A Caldera Bay Halloween short
The year the candy ran short, Caldera Bay still hung its paper moons and wound garlands along porch rails. Kids practiced the old joke—“Trick or treat, count your feet”—and the lighthouse threw its slow blink like a metronome nobody argued with. On Pepper Street, every stoop wore a jack-o’-lantern; every jack-o’-lantern wore the same grin—except for the one at the edge of the cul-de-sac, the one that never went out.
It faced the street from a porch that didn’t get much traffic. The house was a square thing with a widow’s walk and a fence that remembered it once had paint. The pumpkin’s mouth was wrong by a tooth. Its candle burned with a steady little heart no wind could convince.
People said the house belonged to a Mrs. Greaves or a Miss Graves or a woman with a name the town had paid and forgotten. Daylight made it a fixer-upper. Night made it a corner you passed without counting.
By dusk, the little crowds started. Princesses with plastic shoes. Werewolves who had to be carried by their dads after the third block. A boy in a cardboard lighthouse his mother had painted with careful rings that caught the porch lights and made everyone go soft for a second. The parade flowed toward the square and the kettle corn and the band that only knew four songs but played them like they owed debt.
Pepper Street ran the current the other way.
“Too far,” said Maya, witch hat sitting crooked on tight curls. She was ten and mostly unafraid of things she could touch. “Mom said stop at the corner.”
“We’re at the corner,” said her brother Jude, who was twelve and wearing a borrowed cape that dragged like a bad decision. He held his pillowcase close because he held everything close. “That’s… extra corner.”
“Everyone else has the same stupid smile,” Maya said, tipping her chin at the row of pumpkins. “This one looks like it knows something.”
“It looks like it’s going to bite,” Jude said. “Same difference.”
They watched the porch. The bowl on the top step was a shallow metal tub that had once held carnations. A sign sat in it, handwritten in block print with a hand that had taught other hands once upon a time.
TAKE WHAT YOU’RE OWED.
“That’s… weird,” Maya said. “What if you’re owed nothing?”
“Then you get manners,” said Jude, but his voice lacked conviction.
No other kids walked up. No one crossed the fence line. The street lights hummed the way they did when weather changed its mind.
Maya set her jaw. “Two pieces each. Fast.” She hopped the last three steps, cape-less, arguments light in her socks.
Jude followed because not following meant going home with a story he wouldn’t like. He counted the boards underfoot like the habit he pretended he didn’t have. Four, six, eight—he skipped ten because skipping ten kept the world fair.
Up close, the sign felt heavier than a scrap of paper should. Up close, the pumpkin smelled like iron and old sugar. The tub held wrapped caramels, little licorice spirals, and the cheap chocolates that always taste like they were poured into a hurry.
Maya took two caramels because fair is fair. Jude took one licorice spiral and one chocolate because balance looks better when it isn’t perfect. The candle flame leaned and straightened as if it had an opinion.
They turned to go. The porch light clicked on by itself and revealed another sign beneath the first, written smaller.
SAY YOUR NAME.
Maya laughed because rules are funny when you’re the one breaking them. “Maya,” she said, and the pumpkin flame blinked once, approving.
Jude hesitated. Names felt like keys you shouldn’t lend out; Mom said that was silly; Dad said locks were suggestions. “Jude,” he said, and the flame leaned again and stayed there a long beat like a thought.
The air nipped. Not a cold wind—more a count taken. The caramel in Maya’s hand went heavier, like it recognized pockets. On the step behind them, Jude miscounted the next board and didn’t know where the ten went.
They left with the candy and the small feeling that something had started to add them up.
Down the block, a man in a cheap rubber devil mask watched, the kind you buy last minute at the hardware store when you find out the neighbors throw a thing. He kept his hands in his coat pockets like any decent grown-up and rocked on his heels like an indecent one. He had the look of a person who always spots the loose bolt before the sign falls.
He stepped up when the street emptied, lifted the tub “so it wouldn’t get knocked,” tucked it under his coat like a favor, and walked on with a posture that asked for thanks ahead of time.
The metal touched his palm like cold breath. For a second, he thought the tub hummed. For a second, the porch light went thin. He didn’t notice the paper sign sticking to the bottom—TAKE WHAT YOU’RE OWED—or the smaller sheet beneath it, the one that waited for names.
He made it to the corner before the weight changed. Not heavier. Particular. The way certain debts learn your walk.
He adjusted his grip and kept moving. Farther down, a gust pushed from the bay and the bowl rang the way thin metal rings: once for counting, once for keeping. He looked back and saw the pumpkin flame lean, as if tasting the air he’d left behind.
Morning wore fog in polite strips. The square looked like a party that had gone home without its trash. People arrived with brooms, rakes, and coffee in therapy sizes. Mr. Kearney directed traffic with one hand and gratitude with the other.
The man with the devil mask on his head brought the tub back under his coat, face set to doing a good deed. He found Miss Graves before she found him. That should have felt like winning.
“Good morning,” she said. “You have something of mine.”
“I picked it up before the kids trashed it,” he said. “You’re welcome.”
She reached for the tub; it didn’t leave his hands right away. He frowned, tried again. On the second tug it came loose with the faintest stick—like pulling off a bandage you’d forgotten you wore.
“I owed you thanks,” she said. “I brought it.” She set the tub on the curb and rapped it with her knuckles. The sound came back with a name in it. Not the bowl’s. His.
He didn’t hear the name, not exactly. He felt his throat try to answer.
“You also owe me an apology,” Miss Graves said, “and three licorice spirals.”
He reached into his pocket and came up with two. He checked the other pocket and found the third, though he didn’t remember putting it there. He handed them over. “Fine.”
“Say your name,” Miss Graves said, gentle as a teacher, exact as a bill.
He opened his mouth. He had always been a man who enjoyed strangers knowing it. What came out was air shaped like a syllable that wouldn’t stand up.
Jude and Maya stood behind Miss Graves. Jude watched the man’s lips move and thought of counting on stairs. Four, six, eight, and the number that should come after didn’t.
“It happens,” Miss Graves said softly, to the man. “When you take what was given freely and try to be thanked for it besides. You carry it away, the porch sends a little something along to keep it company. The bowl keeps a ledger; the ledger keeps a name. Yours went with the metal for the night. It’s a small hold. It would have come back by noon if you’d set the tub down on your own doorstep with the sign face-up.”
He swallowed. His tongue found letters and slid off them. His face decided to be red and then decided it forgot how.
“You’ll get it back,” Miss Graves said, “minus the interest. Names don’t enjoy being tugged. They bruise.”
He tried to speak again and made the sound people make when they’re about to introduce themselves and then remember the other person doesn’t care.
Miss Graves laid the sign inside the tub, paper soft from fog. TAKE WHAT YOU’RE OWED. Beneath it, the smaller sheet peeked out—the one that said SAY YOUR NAME—and the missing e in Graves looked like a tooth gapped by habit.
“Cleanup starts now,” she said, to everyone and no one. The man stared at his hands until they decided they were finished being looked at. Then he left, holding his coat closed like weather was a thing he could still reason with.
By noon, the square looked like it forgot how to misbehave. By one, the fog tied a ribbon around the lighthouse. By two, the last candy wrapper blew down Pepper Street and got caught on a fence that remembered being white.
The man tried his name at the post office. The clerk waited for the sound and wrote — on the form, a neat dash as if the name had gone out for air. He tried it at the bank. The teller smiled the way you smile at a regular whose details have fled: kindly, carefully, like they’re holding a plate you might drop. He tried it at the church office to square a heater bill and the lady there said, “Bless you,” the way people do when they mean I’m sorry.
At home, his driver’s license showed the picture he always hated and letters that refused to sit in a row. He blinked and they arranged themselves as M—, then —. He put the license down and lifted it again and found himself looking at a mostly blank small rectangle that still insisted on being his.
When he spoke out loud, his house didn’t echo in the right places.
He walked to the mirror. Mirrors are good at arguing. His face reflected back, then softened the edges he used to insist on. A little blur where the name usually sits in your head and keeps your features tidy.
He said, carefully, “I am—” and his mouth made the noise a door makes when you push it against a lock you don’t own.
He went outside to find anyone who would agree with him about who he was. The sky decided it had other plans.
Sometime near midnight, someone knocked at Miss Graves’s door. Three times. Too polite for a thief. Too late for a neighbor. She opened without asking.
The man with the rubber devil mask in his hand stood there bareheaded. He held a brown paper bag he’d folded exactly in half. He looked like he’d been practicing his name and coming up with a cough.
“I put a bill in the wrong box,” he said. The voice sounded like his, stripped to outline. “For the church heater. They credited me anyway. I told them. They said keep it as a blessing.” He swallowed, found a splinter of sound. “I figure that puts me in your books.”
“It does,” Miss Graves said. The pumpkin flame leaned toward the hall like a curious animal. “The porch keeps order. It’s kinder than most ledgers. You’re paid up for this year.”
“Then why does it feel like I went negative?”
“Because you wanted to be thanked twice,” Miss Graves said, and the words landed on his shoulders with the exact weight they needed.
He looked past her into a hallway that had the ordinary of houses and the exactness of records. Paper lived there, and the smell of iron and old sugar. He could hear the gentle rustle of a name sliding back across a page.
“It’s a small return,” Miss Graves said, and tapped his chest, once. Something settled under his sternum with the quiet relief of a book put on the right shelf. “You’ll be hoarse on introductions for a week. You’ll forget your middle for a month. You’ll learn, I hope, the difference between doing good and wanting credit.”
He reached for the gap in his history and found a thread he could hold. His name returned like a tide that needed a moment to remember the beach.
“You some kind of…” He stopped before he said what he wasn’t ready to say.
“I’m the porch,” she said. “I’m the hand on the bowl. I keep the names in the right places.”
“What happens if you miss one?” he asked, and the question had more humbleness in it than hours ago.
“I don’t,” she said. And the pumpkin’s flame agreed.
He believed her because that was easiest, and because doubt would mean carrying the bowl in his head again. He left with nothing, which suited the porch fine.
Miss Graves closed the door and turned the deadbolt because people like to see you try. The jack-o’-lantern’s wrong tooth smiled at the night, and the light inside leaned to listen.
On Pepper Street, the wind changed and brought the sea without asking. The town breathed in and remembered to hold.
At one a.m., the lantern went out on its own.
The porch held the smell of iron and cooling sugar. The bowl sat quiet with its sign face-down, paper softened by a night’s worth of air. The fence kept its paint in memory. Upstairs, a window went blank.
Out past the point, the horn kept the beat once, and the glass rings turned in their frame. Somewhere a ledger line slid back over a name and settled—less one bruise, paid with interest.
Rule: take what you’re owed
LEDGER: porch; names; light kept—double thanks costs a name