Killer-Extras: Flash Fiction
Special Halloween Edition! Richard Pitaniello carves more than just the pumpkin...
Pumpkin Guts
By Richard Pitaniello
At 8:00 PM, the sky turned dark and the streetlights turned on, flaring orange and leaving shadows clinging everywhere like cobwebs that were black instead of white. Lightning popped all over, thunder rattled windows, and the rain bled down, gathering in puddles that shined black in the dark. Nobody would come out on a night like this, no sir, not even trick-or-treaters.
But it was still Halloween and Corbin Baxter still had to decorate his boxy white house and make it all creepy. He'd hung skeletons off the roof by their hands, but the rain had soaked the cardboard soggy and heavy. Some of them had fallen, breaking at the wrists. The rain couldn't touch the scarecrow on the porch though, so his house was still partly decorated and losing the skeletons didn't bother him so bad after he'd sniffed a few lines of white.
But he still had to carve his jack-o'-lantern for the year--and eat his dinner too. So he went out on his gritty concrete porch and sat his fat self down at the top of the dusty steps, sat down with a knife and a spoon and a tray and a plan, as well as a few other items. He took the knife and scalped his pumpkin, pulled its head right off and scraped the stringy insides clean with the big serving spoon, slopping spoonful after spoonful of pulp in a metal tray beside him. The impact of the pulp pushed the tray across the concrete a little bit each time. It rasped, scratching a trail on the dusty porch. Some pulp missed and hung over the sides and touched the concrete, limp, stretching and breaking when the tray moved some more with the next impact. Corbin would clean it up later.
He had to clean it up, no question there. He couldn't have wormy stuff like that on his porch. After he'd sniffed some dust, he'd realized that the pulp looked like worms and worms could make some kid sick, or his jack-o'-lantern. Corbin knew: "You can't have worms, jack-o'-lantern. They steal all your food, thin you down. Plants should be healthy and fat, even dead plants like you, little Jackie."
He leaned back and scratched his fat belly. "Me though, I should lose lard like the doctor says, eat my veggies and stuff like that."
He sighed. "But they taste so bad. Nothing personal," he quickly told the pumpkin, worried he'd offended it. He sniffed some blood back up his nose. "There's just something about veggies I can't stand, something vile that makes me wanna puke. I threw up on our turkey one Thanksgiving when they gave me mashed potatoes--even the gravy couldn't make them good. They just looked too much like lard."
A drop of blood slipped out his nose, jumped from one lip to another and then clung to the bottom of his chin. He didn't wipe it up. "That's what I can't stand about veggies," he explained. "They all look like body parts: potato fat, corn teeth, carrot fingers, cauliflower brains, cranberry blood. No, I can't stomach any of them if they go through my mouth...But I need to eat them if I wanna lose some weight, like my stupid doctor tells me," he knew. "I'll have to choke them down somehow."
Corbin slapped his belly flab again, then pulled up his shirt. He finished digging pulp out of the pumpkin and leaned himself back, picking up the knife again. He gave himself a big smile and then filled the pumpkin up with tallow--he could light the glistening fat on fire to make everything glow when he finally carved a face in the jack-o'-lantern.
He couldn't do that yet because he had to eat dinner. So he did. Afterwards he fixed himself up with a needle and a lot of fishing line, sewing his slit stomach tight before he lost so much blood it killed him.
There, good as new.
Corbin looked at the empty tray where the orange worms had been. Then he looked at the pumpkin filled with yellow fat, his own body fat. He thought about what face to carve, but he wouldn't do that yet. "Better let things digest," he muttered. And he slapped his stomach, which still bulged plenty even after loosing all that fat. "Gotta lose some lard," he knew, "even if it does mean having worms."
He pushed the empty tray off the porch. It fell face-up on the grass. Rain drummed all over it, cleaning off the rest of the nasty pumpkin pulp that he couldn't stand the taste of.
But that didn't matter now, so Corbin laughed, slapping the stitches on his bloody stomach. "There's more than one way for a man to eat his a dinner..."
Bio Bits:
Richard Pitaniello lurks in libraries, Latin halls, backwoods
forests. He's had work published by Black Petals, Wicked
Karnival, and Carnifex Press, as well as poems in Dreams and
Nightmares and Poe Little Thing.
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