illustration by CALUM HEATH
At night, Harold dreams of children. Their faces are young and innocent. He lies beside blondes and brunettes, girls with dark, tightly curled hair, and they tell him, “We could love you.” Their mouths open and then curl closed in pain. The dawn approaches, and an angry god appears. “Oh, Harold,” he beseeches, “do not the innocent mind corrupt.” Another day, another painful layer added to the ball of shame in Harold’s gut. I am an awful thing, thinks Harold. The objects in his bedroom turn away. The lamp. The table. The Magritte. They cannot bear witness to his pedophilic lust. But lust, says Harold, is not the same as action. To act is not the same as biology. He grips the pillow tightly, and the night ends in daylight.
In the morning, as coffee brews in the kitchen, Harold watches his own eyes in his bedroom mirror as he carefully combs his hair into a neat part. The polo he wears, with its SunTrust emblem prominently displayed, hugs his middle tightly. He pulls an errant hair from his shoulder and then turns away from the mirror, setting his comb on the nightstand. Harold is twenty-six, but his small stature and large-cheeked face give him a boyish look. From the bathroom down the hall, Harold hears the sound of public radio’s Morning Edition and then a groan, followed by the word shithead. Darlene, his roommate, is awake.
The bathroom door creaks open, and Darlene calls from down the hall. “Hey—can you pour me a travel mug? I’m running late.”
Harold nods, an action Darlene cannot see, and heads to the kitchen to pour the cup. He pours himself one as well, then adds a splash of soy creamer to Darlene’s mug and passes it off to her as she enters the kitchen.
“Thanks.” She pauses to take a sip, her dark hair pulled up into a network of braids, impossibly complicated in Harold’s vision. “I fell asleep with this hair—you think it works?”
Harold nods again, smelling now the strong floral spray that Darlene has generously applied in lieu of a shower.
“I know. I’m gross.”
“No. I like it. Like I’m in a meadow or something.”
Darlene laughs and begins to rummage through her purse. “You going to the Taproom after work?” Darlene now holds open a compact, looking at her face and scrunching her nose so it touches her upper lip. “I think Leah said she’d be there.” She glances toward Harold, and he catches her eye in the small mirror of the compact.
“You look fine.” Harold opens the cupboard and pulls out a bowl, then moves to the pantry to grab the box of Cheerios. “And yeah. Okay.”
“Good. Me and Stella will be there, too.” Darlene pauses to take a long swallow of coffee and then opens the fridge, pulling out the creamer and adding a splash to the mug. “Maybe change your shirt before you meet up?”
“I’m sure.”
“I think she’s a nice one.” Darlene snaps the compact shut and pulls out her car keys. “Okay. I’m out. Will you feed Angie?”
He nods a third time, and then Darlene is out the door, her keys jingling loudly in her hand. A trace of her smell lingers in the small kitchen space. Harold pours his cereal and his milk, and, standing with his elbows resting on the countertop of the low kitchen bar, he chews the familiar meal. Its taste is a chemtrail to childhood.
He finishes the bowl, wipes his hand across his mouth to remove any drops of milk, then whistles for Angie, pouring a cup of dry food into her food dish and supplying her with fresh water.
The orange tabby wends her way toward him, and Harold stops to pet her between the ears. He kneels down to accept her curious mews. She is a loving thing, thinks Harold. The creature purrs, rubbing against his outstretched hand, brushing her forehead against his knuckles.
The dreams of the night before float ethereally in his mind, and Harold does his best to destroy the wisps. Though he cannot remember their content, the warm feeling in his belly is not one he trusts. The cat ticks against his hand, and Harold closes his eyes. He summons an image of the future, one where he is happy, in love, and surrounded by sweeping palms. Beside him is a woman, a being whose unconditional support is so large, it saves him from his own special sickness. But then, she is gone. The kitchen cupboards surround him. The day is waiting.
Checking his watch, Harold gives the cat a final scratch. He gathers his keys, phone, and wallet, and he departs the house, carefully locking the door on his way out.
The first time Harold felt an impure thought, he was a child. The pang was normalized despite its terrifying implication of sex. As his mother told him when they folded laundry together on his parents’ queen-size bed, “Even good boys have bad thoughts.” He had not mentioned the specific feeling to her—the warm buzz in his stomach when his neighbor, Sally, also eight, had worn a yellow bikini in the backyard sprinkler—but his mother seemed to intuit much that was not said.
He carried this logic with him to early adolescence. The mornings he woke up drenched in sweat were not so problematic, though the dreams themselves held subjects who seemed somehow misplaced. When his friends would speak of girls, more and more Harold found himself biting his tongue. Because, for Harold, these girls did not mature. They stayed young, pure, children, while he himself became an unfamiliar predator. It was the stuff of fairy tales, but he was the witch, the one whose desire demanded acts of cruelty. He was the wolf who, in satisfying his hunger, destroys the innocence of all around him.
At night, in his bedroom, Harold would imagine that a monster had taken residence in his belly. Maybe he had eaten something—a moldy cracker, a too-pink hamburger, some sour milk—that had poisoned his brain and made the objects of his lust so impossible. I am broken, thought Harold. I am no good.
Once, at age sixteen, Harold tested himself. He agreed to babysit his cousin, a girl of six, and they were alone in the house together for an afternoon. Harold faced his demon head-on. He had not expected the temptation to be so great, his curiosity and desire so deafening in his ears. The girl was loud, rambunctious, redheaded, and beautiful in her yellow tutu, and she was fawning over him: her older cousin, the boy, was her hero. It took all of what Harold could muster to protect her from himself. Later, complaining to his mother, he told her he would never babysit again. The irritation was too great, the child too annoying. And to himself, Harold vowed to avoid being around children altogether. He would invent a force field, and no child would be able to penetrate the protective shield that Harold had constructed. It was the only way.
On more than one occasion, teenage Harold stumbled into the realm of pornography, but the regular, full-breasted women were a paltry substitution. He tried watching men, but this too felt inadequate. And so, in shameful desperation, Harold experimented with watching children. He tried to tell himself there was no victim in his gaze, but as the months passed, the horror of what he saw grew uglier and uglier in his mind. The savagery of his own lust manifested in his sleep. The innocents who suffered in his viewings entered his dreams to show him their ruined lives, their scars, and the exploitation that his desire wreaked on their small bodies. So, with determination, Harold quit his viewing, and slowly, over time, he tried to smother his sexuality in gauze. His longings were so tightly wound that they could not touch the outer world. Harold was in control, and the demon of his sexuality—a mere specter, difficult even to hear through all the layers of dense shame—had complied.
Through all of this, Harold remained silent, aware that this was the sort of secret one did not spill. His mother’s love, though great, could surely not hold this wickedness in its wide net. Sometimes Harold wondered if there were other men or women born with this genetic abnormality, for where else could this desire have come from? His own past was free of abuse, his own childhood untainted. But to try and seek these people out, even online, felt dangerous, like an attempt to justify a heinous longing. For appearances, Harold dated now and then, and he often felt an honest attraction to the women who welcomed him into their arms. But all the while, Harold felt the duplicity of his true self lurking within. He knew that to be honest would provoke disgust, and so any intimacy was itself sheathed in lies. When he was drunk at parties during college, playing games of “I never,” Harold sometimes wished for a slip, a release, a way to admit to the terrible thing so it might be banished like a dark bird from his psyche. But this never happened, and Harold knew it was for the best. The thing in him was so base, so awful, that for most people he passed—and for those he knew, even for those that claimed to love him—his truth would never even manifest as a possibility. The bogeymen are elsewhere, not among us, or so his mother had promised.
At just past five, Harold prepares to leave the bank. He performs his closing duties as banker, says his good-byes to Kristin, the branch manager, and heads outside into the day’s mouth, warm and waiting, unnaturally hot for this, the middle of October. The car ride is short, but the warm, sun-soaked interior of his black Hyundai makes the time feel long, as though he is entombed.
Once home, Harold changes his shirt, an effort suggested by Darlene with the hopes of impressing Leah, the woman with whom he is meant to have a first date this evening. Darlene is ever eager that he should find love.
The shirt he selects is a short-sleeve button-down decorated with windmills, a mass of which are distributed in an orderly pattern across all planes of the fabric. He’d met Leah, a teacher friend of Darlene’s from the private school, late the previous Saturday night, her small nose and smaller mouth making her a proportionate candidate to date his own small-statured self. That night, wasted, Darlene had flung them together, and Harold, equally drunk, had offered to wait outside the bar with Leah for her Uber to arrive. They hadn’t spoken much, but they had somehow come to hold hands. Harold had admired the cleanness of her smell and the gentle feeling of her moist palm on his own. An echo of laundry and buttercups. Attraction, thinks Harold, is a worrisome thing.
When Harold arrives at the bar, the three women are mid-order, and the waitress is standing at their outside table, partially shaded by a Guinness umbrella. Harold slides into the empty chair between Leah and Darlene and waves hello, ordering himself an IPA, and then turning to Leah to smile broadly. I’m a normal guy, thinks Harold. The thought is a steady affirmation in his mind.
Today, Leah wears a yellow sundress, and when she turns to greet him, Harold sees the thin straps tauten against the soft flesh of her shoulders.
“It’s good to see you—you look nice.” To which Leah blushes, slightly, and Harold inside senses a pang of want, of desire.
“I like your shirt,” says Leah in response. Across the table, Darlene laughs, a single, fat beat.
The drinks arrive. Beers for Darlene and Harold, vodka for Stella, and a bourbon with ginger for Leah, who holds the glass in one small hand, sucking the drink through the thin red straw.
The table dissolves into chatter about the day, about work, about television and where to eat an excellent taco. Increasingly, Harold finds himself feeling a degree of comfort in his skin. Leah gradually scoots her chair closer toward the table and toward him, and soon he can smell her hair, the warm pleasantness of its girl scent, its flowery odor. More drinks are ordered, then French fries to share, a burger for Stella.
Across the table, Harold sees Darlene rest her hand on Stella’s thigh and then Stella’s hand traveling down to interlace her fingers with Darlene’s. The ease of their intimacy sends a pulse through his own clammy body.
Harold glances back to Leah, who is looking down at her drink, using the stir to move the remaining ice cubes in a circle. A strand of her nearly blonde hair falls loose against her face.
“So, how long have you been teaching?” Harold asks.
“Huh. I guess three years now?” Leah leans back in her seat and shakes her head. Harold notices the soft yellow of her dress against her pale skin. “It still feels like I have no idea sometimes.”
He smiles and thinks about reaching out a hand to touch her chin, to tuck the strand on her forehead behind her ear. There is an innocence about her face that the cold beer seems to draw out.
“And you’re in the high school, too?” asks Harold. “With D, I mean?”
“No, I actually teach second grade. Darlene and I met at a school-wide faculty meeting.”
Harold takes a swallow of his beer and then leans across the table to take a sweet potato fry and place it gently in his mouth. His tongue feels out the sharp ridges made by the deep fryer.
“Yeah—I love it,” Leah continues. Her eyes, which he hadn’t noticed were blue, look up toward the sky, which does not quite match their color. “It makes me feel taller, I mean being surrounded by all these little people all the time.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Do you have younger siblings?”
“No, I’m the youngest.” Across the table, Stella is showing Darlene something on her phone, and the two are laughing. Darlene’s hand grazes the back of Stella’s T-shirt. Her hand is like a hummingbird, tentative but alighting.
“Well, it’s like having siblings. Except the family is huge, and they all want your attention all the time.”
“That sounds tiring.”
“It can be. But so can most things, right?”
“True.” Harold cannot stop himself from picturing Leah in the classroom. The image flits before him, the tiny hands clamoring for her, pulling at the fabric of her yellow dress.
“Do you like kids?”
“Sure. I guess.” He swallows the last of his beer.
“It’s okay. I find not a lot of guys think about it. Unless they’re teachers or they have them, you know.”
“Huh.” Harold takes another swallow. He can see them swarming him with their little legs and bodies, like blind puppies pushing toward sustenance, this otherwise wholesome display made gross by his nature.
“I bet you’d be great with kids,” Darlene says, leaning forward, her elbows propped on the table.
“Yeah, you’re so—gentle,” Stella says, nodding.
The three women all look his way, smiling, surmising his worthiness as a parent, as a guardian. Harold, protector of the children. The grimness of it almost makes him laugh aloud.
Darlene laughs, perhaps sensing his discomfort. “This is some great first-date conversation, Leah. You really know how to lure them in.”
Blushing again now, Leah laughs too. “Right.”
“It’s okay,” Harold says. He smiles at Leah, wanting to reassure her, not wanting her to feel exposed in her curiosity. He excuses himself to the restroom, gently touching Leah’s shoulder as he rises.
In the bathroom, facing the urinal, Harold attempts to order his mind. Most of the time, it is possible to forget the parts of himself that make him feel disgusted, though dating has often been a strong trigger. As if the mere potential for human contact requires him to evaluate the risk he poses. Harold can feel a tinge of rage echo in his chest, so he clenches his jaw in response. Here is a “Why God?” moment. Why trap me in this mind? Why make me a predator? How unlovable must I be in this life?
The cold space of the bathroom does not respond, and Harold, always alone in his thoughts, moves to the sink to wash his hands. The soap smells like apples and reminds him briefly of his mother and the pies she would make on Sunday afternoons in the fall. He would need to go on his drive tonight after this date, after he says his good-byes and pays his tab. Once Leah and Darlene and Stella are safely headed home, he will take the drive, and it will calm him. It will give him a chance to think about this girl, his plans, and the possibility of being normal.
Back at the table, the conversation had changed to Stella’s new job at a nonprofit for immigrant rights, and Harold makes sure to look warmly at Leah to reaffirm his interest in her.
A final round is ordered, and the evening winds down shortly after. Harold insists on paying for Leah. Stella and Darlene leave in Darlene’s car, and Leah and Harold linger in the parking lot to exchange numbers.
“I’d like to see you again.” Harold says the words and feels their truth.
“I’d like that, too.” She smiles and turns her almost-golden head with its doll-like features his way. Her arm brushes his, so he leans in to hug her.
She feels bigger in his arms than he’d expected, like they were evenly matched, each able to lift the other off the ground if they so desired. Harold pulls back to kiss her, a peck, an affirmation. Her lips are soft, and her breath is slightly tinged with the sweetness of bourbon. The candy of adulthood.
“I’ll call you soon.” Harold pulls away, sees himself before her, almost vulnerable, and his body tenses.
She smiles and moves in the direction of her car. He watches her and feels good when she is safe inside her vehicle.
Harold unlocks his own car, noticing that the warmth from the day’s sun has worn off with the coming dusk. He waits, watching, as Leah, waving, makes her way out of the parking lot and into the neighborhood. He keeps waiting, sitting in his parked car until she turns left and he can no longer see her dab of yellow hair through the distant window. These are early days, thinks Harold. We are both still unknowns. And yet, in his chest, a tremor, a hope.
At the 7-Eleven, ten minutes from his house, Harold stops to pick up Peanut M&M’s and some assorted Laffy Taffy, the usual provisions for his drive. The drive Harold anticipates is a ten-mile loop through the suburb, one he has charted and repeats on days when he needs to feel sober and be reminded of the consequences of his brain chemistry. Sometimes, Harold thinks the loop forms the shape of a dinosaur—an imperfect, child’s approximation of the reptile. Other days it is a loop of depravity—of humans who lack control, of double-sided misery. A misshapen slug, undeserving of uniformity or order.
Each of the five pins that form the loop represents the dwelling of a registered sex offender. The information is blasted online, available for any curious or fearful individual to access. The worried and the lascivious, thought Harold as he himself pored over the findings when first creating his map. Housewives and neighborhood watches, anxious to know where danger lay. To quarantine it. To keep their loved ones safe.
The first house on the map belongs to an older gentleman, a neat home with a silver Pontiac always parked in the narrow, steep driveway. The house itself is made of brick and shuttered. Harold parks across the street and watches the windows for any sign of movement. As expected, there is none. These marked homes tend to be quieter than most, as if the creatures inside were trapped captive in their shells, avoiding any unnecessary temptation or scrutiny.
Harold lingers for a few minutes, aware of his semi-conspicuousness as he pretends to check his phone. His eyes watch the home, studying its small curtained windows and the neatly manicured hedges, two of them, twin and forest green, nearly waist-high. A man jogs by, and Harold hears the smack of his footsteps on the pavement through his open car window. The night air slowly settles like a sigh.
The next house is smaller, with white vinyl siding and a birdbath in the front yard that always seems strewn with leaves and other detritus. The man who lives here is younger, only a few years older than Harold himself. According to the Internet, his act involved the sons of his then-girlfriend, though even this small detail was too much for Harold at first. Harold did not need the titillation that makes Law and Order so popular, the depravity that others might dwell in at leisure.
Once he had seen this man, sitting on the stoop of his weathered front porch, smoking a cigarette and scratching at his jeaned ankle with a white, burly forearm. Harold was like an entomologist who finally spies his own species beneath the magnifying glass. But we’re not the same species, thought Harold, because I have not acted.
Today, the driveway is empty, and there are no lights on in the house. A soda can, partially crushed, decorates the front lawn, but Harold cannot be sure the litter wasn’t an act of violence against the man inside, an act of vengeance by the neighborhood children, high on sugar.
Harold pops a handful of M&M’s in his mouth and drives on. The interior of his car is silent except for the nearly muted radio playing its classic rock. Outside, the night has fallen, the clouds denying the stars access to the land below.
The third dwelling is a garden apartment, and Harold pauses here only briefly. He has not yet developed the courage to figure out which apartment belongs to the man on his list, and the parking lot itself is often a flurry of activity: kids, moms, dads, the elderly, all coming and going as they live their lives. Any one of them could be the predator, thinks Harold, though more than likely they are just normal, healthy people.
The fourth house is a duplex of whitewashed brick. Harold pulls up across the street, parking beneath an oak tree. He carefully unwraps a strawberry Laffy Taffy, sliding the candy into his mouth. The porch light casts a weak glow on the concrete steps that lead up to the house. The grass is short, and the remnants of a tree, a trunk with four branches sawn off, sits squat in the middle of the small yard. The quiet is nice, thinks Harold. Here is a moment in which the unknown is known. He rolls his window down slightly to let the cool air come in. All across the land, the children sleep, and here Harold keeps watch. The sound of these words is warm and gentle in his mind. Perhaps there is security in knowing where the badness lives; perhaps he could be its keeper.
A few moments later, a red sedan pulls up to the stop sign at the end of the block, and Harold watches as the car slowly approaches the house and then stops directly adjacent to the tree in the front yard. The engine idles briefly and then is turned off. There is a man in the front seat of the car, and Harold leans forward slightly to see him. He has read about this person, seen his mug shot, but never seen him in the flesh. He, like Harold, is attracted to young girls. Harold breathes in the air as it enters through his slightly cracked window and sees himself and this other sharing the same air, the same evil.
The man lingers in his car a moment longer, his hands resting idly on the steering wheel. Then he opens the door and stands outside, his face shadowed by the starless night. Harold’s mouth opens and then closes. The man turns and slams his car door shut, but then pauses and turns back to peer in the direction of Harold’s car, his body contorted like a dancer’s.
A shiver seems to run through the man’s body as the moment holds, but then he faces the car and walks directly toward Harold. He stands by his window, peering down with what looks like a grimace smeared across his thin, angular face. Inside his body, Harold’s organs rotate and squeeze.
“What are you doing?” The man’s voice is low, calm, almost a whisper.
Harold cannot speak. He puts his tongue against his lower lip. Hesitates.
The man squats down so he and Harold are at eye level, but in the darkness, the man’s face appears like a geographical survey, a map of shadowy gradation. “Why are you parked outside my house?”
“I’m sorry,” Harold speaks now. The words form more of a question than a declaration.
The man stares at him, silent, as if awaiting some answer.
“I’m sorry,” Harold says again, a grotesque confusion growing in his veins.
The man shakes his head. “You people who do this—who come and watch me—you’re perverts, too, you know.” The man looks as if he might spit at Harold’s window or bash it in, but then he sighs and rises. His head is entirely obscured now in the shadows. He stands and stares at the car and Harold.
Harold reaches for his door lock but halts, unsure.
The man turns away and walks toward the house. Harold, grasping, rolls down his window further. Wait, he thinks. Tell me what it’s like. Don’t leave me. Just, please.
The man turns back once more and shakes his pointed finger at Harold. “Please,” he says, “just leave me alone.” Then he is gone inside the house, and Harold hurriedly turns on his engine and leaves the neighborhood, his headlights like twin lighthouses in search of safety. The feeling of it all stuck in his gut. His innocence is a false idol not even he himself could worship. The drive home is a painful one.
Over the course of the following week, Harold manages to recover from his confrontation, and in the light of day, his sense of his own moral rightness is restored. How could anyone question Harold’s good fight? Who else could manage such an internal demon as he had for some twenty-odd years? This man, who in his lack of understanding of their common ground, had cast against Harold, and yet Harold is the one who abstains—whose ability to do so should warrant something, some applause, if even in the quiet of his brain. Still, the encounter provokes ambivalence in his thinking, and each time he tries to find a way to feel, Harold becomes confused, unnerved, unhappier than before—but also, oddly, righteous.
But Leah. Leah is a good thing. Five days after the first date, on a Friday night, Harold takes Leah to dinner, where they eat sushi with chopsticks. And then they hold hands in the movie theater as images of sweaty, war-torn men flit before them. The following Sunday, they eat eggs and sip champagne, and take a long walk around the town’s lake, pointing out ducks and egrets and turtles to one another. After that, they make out on a picnic blanket, Harold’s hands venturing cautiously across the argyle terrain of her sweater.
Over the days and nights they spend together, Harold discovers that Leah is easy, kind, natural with him, and only rarely does she speak about the little children in her classes. Only rarely does Harold become aware of his body and its unconscious reactions to the stories she tells and the images she describes. On the fourth date, Harold cooks dinner for Leah—linguini with pesto and sautéed spinach—and then after two bottles of red wine, they retire to Leah’s bedroom where they have mild, curious, and only slightly awkward sex. But not a bad time, Harold thinks. Not for their first attempt. And Leah seems to like it too, or so she says, laughing, when they try again the following morning to, in her words, “a greater success.”
The weeks pass quickly and intensely, Harold willingly consumed by the idea that there might be a girl in whose arms he can seek refuge. Leah, seemingly invested in his kindness, says she is glad to have left behind the bravado of her last partner. Meanwhile, Darlene echoes excitement for the connection and casually comments that Harold might finally be finding love.
On the day before Halloween, Leah texts Harold and asks if he’ll come over the following afternoon to hand out candy, the holiday this year falling on a Friday. Then later, the two will hit Stella’s party that she and her roommates host each year. Harold agrees and feels a pang of excitement, a note of pleasure in his chest that makes him realize that the prospect of seeing the girl is enough to whet his heart, to make him smile. It occurs to him that he might become a normal man, a man whose desires are boring in their wholesomeness. I could be average, thinks Harold. Maybe it just takes the love of the right girl to be a normal guy. Maybe this Leah can make me good.
On Halloween, Harold dresses as a wolf to fit the fairy-tale theme his coworkers at the bank have chosen. The costume is a plastic mask and a tail, which he pins to his suit pants. The suit itself is gray so that the double-entendre of a wolf on Wall Street will make an easy transition to the party that evening. Leaving work just after four, he heads to Leah’s small duplex where she lives alone—aside from her two fish, whose tank is the principal feature of her small, carpeted living room.
She greets him at the door wearing a pig snout and pig ears. “I’m a capitalist,” she laughs. They hug, and he pulls back to kiss her on her snout. A moment later, two very small children in witch outfits are led to the door by a mother. Harold settles himself beside Leah on the wide concrete steps that lead up to her front door. The day is still light and reasonably warm. Leah holds a large bowl of Twix, Butterfingers, and Starbursts and offers it to the children in their black cloaks. Harold watches as the small hands reach into the bowl and select pieces of candy, depositing them with determination into plastic pumpkin-shaped pails.
“Say thank you,” the mother prods, and the little witches mumble thanks through their shy, smiling mouths.
The group moves on, and Leah turns to Harold. “Did you want anything to drink? Beer or water?”
“I’m okay right now,” he says and points to the next group of children approaching, two zombies and an evil doctor with blood splattered on his small, white lab coat.
“Tough day at work?” Leah asks the doctor, and he shrugs his shoulders in response. She laughs, a sweet note, and then offers the kids the bowl.
When the children have moved along, she turns to Harold and leans her head gently against his shoulder.
“It’s a strange holiday.” Leah shakes her head. “Especially when you grow up and you’re the one handing out the candy.”
“Yeah.” Harold nods. “It’d be a weird day to visit Earth if you were an alien.”
“All these small people dressed all scary, and then this door-to-door collecting.”
Harold laughs, and Leah sits up, taking a Starburst from the bowl and opening it, offering one of the squares to Harold. He accepts, taking the orange one and leaving her the pink.
Another group approaches the house, this time the children slightly older, and Leah rises, smiling. Harold watches as she effortlessly comments on their costumes and offers them the candy. The confidence and ease in her actions are qualities Harold knows he lacks. He unwraps the orange candy and slips it into his mouth, playing with the wolf mask in his hands.
When the children are gone, Leah yawns. “God. I might need to make coffee.”
“Long day?”
“Oh, yes. Halloween is never an easy day in second grade.”
“I can imagine.”
A dad comes forward, pushing a baby in a stroller and holding the hand of a small girl in a princess dress from a Disney movie Harold cannot name. The exchange is made, and Harold finds himself watching the small, brunette head with its plastic tiara, moving down the path and into the neighbor’s yard.
“I remember being scared of Halloween as a kid,” Leah says, leaning back to place the bowl beside the lit jack-o-lantern on the stoop behind them.
“I remember loving it. What was scary about it?” Harold asks. The soft body of the orange Starburst rests on his tongue, just slightly impairing his speech.
“Not the costumes or anything. It was all the stuff you’d hear about, like poison candy or razor blades in chocolate bars or kidnappers.” Leah squints and lifts off her pig nose, resting it on her forehead. “The real stuff. Not that any of it was actually real.”
“Humans can be pretty scary.”
Leah looks at Harold, reaches to take his wolf mask, and places it over his face. “Yeah.” She slips the elastic behind his head so the mask is attached. “Maybe it’s our lack of fur.”
“Hairier is scarier?” Harold peers through at Leah’s eyes, and her soft pink lips and round chin.
“Maybe so,” she laughs. “Though maybe hairless is scariest?”
A brief quiet settles between them, and Harold self-consciously swallows the candy still marinating in his mouth. Leah is looking at her fingernails, and through the mask, Harold’s breath feels hot and sticky. The air is cooler as the sun begins to wane.
“A beer sounds nice, actually, but I can get it.” He begins to raise himself up, but Leah touches his arm.
“I’ll get it—no problem. I’ll make some coffee too.”
“Thanks.”
“You man the bowl?”
Harold nods, raises one hand like a wolf paw, and pounces on the bowl, pulling it into his lap, making Leah laugh as she stands up and turns to go inside.
Alone on the steps, Harold appreciates this break from trick-or-treaters. With Leah beside him, the purity of the activity feels believable, feels right. But alone? He straightens the mask on his face and imagines wolf teeth inside his mouth. In another version of his life, he would lure them in, terrify them, eat of their flesh, their sex.
Harold shakes his head, pulls down the mask, and sees two girls coming his way, a mother trailing behind as she holds the hand of a tiny boy dressed like a Ninja Turtle. The girls are dressed as ballerinas, the tulle of their tutus flaring out to form the shapes of exaggerated flowers. Tulips, young and lithe. They float toward him, attempting pirouettes and other moves their untrained bodies cannot quite perform.
“Trick or treat,” the one in purple shouts. Her friend or sister echoes the words as she spins once, then twice, the pink of her tutu still bright in the fading October light. They laugh, these trilling birds, these friends, and Harold smiles and holds out the bowl, his own heart a hummingbird.
“Ballerinas?” he asks. The girls nod as they lean forward, examining the contents of the bowl. The smell of their hair is just perceivable as they reach forward to take a piece of candy.
“One piece?” asks the girl in purple, and Harold nods.
“What’re you?” the one in pink asks, reaching for a Twix, then dropping it in lieu of a Butterfinger. She doesn’t look at him directly, her eyes cast on the candy before her.
Harold laughs and shakes his head. “A wolf.”
The girl nods, her eyes now on his mask and then catching her friend’s hand. The two turn and shout, “Thank you!” Harold nods, waving to the mother who watches, smiling, from the background. They leave, their thin bodies skipping, and the skirts like pale ghosts in the front yard.
Then the door behind him opens, and Leah, in her pink sweater and pink jeans and pig ears, is beside him, handing him a bottle. He hears his own thoughts, the prayer for her return, and feels the cooling of his sweat at the nape of his neck.
“Looks like you survived,” Leah says, settling down beside him. The porch light above them now visible in the oncoming darkness.
Harold nods. “Thanks for the beer.”
“They’re not so scary.”
“Who?” Harold turns to look at her face, the snout still settled on her forehead like a third eye.
“Children,” says Leah.
Harold nods but finds he cannot speak. Instead, he places his hand on her thigh and squeezes. He lets the feeling of her girl flesh excite him, satiate him, and make him feel, at once—and for the first time—like a human. This moment, he knows, is not the stuff of dreams. They are here, on this porch, the concrete step beneath their fleshmade selves. The grass is shorn and earnest in the fall dark before them. And here with this body beside him, with heat and breasts and his own true longing, he is not now this time an unclean thing, but maybe—oh, possibly—whole. 
