Chapter 12 #3
Skully rolls his eyes, cigarette twitching at the corner of his mouth, but the smirk tugging at his features is the kind that makes my stomach flip.
And Marrow—standing off to the side like he was born in a graveyard runway show—tilts his head and watches me with that reverent hunger that always makes me feel like a prayer and a curse in the same breath.
For half a second, the sight of them together guts me. My monsters. My chaos choir. And the whisper in the back of my head that says they’re on borrowed time scratches too close to bone. I shove it away, hard, because I don’t do mourning before the funeral.
“Cider,” I announce, too loud. “Before I bite someone out of principle.”
Skully’s hand slips to my lower back, quick, anchoring. “Aye aye,” he says, soft enough no one else could hear it. He gestures with his chin. “Stand has a line. You want the hot or the cold?”
“Hot,” I say. “I want my insides to steam.”
“We can arrange that,” Marrow says, tone obscene purely because he is breathing.
The cider stand is a wood-slatted kiosk decorated with corn husks and a chalkboard menu written in aggressive whimsical font.
A teenager with haunted eyes passes steaming cups through a window while her coworker drowns cinnamon donuts in sugar like a baptism.
The line is long. I clutch the wheelbarrow handles and try to be patient.
My patience is a bat with a ribbon around its neck.
Ahead of us, a couple argues gently about whether a pumpkin can be too orange.
Behind us, a toddler informs the world of his need to go potty.
Bonehead watches the donut fryer with lust I take personally.
Skully studies a hand-lettered sign that says PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE GEESE and grins like he’s found a long-lost scripture.
Marrow examines the chalkboard’s curlicues as if they mean something transcendent.
When we reach the window, the teenager looks at the boys, looks at me, and recalibrates her personality to complicit wingwoman. “What can I get you?” she asks me, her tone bright.
“Four hot ciders,” I say, “one without the top because he’ll drink it like a Labrador.” I tip my head toward Bonehead.
Bonehead, delights at my observation, thumping his chest. “Topless.”
Skully releases a theatrical groan.
The girl composes herself with the brittle dignity of a barista at a funeral, sliding steaming cups across the counter and slipping me an extra donut with a smirk that says, get it, witch. I almost want to reward her with glitter, like a fairy godmother of chaos.
I pass Bonehead his topless cider and he downs it in one heroic gulp, Adam’s apple working like pornography disguised as hydration.
Skully is already leaning in, sly as a pickpocket, tipping his silver flask into mine—the one he insists belonged to some tragic rock star and therefore counts as historic.
The cinnamon smells hotter now, sharper, like trouble.
Marrow doesn’t drink yet. He only cradles his cup between gloved hands, eyes shut as though he’s coaxing confessions from the steam. When he finally looks at me over the rim, it’s with that reverent hunger that makes the air feel like a chapel, and I’m the only altar he’ll kneel at.
I take my first sip. It tastes like cinnamon, apple, and every spiked October I promised myself I deserved.
Heat climbs up my throat and pools in my chest, molten yet kind.
I wipe sugar from my lip with the back of my hand and gesture like a general who has just finished communion.
“Back to the fields, my beautiful disasters. We came here to commit pumpkin larceny with receipts.”
Bonehead shoulders the wheelbarrow like it’s a backpack and immediately sets a pace that implies we are fleeing a crime.
Skully falls in beside me, flask returned to whatever pocket dimension he keeps it in.
Marrow moves at my other shoulder, suit catching the sun like it was fitted by a mortician who believes in lust.
We cut through new rows: the Freak Row—warty beauties, green scars like lightning, the Pageant Row—matte-orange spheres, smooth as sin, and my favorite, the Misfits—pumpkins with ridiculous necks, pumpkins shaped like sleeping walruses, pumpkins that look like they’re trying to whisper gossip to the ground.
I point and they obey. It’s obscene. “That one. And that one. And—oh, the little gremlin with the flat top. He’s named Dennis.
Respect him.” Bonehead scoops Dennis with both hands like he’s presenting a newborn to the moon.
The barrow groans. Skully heaves one onto his shoulder, the flat side against his collarbone like a beat-up amp.
Marrow chooses with ceremony, testing stems like he’s reading veins, and somehow his always end up looking curated, a museum exhibit of Harvest That Wants To Kiss You On The Mouth.
We pass a staff boy dragging a fresh stack of wheelbarrows. He slows, stares like he’s seeing a PSA on the dangers of falling for goths, and then politely pretends he was never born. I blow him a kiss for his courage.
By row six, I’ve stopped pretending I can count.
We have an army. Bonehead has started humming a crusade anthem of his own invention, Skully keeps adding harmonies that do not exist in nature and Marrow keeps pausing to admire mold like it’s lace.
I am drunk on sugar and victory. The barrow lip is a jack-o’-lantern grin made of pumpkins, all teeth and threat.
“Budget check,” Skully says mildly, nudging my hip with his. “Do we have one?”
“Yes,” I say. “It’s called shut up and push.”
I kiss him directly on the mouth, short and sweet. Or, it would be sweet if I didn’t bite him on the bottom lip a bit too hard. But he happily shuts up and pushes.
We swing by the photo sign that says PICK OF THE PATCH with a cutout where you stick your face through.
Bonehead gets his entire head stuck for eight exciting seconds.
I pretend to be worried while discreetly photographing the greatest artwork of our time.
Skully frees him with a twist and a muttered, “We need to stop bringing your skull to wooden holes, champ.” Bonehead emerges triumphant, hair wilder, grin brighter, looking at me like I hung the moon and nailed it to a scarecrow.
I fan myself with a brochure that claims this farm has goat yoga. “Okay, final sweep,” I decree. “Two more big ones and then we head to the scales before the sun sets or I marry a gourd out of panic.”
Marrow lifts me—no warning—by the waist and plants me delicately atop a hay bale to survey my kingdom. I gasp, clutching his shoulders because gravity believes in foreplay. He steps back, jaw set like he’s been knighted. “Choose,” he says, and it lands somewhere between order and worship.
I scan. The last two reveal themselves like they knew my gaze was the spell: one is a squat brute with battle scars and a stem like a handle for sin; the other is pale and charmingly lopsided, a moon pretending to be fruit. “Those,” I whisper, pointing. “The husband and the mistress.”
Bonehead collects the husband with a pleased grunt. Skully lifts the moon and tips it in a mock bow that makes a PTA dad almost pass out.
At checkout, the scales groan the way saints do. The farm woman rings us up with a face that starts at suspicion and ends at a kind of bewildered awe, like she’s seen all manner of pilgrims but none so aggressively committed to altar decor. “Y’all doing a display?” she asks.
“A ritual,” Skully answers automatically.
I beam. “Seasonal hostage situation: they get candles if they behave.” She blinks. I smile wider. “Plus, a few offerings to appease the fog machine before it eats a neighbor.”
She sighs like she’s checking out completely and tells me the total.
I feel the ghost of my bank account trying to throw itself down a well.
I pay with the giddy horror of someone who knows death pays her bills.
The woman hands over a wagon token and a bundle of those plastic pumpkin-carrying thongs that are both helpful and vaguely suggestive.
Load-out is Tetris on hard mode. We ferry our loot to the lot in multiple trips like we’re moving house and the house is round and judgemental.
Bonehead insists on two at a time and then three at a time.
Skully refuses to let me carry anything heavier than mischief; he tucks the smaller weirdos into the footwell and narrates like a heist movie.
Marrow packs the trunk with the calm precision of a man who once organized a mausoleum by passion.
Soon, the car looks less like transportation and more like a mobile altar. The trunk is full. The backseat is a pumpkin pit. The floorboards are colonized. There are gourds in the cupholders. One sits primly in the console like a queen.
Bonehead looks obscene in the passenger seat, knees hiked to his chin, surrounded by pumpkins of all sizes.
Skully pats his lap after finagling his way into a spot in the back. “All right, Dennis, climb aboard.” He plops the flat-top there and winks at me. “We maintain eye contact in this family.”
Marrow settles beside him with two of the small exclamation-point gourds nested in his coat like smuggled artifacts. He looks unjustifiably sensual committing a crime.
I squeeze into the driver’s seat with a lumpy orb in my own lap, its stem poking my belly like a tiny dagger. There is zero visibility out the back and only vibes out the sides. The car smells like cider, dirt, and victory.
“This is illegal in at least three states,” Skully observes, delighted.
“Lucky for us,” I say, starting the engine, “we’re in the fourth.”
Back onto the gravel. The car fishtails under the weight and then surges like it’s decided to become a parade float.
At the exit, a farmhand waves us through with the expression of a man who has accepted that autumn makes people do crazy things.
I salute him solemnly. He salutes back before he can stop himself.
The road home is a gauntlet of potholes and temptation. KETTLE CORN, screams a sign. “Now?” Bonehead rumbles, hopeful, Dennis bobbing on Skully’s lap like a dashboard idol.
“We might be pushing our luck on the weight limit of my car,” I say, but my resolve lasts exactly three seconds.
I swerve into the gravel pull-off, and we perform a kettle-corn drive-by: Bonehead points out every bag he wants; I hand over cash; the vendor says “y’all be careful,” in the tone of a man who’s seen a haunted house and is trying to be polite about it.
We roar off with corn confetti exploding in our wake like we just won harvest homecoming.
“Try,” I command, tipping the bag to Bonehead’s mouth like he’s a seal at feeding time. He crunches, eyes going wide with religious revelation. “More,” he declares with a pound of his fist on the dashboard, sending popcorn everywhere.
“Easy, champ—no baptizing Dennis in sugar,” Skully drawls, rescuing the flat-top on his lap from the fallout. “He’s a savory gourd.”
Marrow feeds me a handful, his fingers elegant even when dusted with sugar. “Sweetness suits you,” he murmurs. I almost drive into a ditch on purpose.
We hit a stoplight. People in the neighboring lane stare like we are a family of gourds that learned to operate heavy machinery.
A child in the backseat of an SUV presses her palms to the glass and mouths wow.
I flash my teeth and wave the queen pumpkin at her like a monarch granting an audience.
She squeals. My chest hurts again, the good kind—the kind that says remember this, idiot, this is the part worth haunting for.
The light turns green. We rumble on, ridiculous and radiant.
By the time we slide back into my neighborhood, the sun has gone a lazy, honeyed gold that makes even the HOA’s trimmed hedges look like they’ve considered crime. I nose the car up to the house and kill the engine. Silence falls, full of sugar and breath and a thousand tiny pumpkin judgments.
“Unloading plan,” I say, and then immediately abandon the concept.
We pour out, laughing, hands everywhere, passing pumpkins like contraband.
Bonehead carries two tucked against his sides and one between his teeth for the drama of it.
Skully stacks a trio like he’s balancing records.
Marrow takes the heaviest with stately grace, his suit unbothered, because of course it is.
Building a staircase of orange on the porch, we line the steps, flank the door, and crown the railing.
The house’s starting to look like it ate another house and kept the bones.
I am incandescent. I am a saint of excess.
A neighbor slows in his jog to gawk; I bless him with a chin tilt that says mind your cardio and your business.
The last trip we make is for the floorboard gremlins and the console queen.
I cradle the queen, and for a second, our reflections meet in the porch window—me and a pumpkin and three beautiful, impossible men in the amber light.
The whisper of borrowed time brushes my ear again.
I turn my head and bite the air like I can scare it off.
Later. Not now. Not while the porch looks like a throne fit for a Hallowed Queen. For me.
Bonehead nudges my shoulder with his, gentle for a man built for demolition. “Good haul,” he says, pleased as a saint with a full reliquary.
“Perfect haul,” I correct, tipping my forehead to his bicep like a prayer. “We pillaged politely.”
Skully flings himself onto the top step and leans back on his elbows, boots together, staring at the piles. “If the cops come,” he says, “we say we’re starting a church.”
Marrow steps close enough that his shadow folds around my feet. “We already have,” he says simply.
I take it in: the outrageous excess, the dumb romance, the way the air smells like sugar and dirt. My porch has never looked better. My heart has never felt more like a lit candle. “All right,” I declare, clapping once. “Showers for whoever is sticky, then we carve until the moon complains.”
Bonehead raises his hand. “Sticky.”
“I volunteer to supervise,” Skully says, innocent as arson.
Marrow’s mouth curves, slow and sinful. “I shall fetch the knives.”
“See?” I purr, sweeping my arm at the pumpkin city we built. “Pilgrimage successful.”
Inside, the fog machine coughs like it missed us. Outside, the pumpkins sit in their orange ranks, fat and patient, ready to be turned into faces that will watch us long after the lights go out.
I grin. “No survivors,” I tell them sweetly. “Not even me.”