The Bagging
By
Milan Kova?evi?
When we first started with… well, a game of ours, we used mostly harmless things.
That first year, Jeff suggested we slip dog shit into the kids’ candy bags, but we all said it would never work; those little smartasses would smell it right away.
We knew, even then, that our objections would never stop him.
He was a strange one; a rare beast, as he liked to call himself.
And the rest of us were much the same – unfit for any mold, just as we were unfit for the world that had cast us out.
So, of course, he went through with it, and tradition began, reeking from the start.
October was cold, as it always was. Somehow, I had the feeling that each one would be colder than the last, even though everyone had already started talking about global warming as if it were an established fact and not some distant prophecy muttered by people on television.
Either there was less and less fire left in me, or the world was truly beginning to freeze over.
Whichever it was, the temperature did nothing to dull the stench.
The house, as always, reeked of sour wine, ash, and mold, with that damp, rotten sweetness old walls get when too many people have breathed badly inside them for too long.
The kids spent whole days prowling up and down the street, shrieking under their plastic masks and dragging their cheap little capes through wet leaves, which made life hard on all of us, since we often slept until noon, and sometimes even later, depending on how deep into the previous night we had been drinking, chasing dragons, and pretending there was still something out there worth catching.
And when the kids finally came knocking, chanting their trick-or-treat bullshit through the door, Jeff took the bowl into his hands like some generous neighborhood saint.
Among the raisins he poured into their bags, he slipped the little piece of dog shit he had found on the porch earlier that day.
We watched the whole thing from the floor, hungover and half-dead, our backs against the stained couch and the wall, trying not to make a sound.
The kids didn’t notice. They just held their bags open, greedy and bright-eyed behind their cheap masks, thanked him in those high little voices, and ran off to the next house.
And although the trick was shit – literally – our brains were smeared thin enough across the inside of our skulls that we found it hilarious.
We laughed until our ribs hurt, until one of us started coughing, until even the smell seemed like part of the joke.
The next year, we gave this tradition a name.
The Bagging. It just felt right. We were mocking the kids, and at the same time, we were dying of laughter when they came back pounding on our door.
I think the second year we slipped worms into the bags, wrapped up in the foil from chocolate bars we’d already eaten.
Or maybe it was cigarette butts and loogies. I can’t quite remember.
What I can say for certain is that the preparation for that ritual always began days before the kids poured out into the streets.
We took it seriously, despite the sheer idiocy of the gesture itself.
Thinking about it now makes me uneasy in a way I still find difficult to name, but I could swear that my feelings back then were clean; maybe too clean.
And because of that, they were easy to soil.
Once the stains appeared, they were hard to scrub off. Not only from me, but from all of us.
We rented a single-story house in Akron, Ohio, for next to nothing.
I was first there. Before long, Jeff moved in – the guy who had come up with the whole idea – and we got along pretty well.
He was an oddball, as I said, but he had a way of slicing through our everyday misery with quotes, verses, and little jokes delivered so subtly they almost felt artful.
Even when there was nothing in our lives to laugh about.
He taught me how to survive on little money, or no money at all.
He taught me how to steal, how to order a hamburger, and bolt at the exact moment of exchange, hand already closing around the paper bag while the poor bastard behind the counter was still wishing me a nice day.
Back then, they didn’t have those fancy screens yet.
Everything was done face to face, which meant you had to look innocent until the last possible second, and then become faster than shame.
A hundred times, fast-food workers chased us across parking lots and down alleys while we ran laughing with paper bags in our hands, steam pouring out of them into the cold like something was breathing from them.
Afterward, we would eat with a kind of triumph, chewing slowly, almost ceremonially, convinced that the meal had been earned through nerve, wit, and speed.
Jeff was a survival mentor of sorts, though he would have hated hearing it put that way.
Something about him always made me think he came from people who had not lived very differently; people who knew that the world was a locked pantry, and that hunger was as good a key as any.
Then Melissa arrived, running away from a boyfriend who used to beat the shit out of her.
When I first saw her, I could not tell which wounds had been left by him and which she had carved into herself.
Even if she had been drenched in blood, those green eyes would still have stood out. I remember them still.
She showed up on a wet afternoon with a trash bag full of clothes and a split lip she kept touching with the tip of her tongue, as if checking whether it still belonged to her.
Jeff had found her somewhere, or she had found him; stories like that were never clean enough to have a single beginning.
She stood in the doorway for a while, dripping rain onto the floorboards, looking past us into the house as if judging whether our ruin was the kind she could live inside.
Then she smiled, and the whole place seemed briefly less dead.
There was nothing soft about Melissa at first. Not in the way she moved, not in the way she smoked, not in the way she laughed when Jeff made some awful joke about our lives.
She laughed too loudly, almost violently, and that made us laugh too, though none of us knew if we were allowed.
Her face was bruised in several colors, yellow fading into purple under one eye, a thin red line near her mouth, and another mark hidden badly beneath the collar of her sweater.
But those green eyes cut through all of it as I said.
Even then, I understood that whoever had hurt her had failed to take the best part.
Or maybe that was only what I needed to believe.
She didn’t ask if she could stay. She just put the trash bag in the corner, sat down on the floor, and asked if anyone had a cigarette.
Jeff gave her his last one without thinking.
She took it from his fingers, lit it from the candle on the coffee table, and inhaled like she was pulling herself back into the world one dirty breath at a time.
After that, she belonged to us. Or we belonged to her.
I still don’t know which version is worse.
Finally, Aaron showed up. Back then, he still seemed like a normal guy, though from the very beginning, there was something about him that felt off.
His hoodoo pamphlets and occult crap didn’t appeal to me as much as I thought they would.
To him, everyone was a charlatan. If some junkies came by and started talking about LaVey, or even Crowley, he would laugh right in their faces.
He called that kind of reading kindergarten fare; those were his exact words.
He had a way of making even silence feel rehearsed.
Sometimes I would catch him sitting at the kitchen table long after the rest of us had passed out, sorting through little scraps of paper, matchbooks, bones from chicken wings, dead beetles he had found in the corners, things no sane person would bother keeping.
He never explained what he was doing with any of it.
If asked, he would only smile without showing his teeth and say that most people threw away the only useful parts of their lives.
Jeff thought that was hilarious. Melissa told him he sounded like a fortune cookie written by a serial killer.
Aaron didn’t laugh. Not really. He only looked at her for a second too long, as if the joke had revealed something about her neither of us could see.
The strange thing was that he never tried to impress us.
That may have been what made him convincing.
The others who came through the house, all those black-clad basement philosophers with their pentagrams, bad tattoos, and borrowed darkness, always wanted an audience.
Aaron seemed to resent the very idea of one.
He kept his little books hidden under his mattress, marked pages with cigarette foil, and wrote in the margins with a pressure so hard the words scarred through to the next sheet.
Whatever he believed, he carried it privately, almost grudgingly, like a sickness he was too proud to treat.
He also hated Halloween. Called it a poser’s holiday.
For us, every day was Halloween. We worked only as much as we had to – handing out flyers or selling bad dope so that we could get our hands on something halfway decent.
It was hard, mostly, but we got through it somehow, whether it was mere desperation or something more than that, I cannot say from this distance, but the feelings were clear, almost tangible.