All Hallows’ Eve Brunch
written by: Lou Storey
Frankenstein holds my gaze. All Hallows’ Eve, festive Samhain, my brunch with an abomination. Gray arms flung wide spill the juice, a filthy sleeve drags across the egg-white omelet. He means no harm, turning Sunday brunch into a battlefield. I say nothing, command my smile. The waitstaff hold tight to their crosses, recite a lavish menu of prayer. His mismatched eyes seek to focus, blue, brown, glazed flat in a cavity of tears. I feel the damning eyes of other patrons, disapproval at our disruption, my poor choice of companion, selecting this café—a mistake.
He wants to tell me something, a tongue too long dead, lolling in a head stapled bone-crude into place. Why does science always end in monsters? His sorry face in zigzag catgut stitch. What magic did I want from this autumn holiday, this celebration of the macabre? The monster is uneasy. In kindness I stiffen my breathing limbs still as death, a posture offered as memory of graveyard peace, the rest from which this sad creature was unfairly awakened.
Frankenstein gurgles wet vowels, fist pounding the table coughing up Formica splinters. I say nothing. This day to remember the dead. How many parts of men have made this one man? Each of them watched the light dim, felt their hearts slow, lungs unable to vent their helpless rage, soon lost to background murmur, the dull chorus of clumsy cliché, hollow comforts whispered by kin.
Are we really so very different, man to monster? On impulse I reach out and seize those rotting hands, my touch stuns him, our grip of ice, mine from old age, his from death. I know the real monsters. Those who treat shame like a virus, mirror self-disgust into bullseye of OTHER. Our hands stay joined as if in prayer, man and monster. Those eyes alone now move, electric sparks in synaptic collision. Yes, I know. He has angered many others beyond this café. Yesterday Frankenstein drowned that lovely little girl. She was tossing handfuls of yellow daisies and purple clover into the lake. How human a mistake, little girls and flowers, so alike. Does he even remember?
His cold meat hands grow heavy, more dead than still. Can those borrowed ears hear what I hear? A rumble of feet, the villagers armed in Celtic harvest toting stones and clubs, torches and pitchforks, bows and arrows, guns and iPhones, the human mob in trick or treat, lifetime after lifetime ready to do our business on this special day, stalking the undying need for justice to restore us to presumed innocence.
I say nothing. They will be here soon to celebrate the horror, unleash their holy vengeance upon this sorry walk of human carnage, a man of men, born of needs unmet. He wants to tell me something, his misshapen figure now in backlight against silhouette of torch, outlined within a mesh of humanity. I wonder at the word those stolen lips fail to form. Is it Mercy?
They are here. I release my grip, deliver the monster to his fate. Many arms drag him away, further and further away, far enough away until we are just another village alive in bonfire, jack-o-lantern pumpkin light carved sharp along winding paths, town upon town, a crazy quilt of so many, a landscaped coverlet thrown soft upon a bed where each of us Lay Me Down to Sleep, certain of our cause, unbroken in our pledge of noble humanity, believing ourselves heroes as we dream away into this night’s darkest slumber.
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