HALLOWEEN
BY RUTH COOLIDGE
The problem with Halloween has always been Dad. The thumb lick and wipe, cleaning chocolate smears off your cheek. Pawing through your bag for peanut candies at every stop even though you know what not to take. It’s a relief when you turn fourteen and Dad is a curfew not a companion, when you leave the house with a candy bag you won’t use, backpack stuffed with a plain hoodie and jeans you’ll change into once you’re out of eyeshot of Dad calling from the porch that your pirate costume looks awesome and keep your phone on. Your bike flies through the night like a banshee past the warm glow of houses and streetlights down to the river road and the older kids’ party under the bridge. Trick-or-treating with Dad never gave you this rush as you get handed a solo cup that smells way too sugary and try moving your hips to heavy bass beats. It’s not long before the dares start and you, strangely giggly, can’t refuse jumping off the bridge for these cool kids who promise the water’s deep. It is deep, just freezing, and you don’t realize your phone’s in your pocket until you haul yourself shivering onto the bank where they cheer for you and somebody hands you their cup, but they don’t know you and you don’t know they’ve been eating a Snickers, and now you’re swelling and wheezing with wet leaves stuck to you asking who’s seen your backpack saying call my Dad, call my Dad.
Athletics are suspended indefinitely, all contact banned
BY RUTH COOLIDGE
She holds the collar of her rain jacket to her cheeks, blows a few hot breaths. Droplets have begun soaking through at the shoulder rather than running off. It’s cold.
The green of the field is over-saturated as though the pale sky is draining itself of hue as well as water. The pines are a blurry horizon. She rocks on the balls of her feet, feels how they sink and sees the brown water rise up to meet the toes of her sneakers. She can’t help but imagine the tear of cleat teeth digging into this soft earth. Bad for the field and everyone’s ankles, but so satisfying.
She hears him first. Squelch and stomp. He stays far away, as everyone does on days like this to avoid using a damp mask. She turns and thinks his distance is more like eight feet, but who’s measuring? He breathes heavily from the uphill walk, chest straining against his bright red jacket. From eight feet she can hear the inhale/exhale.
He sighs. Hands in pockets. He could say anything—so could she—but that seems to do it. They stare out with the rain plinking on metal bleachers. Without white lines the field looks bigger. Lush as the grass appears, it’s practically bursting with promise.
“You play last spring?” she says, like she doesn’t know. Too easy to ask stupid questions these days.
“Hm?” She turns towards him and speaks louder. With their hoods up and the rain, words become muted.
“I just asked if you played last spring.”
“Oh. No.” He shrugs. “We didn’t have much of a season before the shut down.” All this directed out, not at her. He squints at the uprights down the far end. Tall, still and white, water streaming down the posts and pooling, seeping into the grass. A bridge between earth and sky.
“Me neither,” she says to the rain. “I wasn’t here.”
It sends a shiver through to her fingertips, the memory. The last game, the cold one, mud glued front and back on both legs, slipping and carving ruts into the earth. Hot bodies with cold skin pressed together, panting, steaming, clutching each other for warmth as much as stability.
She looks at him again, eight feet away, still fixated on the unmarred grass. Where does the water pull him? They played that day too. Hard and manic. She saw the sheen in his eyes when he helped lift his captain for the victory song, when he ran through the roaring tunnel her team had made from their trembling arms. She wanted to clap her hand to his shoulder, then. Perhaps even say something.
The fronts of her thighs are now soaked so the denim thickens and sticks. Her fingers, ice cold, she finally tucks into her pockets. He and she are copies now, one red one blue. Two ghosts mourning the green. Rain dripping from the brims of their hoods, running lines down their cheeks. She tilts her head just back. Me too, she thinks to the pale weeping sky. And you? to the man standing eight feet away, closed-shouldered. Eyes floating away. He could at least look at her.