Here’s Some Early Halloween Candy, Just For You

…Hungry? Sink your plastic fangs into this bite-sized short story. Filled with coagulated caramel and horrific nougat, you’ll fear each shadowy note of delicate terror, crispy fright, and chewy suspense.

Paragraphs contain 100% unnatural ingredients. Enjoy at your own risk.

Smiling After Midnight

Please don’t kill me…see this smile? It’s only makeup. Purple face paint hides my frown, and trust me, you don’t want to see my frown.

Stan, an exotic animal trainer from Old Hillfield, owned three lions: Bobby, Robby, and Tommy. Everybody knew Stan never fed his four-legged slaves, that’s how he “maintained dominance”. Everyday at noon, he dropped his steel lunchbox next to their dirty cage and opened it like a greasy gift.

Stan also shoved his arm between two metal bars and dangled a jagged slice of butchered swine. He returned the cheap cold cut to his sandwich and devoured it. The lions growled but it was only their empty stomach.

One late afternoon, after the contortionists ended their gymnastic routine, Stan caught me throwing leftover corn dogs into the lion’s cage.

The light in Stan’s eyes extinguished, and then a storm cloud condensed above his scarred brow. Serpentine hands constricted the whip’s leathery neck. A crooked grin unsheathed a vandalized row of shattered tombstones embedded in his charred gums. He spit a glob of oily gunk on the ground, then walked away.

The human cannonball trailer loitered behind an aisle of rigged carny games. Later that night, the trailer door crept open while I put on an emerald green cap and fixed my smile. As I prepared for my performance, a rusty hinge cried a slow, perpetual song of terror, tapering into frigid silence.

A garbage heap of a man clogged the open threshold. Tendrils of ghostly miasma and sulfurous stale beer tried to haunt my forsaken nostrils. A bullwhip dangled in his hand like a severed devil’s tail, while tiny, winged creatures of the night, gathered around a dim light bulb.

Strange instincts incinerated the ethereal tinder inside my decomposing gut, but I denied my unnatural impulses, and then bopped the top of his skull with Joyous Roy’s favorite juggling club. Purple face paint no longer hid my frown. Or the truth.

I locked the trailer door and stumbled inside a broken Ferris wheel cabin. If the town sheriff found out about Stan’s fate, the circus would disband, and everyone’s last thread tethered to humanity would be severed.

No, this wasn’t just for me or the perseverance of future laughs. It was also for you. After all, what would happen if everyone in your neighborhood ate each other?

I needed someone, or something, hungry enough to keep a secret.

They never asked for any of this. They put on their smile, just like me, because there’s something underneath the colorful paint…chewed nose, empty eye socket, mangled ear, half-eaten scalp…their hearts blackened and refused to jam to the tempo of life. They never died, but neither did the pain of being detached from humanity. For both the living and dead, the solution is a bullet to their noggin. Some people wipe off their smile before going to bed. Us? We’re still smiling after midnight.

Nobody heard Stan’s quiet whimpers or late promises. You’re not going to believe this. After his dry, cracked knuckles realized there was nothing to sip from my veins, and after all the air abandoned his tarred lungs, he collapsed and bargained with God. But that didn’t work.

He couldn’t hurt me but I let him try.

Nothing is more free than being shot out of cannon without wearing a helmet…kids liked to see that. Adults, too, but for all the wrong reasons. For a few moments, each night, I soared above the crowd, above earth, above everything. I don’t mind breaking bones because it showed that some part of me is still human. No safety net, of course! Needed to entertain the adults.

We couldn’t trust Stan to shamble around the circus…not like the rest of us. No way. Nope. Not after what he did to those trapeze artists and jugglers. Margaret Marigold is still missing. Joyous Roy refused to talk about what happened to him. Police closed their investigation. Nobody cared.

When that silvery, cratered world ascended above the local fairgrounds, I peeked through the trailer window. As a light bulb swayed above the ceiling, each repetitive motion banished shadows and painted sections of the cramped trailer with bleak illumination.

Stan lied in the center of a putrid oasis—pieces of myself glistened on the ground, like globs of gristle, in a frying pan.

I pulled Stan out of the trailer and through the wet fairgrounds. Three dreary beasts prowled the perimeter of their cage, fueled by noxious anger and combustible hatred.

They watched me drag their tyrant under the Ferris wheel, toward their imprisoned universe. Stan’s mere presence demanded undeserved respect from the savanna monsters, and they gave it to him.

Tommy, Bobby, and Robby, sat in a row, toward the center of their barred habitat. I opened the latch, grabbed Stan’s ankles, then dragged him inside.

Light in Stan’s eyes reignited. A calloused hand snapped at the edge of my frilled polka-dotted sleeve, while reinvigorated anger surged through his veins, like a locomotive train choking on ancient coal.

Something didn’t seem quite right. I looked down and saw a wooden handle sticking out of my ruffled collar. He stabbed me. I wasn’t sure how I was suppose to feel about that.

A blur of golden fur opened Stan’s wrist like a lunchbox.

Tommy dragged Stan toward their empty water bowl, while Bobby’s claws snagged his leg, pulling him near the open gate. Robby, possessed by feral excitement, paced along the cage, while an excitable roar, and hideous drool, oozed from his primal maw.

Robby’s bloodlust lured him within a grotesque cavern inside Stan’s hollow abdomen—the light in his eyes glowed red.

For dessert, Bobby, Robby, and Tommy, devoured the final words stuck in Stan’s throat. They’ll live to bite another day…

…and so will the rest of us.

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Smiling After Midnight/Clown with a Frown, written and revised by FlyTrapMan. Story originally featured on slashermonster.com