J.M. Templet is one of our Halloween writing contest finalists for 2015. We’ll be publishing our contest finalists every day until Halloween, when we’ll announce our contest’s winner.
existential trolls
We set up under rainbows
no one notices the crunch of bones
or the rattle of stone
as we gorge on candy
left from last year
perhaps a hand might be attached
we don’t mind
the pink the white
the awful red
the purple and blue
they all mask the ugly
faces we hide from each
other
on the night we hunt
we don’t don
leather or cloth
we stride like water
from bridges and old oak
the children see
they hide behind red devil
horns, white sheets
orange round fruits
wide round eyes
we give them
our real faces
those folds and flaps
never quit fit like
real plastic does
Baked
The new boy is strange. He smells of ginger and his skin has this tinge of brown sugar. His mother, this very old woman with pointed shoes, folds his hair back just so as birds circle the bus stop. Their black eyes watch as he almost hops up those metal plastic stairs, making hardly a sound with his soft shoes. He says he’s from Minnesota. Sounds like a made up place to me. There must be other boys made of sugar there, all hopping to escape birds like him. At recess all the girls giggle and dare each other to taste. He screams. All the birds scream back. The girls smell blood, like leeches they find the points in his skin that tear rather than break. His blood is icing they lick before getting to the cake.
Nurse
he says
the dress is too short
I should spend all night
pulling it down
below my knees
women, he says
take any excuse
do normal nurses
wear glitter there?
they would be
all the time
sprinkling shards
in sick people’s eyes
I remember he once
wore fishnets
with this corset
he wanted to be
singing
instead the fat roll
just above his hips
made him look inflated
now he stays home
giving out pennies
apples, and these
sticks of jerky shaped
like pumpkins
the kids
avoid our house
I would too
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