Here, There & Elsewhere. I scream parlour

The young woman-employee at the grocery store is really quite pretty except for the bleeding gash across her forehead! And her mouth has been slit from side to side! Then stitched up with raw, red thread! Haha. Fooled you. Today, as I write this, it’s October 31: Halloween.

Though it’s mid-morning at the store, there are plenty of ghouls, witches and corpses at large. Not children, but full-grown adults who are going about their celebration of all things macabre with befitting seriousness. The nice young man at the self-service check-out area, for instance, is wearing a full knight’s costume, complete with a cowl of golden chain mail covering his head and a sword strapped to the side of his body.

Another woman employee is masquerading as a friendly skeleton, her face painted white and her eye-sockets darkened. She shows us that she’s got skeletal gloves with bones that glow in the dark tucked into her belt. Inside the pocket of her painted hip bone, she has a tube of white face-paint for touching up her make-up.

I’m with Muriel, of course. We go to our favourite arts ‘n’ crafts store which is filled with plastic pumpkins, skulls, webs, spiders, coffins and mummies with their bandages just starting to come undone. As we enter the store one of the employees greets us with a grin. “Ha!” he says. “I was telling my wife about you two ladies. ‘They always come in together and then they separate and go to opposite ends of the store!’” According to him, whenever he sees one of us, he automatically looks around for the other.

Muriel and I smile and nod. The fact is, even though we really don’t look alike and belong to quite different ethnicities, the fact that we’re both brown-skinned and grey-haired guarantees that we’re routinely mistaken for twin sisters. It’s quite hilarious. This store is also overflowing with evil spirits and the undead. One young girl has painted her face a hideous green. Another woman is dressed all in black with a pointy-witch’s hat. At the check-out counter I notice a young boy carrying a cute little toy-dog. It looks exactly like one of those powder-puff Pomeranians. I assume he’s picked it up in the store until suddenly it leaps out of his arms and barks at the cashier: it’s alive! Everyone collapses in giggles.

We complete our expedition at the Creamery, as usual. The waitstaff are wearing horns and funny hats. There are little children dressed as tiny plump dragons and Spiderman. One young girl enters wearing a princess-style gown, with black hob-nailed boots on her feet and emerald green hair. As Muriel drives me home we see Goth-ladies and young Frankensteins strolling on the sidewalks, corpses hanging from trees and giant bats plastered across doorways. Fortunately, I have a nice warm coffin to climb into at home. Happy Ghoul Night!

Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

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