Halloween Tales

Blood Moon Over Caldera Halloween came early. Not on a calendar—on the air. It began with a scream down by Slip 13. It wasn’t the kind of scream that climbs; it was a single, ragged tear that made people look at each other and pretend they’d misheard. Ten seconds later there was another one, shorter […]

The Blackthorn hayride was a square with manners: right at the goats, right by the windbreak, right along the ditch, then a tidy left past Mr. Kindly back to the cider tent. Kids mapped it with their mouths. Parents timed their cups to it. The tractor coughed, the wagon sighed, straw itched and forgave. At

The Potato That Wanted to Be a Pumpkin (Caldera Farm, Halloween) The Blackthorn place sat where the fog thinned and the field kept the rest. On clear afternoons the bay threw a flat iron glint between the sycamores; on nights this tight, the world narrowed to fence posts and breath. The patch worked hard all

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

Alder Street had more pumpkins than railings. Their plastic grins counted. The wind off the breakwater carried that iodine taste that lives between your teeth and your name. The EXIT sign in the rec hall window buzzed late, then on time. Names travel on candy if you don’t pin them. People say it soft in

The wind off Caldera Bay tasted like a penny you’d kept in your cheek too long. It slid under the eaves and pressed on the little lobby window of 14 Bay until the EXIT sign buzzed out of time, on, off, late, on again. Mina carried her son up the steps in his dinosaur pajamas,

By dusk, Bay Street had buttoned on its cut-out stars and jar candles, and the air carried a pier-metal tang like spray dried on glass. Kids bunched at the sawhorses, cheeks painted quick, capes tripping their knees. Evan told his daughter to hold tight. “Kay,” she said, the way she always did when she was