Spooky

Halloween came spookily early this year for us – and our neighbors.

All I wanted was a little cool-down, a prelude to changing colors, brisk gusts, and cozy harvests.

Instead we got a little horror.

Orange skies, a haze settling over the city like a smoky curtain, all living things burrowing away –the climax of Stephen King’s next bestseller. Something inhuman will lurch out of nowhere to grab the protagonist next. Stranger, horrifying things give chase.

But truth, as they say, can be stranger than fiction.

If the movies are to be believed, it’s my fault – and that of the rest of the pumpkin spice chugging-ilk.

After endless hot days it’s hard not to crave a sweater, a cider, and a warm kitty. Us autumn acolytes can’t help but get a little impatient after the thirtieth 90-degree day in a row with no rain.

But if the movies tell us anything – and as a mostly-upstanding American I absolutely and reverently think they do – then we should have known better.

After all “be careful what you wish for” is the oldest lesson in the book.

It always felt like a plot device, perfect for easy family movies. Universal, fun, and satisfying.

How else do you get teenagers and parents to switch bodies, and gain some much-needed perspective?

How else do you teach kids the dangers of magic (which seems unjustly like some anti-Halloween propaganda…), or more convincingly of the danger in getting everything you wish for?

And it frees up any worries of inventing a better take-home message imbibed with some deeper truth or tear-jerking meaning and allows the writers to focus on important little details – like watching Mom go back to high school. Or a 13-turned-35-year-old holding a job.

Still, movies teach us that those who expect their lives to be most normal, are the ones most in for a shock.

We should have known better than to push for an early Hallow’s Eve.

And look how many have suffered, fallen victim to a severe lack of gratitude.

It was so smoky the cat who only squeaks couldn’t even squawk a protest at being kept inside.

Little gasps of horrified indignation were his only protest, resigned to a day on the bed.

Unlike a B-movie, there were no spooky foreshadows. No villainous grins (except for the triumphant cat’s after a successful mooching, probably unrelated).

No messages of warning were written on the wall in dripping, oozing pumpkin chai.

But, as if somewhere there’s a busy writer sloppily throwing together a viable script (and punishing me for having the sleaze to point it out), I got the point.

When you spend hot summer months craving a little autumnal ambience in the air, beware.

You just might get what you wished for.