The Jack o' Lantern

She smirks at me as she comes at me again with the knife.

Clouds, invisible in the darkness laid like a wet blanket on the forest when the hag arrived at a ramshackle house. Stunted sunflowers stood about the grounds, their heads drooping in defeat. In the middle, a scarecrow looked on with mournful button eyes. It seemed to be staring at me, a warning perched on its single stitch of a mouth. What was I thinking? Of course it wasn’t going to warn me of anything. But what did I know about scarecrows?

The scarecrow’s eyes seemed to follow me as the hag brought me to the front door. She grunted as she heaved at it, then the door squealed hideously, as if in agony as it reluctantly gave way to decaying furniture and the smell of mold.

The smell pervades everything, a creeping entity which invades every crevice, suffocating the very air itself. But what do I know about smells?

I didn’t know what to think when she brought me inside, wondering what the old hag would want with me. Past peeling wallpaper and upon creaking floorboards we arrived at what used to be a kitchen. A gap in the countertop, like a gaping wound told of a stove which used to be there in better times. In its place, something like an altar, a misshapen slab of rock like a tombstone rested. It was splattered with something which might have been red at one time, but was now encrusted black.

On the table was the knife.

That knife stabs me again and again, and my innards gush from gaping wounds.

I don’t know what the witch could possibly want with me.

But what do I know?

I’m just a pumpkin after all.