You love halloween. Every year you get to look forward to the crisp autumn chill, the celebration of fear through costumes and decorations, and most of all the candy. The holiday is seconded only by Christmas. It’s a time of thrill, and it’s only fitting that Orange, your favorite color, takes center stage. Halloween is your holiday, and what better way to build that rapport with a trip to the store. Not just any store, mind you, the brigadoon of frightening decorations and rubber masks: Spirit Halloween, and you have never been inside a Spirit Halloween before. You have no idea what truly lies behind those doors. Images of plastic pumpkins and bats began flashing in your mind. Tombstones made of something that is most certainly not stone, fake cobwebs to fill in the negative space on your lawn. And the scariest thing was only a large skeleton that laughs when you wander too close.

You are wrong. The moment you step inside is an assault. The smell of cheap rubber and the grip of the floor made it feel like the inside of a giant basketball. Your eyes filled with images of the most gruesome and horrifying decorations, the kind that do not thrill, but the kind that makes a 6 year old boy afraid. The front end holds the yard scares, and the back the costumes. The costume section holds the greatest peaks and valleys in the store. Cutesy animal outfits, characters from familiar cartoons, and terrifying masks depicting god-knows-what. Every step you take you have to avert your eyes from something, but you are brave. You go to each aisle, look at every accessory, and confront the nightmarish lawn demons. You look at the checkout desks. It’s a circle, with the cashiers nestled between their registers and a pyramid of babies. Babies that hurt you to look at. Disgusting depictions of babies as demons, as zombies, as vampires. The detail is no easy feat, they manage to disturb even your father as he comments on how gross it is. But this is not the only thing that will keep you awake at night. The end of your time at the store is closing in, and there is something you missed. An animatronic of a girl in a blue blouse, with red hair, and green, scarred skin. This girl is bad. Everything to do with this girl is bad. Your father stands by. One of your siblings asks what the girl is, and he replies “The girl from the exorcist.” None of those words sound good together. The animatronic has a noise box that triggers when someone is near. It’s a garbled recording of someone possibly speaking. You ask how the girl came to be like that, to be green skinned and scarred, and your father replies “She ate tuna”.