Pumpkin Carving

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In the town of Normal, Pennsylvania, there’s a little church at the corner of Wilson and Elm.  One of Associate Pastor Michelle Tellum’s many jobs at the church is programming.  So Michelle was constantly on the lookout for events and activities to encourage fellowship within the congregation.  Holidays frequently provided such opportunities.  When October rolled around, she suggested to Senior Pastor Henry O’Donnell that they hold a jack-o-lantern carving contest the day before Halloween.

“Sounds like an excellent idea,” Pastor O’Donnell said.  “I can be a judge if you want.”  Being a judge meant that he would be the center of attention and that he wouldn’t have to get all messy carving a pumpkin.  O’Donnell liked attention and didn’t like getting messy so it was kind of the perfect arrangement.

Michelle figured they needed at least three judges.  For the second she recruited Ralph Billings who was always happy to help out in any way he was needed.  Then Michelle asked Missy Moore.  “I’d be a great judge,” Missy said.  “I went to art school, you know.”

“I did not know that,” Michelle replied.

“But I think I’d rather carve a pumpkin.  You know, put that art training to use.  If you don’t think that would be unfair to the other competitors.”

“No,” Michelle said, “I think that would be fine.”

Next Michelle tried organist Walter Tibble.  Walter had no interest in carving a pumpkin but didn’t really have any interest in judging either.  However once Michelle mentioned that she would be making cookies for refreshments Walter agreed.  Walter was a fan of Michelle’s cookies and, really, how hard could it be to pick out which jack-o-lantern he liked best?

A dozen people entered the contest.  Michelle and her boyfriend, Ian Wells, had bought twenty pumpkins from a local pumpkin patch – really a parking lot covered in hay to seem rustic.  They set them out on a table in the social hall for participants to select from.

Missy carefully perused the pumpkins, hoisting each one in turn and gazing at it critically.  “In art school they emphasize the importance of selecting the right materials,” she remarked.  “As Michelangelo said, ‘every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.’”

“You do know we’re carving pumpkins, not stone,” Ian said.

“Of course,” Missy shot back.  “And I want to find the pumpkin with just the right jack-o-lantern lurking inside.”

“Great,” Ian replied.  “I think I’ll just carve this one.”  He grabbed the pumpkin closest to where he happened to be standing at that moment.

“No!” Missy cried.  “That was one of my top choices.  That’s why I set it back from the edge of the table.”

“It’s first come first serve,” Ian said.  He didn’t really care which pumpkin he carved, but Missy was starting to annoy him.

“Are you even eligible for the contest?” Missy demanded.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’re dating the organizer.”

“Let’s let Pastor O’Donnell decide,” Ian said.

“I think the judges can manage to remain objective,” O’Donnell replied when they asked him.  “Besides, Katie wants to enter, too.”  He nodded toward his teenage daughter, Katie, and her friend Tabitha who were picking out their pumpkins at that very moment.

“Okay, Ian can have the good pumpkin,” Missy said grumpily.  “I suppose it’s only fair that I’m handicapped considering my art school training.”

“How magnanimous,” Ian muttered.  He grabbed a knife and went to claim a workspace.

Missy picked a replacement pumpkin and found her workspace.  She pulled a bundle out of her big purse and unrolled it.  It contained a selection of carving and scooping instruments.

When Ian saw this he summoned Pastor O’Donnell again.  “Is Missy allowed to use those fancy tools?” Ian asked.  “The rest of us just have knives from the kitchen.”

“It doesn’t say you can’t bring your own tools!” Missy protested and held up the flyer advertising the event.

“It doesn’t say you can’t smash your opponents’ pumpkins, either,” Ian pointed out.

“That’s not the same thing at all,” Missy argued.

 “I’m going to make an executive decision,” O’Donnell said before the argument got out of hand.  “Missy can use her own tools.”

Ian and Missy glared at each other as they returned to their pumpkins. 

Over at the judges’ table Michelle called for everyone’s attention.  “You will have one hour to carve your jack-o-lanterns,” she said.  “Ready…set…go!” 

The contestants immediately bent to their work, cutting the tops off their pumpkins and scooping out the insides.  Michelle collected the pumpkin seeds to roast them with spices in the kitchen.  The judges amused themselves at the refreshment table.

After about ten minutes Katie pushed her pumpkin away with a groan.  “I screwed up.  Can I start over?” she asked.

“Sure,” Michelle said.  “There are still half a dozen pumpkins left.”  Katie found a new pumpkin and resumed work.

Ian hadn’t gone to art school but he was a pretty creative guy.  He planned to carve the jack of hearts from a deck of cards as a pun on the word jack-o-lantern.  Since the jack of hearts was a one-eyed jack, he made an X for one of the eyes as if it had been gouged out.  He sketched out his plan on the pumpkin with a pencil.  He was pretty proud of himself – the thin curling mustache and the hearts on the side sold it.

He glanced over to see how Missy was progressing.  She caught his look and immediately moved to block her pumpkin with her body.

“Aaaarrrrgh,” Katie yelled and kicked her pumpkin away.  It rolled across the floor into the corner.  She stomped over to the remaining pumpkins and grabbed a new one.

Ian was just putting the final touches on his jack-o-lantern when Michelle announced ten minutes left.

“No,” Katie wailed and ran for a new pumpkin.

Ian noodled with his entry for several more minutes.  He was happy with what he had done but since Missy was being so protective of hers he figured he would keep his hidden until the last moment as well.

Finally Michelle announced that the contest was over and instructed the participants to bring their jack-o-lanterns up to the judges’ table.  When Missy saw Ian’s jack-of-hearts, she snorted.  “What’s scary about that?”

“It’s a one-eyed-jack-o-lantern,” Ian said.  The judges chuckled and Missy flushed with momentary annoyance. 

“Let’s see yours,” Ian demanded.

Missy revealed her creation.  She had carved a demonic face on her pumpkin, cleverly using pieces of pumpkin that she had cut out from the eyes as horns.  Ian shuddered a little.  It was surprisingly evil looking.

O’Donnell cleared his throat.  “That’s very…well…”

“Disturbing,” Ralph finished.

“It’s supposed to be scary,” Missy replied.  “This is Halloween, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is,” Michelle said.  She found the demon a bit unsettling as well.  “Is that all of the entries?”

“Wait for me,” Tabitha called out.  She scurried over and set her jack-o-lantern on the table.  Everyone gasped.

“It’s you!” Katie said.

It was indeed.  Tabitha had carved a strikingly lifelike self-portrait on the side of her pumpkin, leaving just enough of the flesh intact within the image that it glowed.  “I got the idea off the internet,” Tabitha said shyly.  “You tape a picture to the pumpkin then poke holes through it with a big needle to create the outline.”

“Is that fair?” Missy mumbled.

“You got to use your special tools,” Ian pointed out.

“I hate jack-o-lanterns” Katie whispered under her breath, looking down at her entry.  She’d ended up carving two triangular eyes and a jagged mouth.

“Okay, let’s let the judges get to work,” Michelle said.

It didn’t take long for the judges to make their decision.  O’Donnell called Tabitha up and presented her with a blue ribbon and a gift certificate to Roger’s Café.

Then O’Donnell announced the other awards.  “Ian gets the funniest jack-o-lantern award.  Missy gets scariest.  Katie gets most traditional…”

“Wait a minute,” Missy interrupted.  “What kind of awards are those?  Tabitha’s pumpkin is great, I’ll admit.  Kudos to her.  But who gets second place?”

“Nobody,” Michelle replied.  “There was only one ribbon and gift certificate.  Everyone else gets these fun awards.  It’s, you know, fun.”

“But…but…” Missy sputtered.  “We all want to know whose was second best, right?”

“Yeah,” Ian agreed.

“Not really,” Katie grumbled.

Michelle turned to the judges.  Walter was the one that spoke up.  “It was a tie,” he said.  “Everyone came in second.  Everyone except Tabitha, of course.  She was clearly first place.  She’s quite an artist.”

“Well,” Missy muttered under her breath, “great art is never appreciated in its own time.”

Perhaps that was true, but within three days her jack-o-lantern had decayed into a puddle of goo so future generations never got to weigh in on the issue.

Happy Halloween!

The Devilish Pastor Michelle

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In the town of Normal, Pennsylvania, there’s a little church at the corner of Wilson and Elm. This Halloween, the church’s 28 year-old associate pastor, Michelle Tellum, had been invited to a costume party by her new boyfriend, Ian Wells.

Michelle was excited about the party, but not so excited about wearing a costume. Michelle and Ian had not been together very long so Michelle wanted to show him that she was a fun person. But picking a costume was tricky for a woman of the clergy. A lot of the store-bought costumes were very sexy and Michelle dreaded the thought of someone from the congregation finding her picture on the Internet dressed in a skimpy nurse or pirate outfit.

After Michelle considered and dismissed dozens of costumes from an online store as either too risqué or too lame, she stumbled across one she thought was just perfect: a devil costume. The red unitard came with a demure skirt and the irony of a pastor dressed as a devil fulfilled the fun requirement.

Katie O’Donnell, on the other hand, was looking for the sexiest outfit she could find. Katie was Senior Pastor Henry O’Donnell’s fifteen year-old daughter. She had recently broken up with her boyfriend, Joe. She was going to a big Halloween party with her friend Tabitha and knew that Joe would be there. Katie really wanted to wear something that would make him jealous. The only obstacle to her plan was her father and that wasn’t much of an obstacle. He was pretty easy to fool.

Katie settled on a skimpy barbarian warrior getup. She knew Joe played a video game that starred a similarly attired female barbarian. Of course Katie couldn’t match the game character’s digital curves but then no flesh and blood woman could.

To get out the door past her father Katie wrapped a sheet around herself toga style so that it covered the leopard print loincloth and halter and told him she was going as an ancient Greek goddess. When he asked which goddess wore a helmet with horns, Katie replied, “Did I say Greek? I meant Norse.” The senior O’Donnell grunted his approval and Katie was off.

Meanwhile, Michelle was putting the finishing touches on her make-up when her doorbell rang. She looked out her peephole but nobody was there. She opened the door anyway.

A zombie leaped out at her with an earsplitting howl!

“Come on in, Ian,” Michelle said. “I’m almost ready.”

The zombie Ian frowned. It was not the reaction he had hoped to get. He shuffled in picking at a plastic wound on his arm.

“Oh, don’t pout,” Michelle said, giving him a kiss on the cheek. “I’ve been to seminary. I don’t scare easily. I really only have one phobia.”

“What’s that?” Ian asked.

“I’m not telling!” She laughed. She gathered her things and realized something was missing. “Oh no, I left my pitchfork at the church.”

“That’s okay,” Ian said. “We can swing by on the way to the party.”

They went down to the car where Ian had left a large and very realistic fake spider on the passenger seat. “Sorry,” Michelle said as she tossed it in the back. “Not spiders.”

By this time the teenagers’ party was in full swing. Katie looked ravishing in her barbarian costume, but you wouldn’t know it from Joe’s reaction. He seemed to have eyes only for Amber who was dressed as Medusa in a short tunic and a wig of fake snakes. Katie began to wish she had gone as a Greek goddess so she would have an excuse to smite the meddling Medusa.

Joe and Amber left the party together after about an hour and a half. Tabitha found Katie sitting in a lawn chair by herself, moping. “Forget Joe,” Tabitha said. “Every other guy here is staring at you. I think you’re going to end at least three relationships tonight.” It did not cheer Katie up.

What Katie didn’t know was that Joe’s disinterest was all an act. In fact he had been driven to such heights of jealousy by Katie’s outfit that he could not stop thinking about her even when Amber suggested they park somewhere and make out. Joe’s immature teenage hormones channeled his jealousy into thoughts of revenge. “I’ve got a better idea,” Joe told Amber. “Let’s go TP the church.”

“I don’t know,” Amber said. “It’s kind of bad karma to mess with a church, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be superstitious,” Joe told her as he pulled into the grocery store parking lot to buy toilet paper.

About this time Ian and Michelle were turning into the staff parking area at the back of the church. “Wait in the car,” Michelle told Ian. “I’ll be right back.”

Ian did not follow instructions. He didn’t buy Michelle’s claim of icy fearlessness and decided to put it to the test. He hid in the bushes by the back door of the church.

Michelle quickly retrieved her plastic pitchfork, but as she came out of her office she heard some strange noises from the front of the church and decided to investigate.

The noises Michelle heard were being made by Joe who was giggling as he tossed rolls of toilet paper over the tree in front of the church. Amber sat on the front step, toying with the wig of rubber snakes in her lap. She had a knot of guilt in the pit of her stomach and was wishing she had stayed at the party.

The door opened behind Amber. She looked back and saw Satan silhouetted in the doorway waving a pitchfork. Amber screamed and instinctively hurled the rubber snake wig at the devil before bolting away.

Michelle reflexively caught the wig. The one thing that she was afraid of, it turns out, was snakes. When she looked down in the dim light and saw that she was holding what appeared to be a knot of dozens of snakes, she also screamed, tossed the wig away, and sprinted back through the church in mindless terror.

She was still sprinting when she came out the back parking lot door. Zombie Ian grabbed her shoulder as she passed and got a punch in the eye for his efforts.

Michelle regained her senses when she saw Ian sprawled out on the sidewalk. “Oh Ian,” she said, “I’m so sorry. I just thought I saw…”

She trailed off. “What?” Ian asked blearily.

“Nothing,” she replied. “You scared me, that’s all.”

“I did?” Ian asked with a grin.

“Yeah,” she said. “You got me. Nice job. Let’s go inside and put some ice on your eye.”

On the other side of the building Amber was demanding that Joe take her home. Joe’s back had been turned so he hadn’t seen what had scared her so badly. Amber wouldn’t tell him, but insisted they leave immediately. Joe reluctantly complied even though he’d only got two strands of toilet paper over the tree.

As they pulled away he noticed a light in the church kitchen. Through the window he saw a zombie making out with the devil while the devil held a bag of frozen peas to the zombie’s eye.

“Did you know the devil was a woman?” Amber asked.

“Doesn’t surprise me at all,” Joe replied.

Happy Halloween!

Howl in One

Hear the story read by the author.

In the town of Normal, Pennsylvania, there’s a little church at the corner of Wilson and Elm. Every year the church holds a Halloween festival for the children on the Sunday before Halloween. The teen youth group usually plans their own event at the same time. Karen Winslow, the teacher of the preschool Sunday school class known as the Guppies, is in charge of the children’s festival. Each year she tries to think of something special and original to do. Usually her ideas involved enormous amounts of thankless effort. This year she had her most special, original, and thankless idea yet: creating a Halloween themed miniature golf course!

Karen was not incapable of learning from past experience. On the morning of the festival she enlisted her Sunday school class to help her build the golf course. This had the advantage of reducing her set up effort for the festival and eliminating the need for a lesson plan for Sunday school. It had the disadvantage, however, of greatly increasing her clean up time after class.

Karen gathered shoe boxes, PVC pipe, tin cans, Halloween decorations and various odds and ends to use for construction material. Then she allowed each child to create and decorate their own hole on top of several large pieces of carpet remainders that she laid out in the social hall, late October being a little cool for an outdoor festival in Normal.

Four year-old Mary Boyer loved Mrs. Winslow’s project and immediately set out to create the biggest, bestest, scariest hole she could. It was a complex amalgam of pipe and cardboard covered in plastic spiders and skeletons and topped, rather incongruously, by a pink unicorn Mary had cut out of a coloring book and glued to a piece of cardboard. The whole thing was held together with half a jar of paste. The other half of the paste from the jar was distributed liberally on Mary’s clothes and in her hair. But she was proud of her masterpiece and the other kids were duly impressed. She dubbed it “Pinkhorn Manor.”

The youth group, meanwhile, had decided to watch a scary movie for their Halloween party. Pastor O’Donnell insisted it be rated PG-13 much to his fifteen year-old daughter Katie’s chagrin. But Katie found a movie that promised lots of creepy chills and would, not at all incidentally, give her a good excuse to cuddle up with her boyfriend Joe. She was further chagrined, however, to learn that her father had recruited church secretary Tammy Billings to act as chaperone for the youth group party.

When the time came for the festival to begin, Karen brought out a bucket of old golf balls and several putters she’d borrowed from members of the congregation. Each hole was a tin can placed behind whatever contraption the child in question had constructed. Karen divided the children into foursomes and kept score on a rolling white board in between dodging runaway golf balls.

Mary was in a foursome with Sierra Smith. Mary had fairly good hand-eye coordination for a girl her age, but tended to hit the ball too hard, no matter how often Karen said, “Gently, Mary, gently,” through gritted teeth. By the time they reached the hole Mary built, the fifteenth, she was three strokes behind Sierra.

Mary did not like to lose, especially to Sierra Smith.

Meanwhile, up in the youth group room, Katie’s plan was going along quite well. At first whenever Katie got too cuddly with Joe, Tammy cleared her throat pointedly until the teens created some space between them. But as the movie progressed, Tammy found herself caught up in the tale of a small town party clown possessed by a vengeful spirit. She quit paying much attention to the volume of air separating Katie and Joe. Truth was Tammy kind of wished her husband Ralph was there to cuddle up to.

Joe, meanwhile, was finding it a little difficult to enjoy the romantic opportunity. He tried to act like the cool, calm protective boyfriend. But that creepy clown was freaking him out. He came up with a reasonably effective strategy which involved focusing his gaze on a point just above the television any time the spooky string music started playing. If he didn’t look directly at the screen, he didn’t jump too much when something scary happened.

Back down on the 15th hole, Sierra Smith had just scored a hole-in-one. Mary stepped up determined to match the feat. She hit the ball and it ricocheted off the side of the elaborate edifice of Pinkhorn Manor. Frustrated, she lined up for shot two. That one entered the piece of PVC pipe that led through the structure but somehow emerged from the top instead of the back, knocking the unicorn into the air and bouncing back almost to the original tee off point.

Mary wound up for shot three, determined to get the ball through Pinkhorn Manor even if it meant punching a hole in her creation. She swung and the ball entered the PVC pipe on a perfect trajectory. But the force of the hit caused it to skip over the tin can when it emerged from the other side. It ricocheted off a plastic bucket filled with water and apples for bobbing, then bounced off the wall and arced up through the open door to the youth room.

Joe was staring intently at the wall above the TV while on screen the possessed clown crept up behind a pretty young housewife who had the misfortune to be home all alone. The golf ball sailed in and bounced off the top of Joe’s head.

Joe screamed.

The scream was high and piercing and caused pretty much everyone in the room to levitate off their seats, spilling drinks and overturning bowls of popcorn. Joe was supremely embarrassed by his outburst once the cause of the blow to his head was discovered. But despite the knowledge that it was a wayward golf ball and not a clown’s hand, he couldn’t seem to stop trembling.

Once order was restored, Katie cuddled up to Joe again; but now she was the one playing the part of cool, calm protector. Joe held her extra tight. Tammy almost cleared her throat to intervene, but Joe’s pale face looked so pitiful she decided to let the two teens be for a little while.