phone long dead. A pair of boots. The earth still moving beneath.
The continental buffet breakfast was truly unlimited. You turned, or blinked, or just shifted your attention, and all the bread and cheese and meat and pastry was back in place like you had got up early for once. We did what we could, filling bags and touring the city to feed the hungry. We planned how we could do more. But we didn't understand the magic. We didn't even try. We didn't know what unpayable debts we were billing to our rooms.
I didn't think school fairs gave goldfish as prizes any more, but apparently this one did. All the parents were holding a fish in a bag, most of them pulling a face to say I don't really agree with this, but the kids were so excited. The first bag split forty minutes in, and its resident spent the rest of the day in the hook-a-duck tub. More joined, until the golden shimmer was so enchanting that kids started tipping them in on purpose. We made a quiet exit, before we could be asked to help.
Jenny gave Dave his birthday present in an intricate puzzle box, knowing he would never get around to solving it. But Dave knew how she was: he knew there would be nothing inside. So he solved it the day he got it, ready to fill with treasure and give back to her. Inside were two tickets to the gig that weekend, the one that had sold out before he even saw it. He didn't mention it, and neither did she. They just met at the venue, and he bought her a drink.
I went out in the storm in all the old clothes I'd shrunk out of, and my big hat tied tight to my head, and I let it blow me away. Once the wind takes you, everything feels calm: the air and the wind and your little body are all flying around just the same as each other. You look down at the ground and think: thank God I'm not down there, spinning around. It set me down a few miles away, not gentle, but fair. I built a little hut, and waited for the next storm.
After that Christmas our snowmen stopped coming to life. Coincidence, I said. You can't fall out so hard it kills the snowmen. It was probably pollution, like every other thing: the changing climate, or the dust from the new road, or the way the LED streetlights flatten the whole world. But there was something else hanging in the air, too, heaviness to hold down something as light as snow. I looked at their gravel eyes and thought: what if they still come to life, and they just can't move? I thought I knew how that would feel.
