Isobel Harper wakes to the dream. The images come back in her waking hours like still frames of cinema noir, the camera shots collapsing and superimposing upon each other:
 
A girl’s silent scream caught in the glare of a street light.
 
A man’s fist poised at a door.
 
Street signs streaking past a car window.
 
The toothless smile of a Jack-o-lantern.
 
Bare feet blurring across wet grass.
 
Two hands locked in a death grip.
 
Each time, the dream shots tumble out in no particular order. But the final image is always the same: two hands, suspended in time, over a kitchen table.
 
Isobel knows that the girl is her child self, Izzy. But the dream doesn’t tell the whole story. And it never will.
 

October 1956

Izzy watches the neon signs float past her mother’s car window. Her dad never came home for dinner, and they’re searching the parking lots. She hates it when he stays out late and they have to bring him home. He’s always in a tavern when they find him, and Izzy doesn’t like it there. The rooms smell like old cigars and spilled beer, and it’s dark in there with loud music playing. Tonight, she and her mom are making the rounds past his haunts: There’s Frank’s cigar store, which has a bar and serves sandwiches. And Eddie’s Tap Room with its pink fluorescent sign. There’s Freddy’s Pour House. And there’s another place, whose name she can’t remember, with a bowling alley in the back. 

 
When they find his car, Mom always sends her in. He won’t come out for anybody else, and even she has to wait for him. 
 
“Your dad’ll come out if you go in,” Mom says. And that’s true. 
 
Every time she walks in there, he hikes her up onto the bar stool, yelling, “Hey Frank. Look who’s here to see me.” Like it’s nothing to see a little girl walk into a bar in the middle of the night. Then he buys her an orange soda while he finishes his beer. Poor Mom has to wait outside in the car until he gets good and ready to drop Izzy in the front seat. And that’s on the good nights.
 
Tonight, Mom isn’t in the mood to fetch him. 
 
“Let him rot in there,” she says, as they spot his car in Frank’s parking lot. “We know where he is, and he’ll come home when he’s ready. Let’s go get a pumpkin.” It’s almost Halloween, and Izzy’s been bugging her for one. 
 
They drive past Frank’s and down Saint Paul’s Street to Wolanski’s market. 
 
“Hi Lenore. Hi Izzy,” Mrs. W. calls when they walk in the store. Izzy likes Wolanski’s. She usually hits Mom up for a comic when they go grocery shopping on Saturdays. 
 
They walk down the aisle to the produce section, surveying the pumpkins. There’s one with a perfect round head and a flat back that makes it look brain damaged. Another has a nice tall shape, but an uneven bottom that makes it list sideways. A squatty bulging pumpkin could be interesting, but the side of it is crushed and pockmarked with pumpkin acne. 
 
“There’s a good one.” Izzy points to the back of the bin. They have to call Mr. Wolanski over to heft it out. It’s perfect—not too oblong or too squatty, and no bad spots.
 
All the way home, Mom’s biting the side of a fingernail, looking at her watch. It’s almost nine o’clock when they pull in. No sign of his car in the driveway. Maybe they should go over there and get him before he gets too drunk and starts yelling things. Mom’s never been too handy with a knife, and she might wreck a perfectly good pumpkin. 
 
Not to mention the yelling.
 
Izzy’s lugging the heavy thing up the walkway and running the Jack-o-lantern possibilities over in her head. Maybe a hobo pumpkin with burned cork on its orange cheeks. Or a clown pumpkin with a goofy smile and sad eyes. 
 
Mom’s always been in charge of the Halloween costumes, but Dad’s the master carver and a source of endless pumpkin personalities. One year, it was a pirate pumpkin with a single tooth in its crooked mouth. They’d put one of Dad’s work bandanas around the stem and a black patch over one eye. Another year, it was a Popeye pumpkin with a sailor hat dangling off the stem and an old corn-cob pipe in the glowering slit of its mouth. They laid a can of spinach on the stoop, so all the trick-or-treaters would know who he was. 
 
She’s counting the minutes, and still no sign of Dad. Her stomach tightens, and she prays he’ll come home sober before Mom starts whacking at the pumpkin.
 
Mom hates knives. Izzy’s been pestering her for a bowie knife ever since she saw Davie Crockett at the movies. She got a coonskin cap for her birthday, which she wears all the time, but so far, no bowie knife. Every time she mentions it, Mom hollers, “You’ll cut your hand off with one of those things.” She’s pretty sure Dad’ll buy her one. He winks at her every time Mom starts screaming about it. 
 
She pictures Davy Crockett’s men, stabbing the soldiers with swords and knives, knocking them off the Alamo roof like rats. She loves the movies, and the westerns are her favorite. She’s seen Shane twice at the matinees. She loves the part where Shane walks into that bar, calls the gunslinger in the black vest a low down Yankee liar, then shoots up the whole place and everybody in it, except for Joey and his dog. She still cries at the ending: Poor Joey, yelling, “Shane. Shane. Come back.”
 
Mom’s pulling the butcher knife out of the drawer now. It’s bigger than the bowie knife in the movies. Mom’s been sighing at the clock ever since they got home, and now she’s looking jittery with that knife in her hand.
 
“So how do you start with this thing?” She holds it like a dead fish, clearly clueless about knives.
 
“You want me to do it?” 
 
“Absolutely not. You’ll . . .”
 
“Cut my hand off, I know.” 
 
“So, you cut the top off first, right?”
 
“Yeah. Dad makes a little circle around the stem first.”
 
“God help me. I’ll probably cut my hand off with this thing.”
 
Mom’s jagging crooked slits into the tough pumpkin skin with the dull butcher knife. When she pries off the top, an overripe musky odor fills the room. They lay the pumpkin on some newspapers, yanking out the strings of slimy seeds, shaking the slime onto the newspaper, and wiping their noses with the backs of their wrists.
 
“You gotta get all that wet crap out, or the candle won’t stay lit. Dad always uses a big spoon.”
 
Mom gets a soup spoon and begins to scrape big flaps of pumpkin and seeds out of the bottom and the sides. When the inside is smooth and level, they wrap the mess into the newspaper, throwing it into the garbage. 
 
“So what should we make this year?” Mom wields the knife like a magic wand. 
 
“I was thinking maybe we could make a hobo pumpkin.” Of the two Jack-o-lantern designs, this one’s her favorite.
 
“Hmmm. What would that look like?”
 
“Remember when you dressed me like a hobo for Halloween and put burned cork on my face and made me that bandana on a stick?”
 
“Oh, that’s a good idea. So we’d put the stick and the bandana next to him some way?”
 
“Yeah. We could prop it up against the house or something.”
 
“Good idea. Look in the drawer over there and see if we have any cork from last Halloween.”
 
She shuffles through the drawer. “Don’t see any—Got it. Here it is.”
 
“Okay, bring it over. We’ll burn it on the stove later. What should he look like? Happy or sad?” 
 
Izzy steals a glance at the clock, the chances of his coming home sober ticking down by the second.
 
Mom grabs a pencil out of the drawer. “Let’s draw the mouth and eyes, so we don’t make a mistake.” She’s an artist, so Izzy trusts her with that part. The carving she’s not so sure about. 
 
By quarter to ten, Mom’s drawn a pretty good hobo face with no intricate little bits to carve with that clumsy butcher knife. 
 
“Here goes nothing.” Mom presses the knife into the corner of the pumpkin’s mouth, the blade buckling against the thick hide. 
 
Izzy’s thinking about hand amputation, when the door opens, and she hears two loud stomps and a scudding on the tile floor. 
 
She peeks around the corner. Dad is falling into the door frame. He rights himself. 
 
“Heyyy Lennnore.” 
 
His speech is dead slow, his eyes glazed and menacing. He lurches around the door frame, holding on with both hands, then staggering past Izzy into the kitchen 
 
He spots Mom with the knife, then jolts backward toward Izzy. “What’sss that Izzz? Did you go out and get a pumpkin without your dear old daaad?” 
 
With every D of the sentence, spit flies out of his lips. 
 
“You don’t know nuthin’ about pumpkin carrrving Lenore. Get outta my way.” Izzy’s stomach clenches as each syllable dribbles out of him.
 
“Lemme show ya how it’s done.” He reels toward the butcher knife, but Mom grabs it out of his reach. 
 
“Willy, I’m not giving you this knife around Izzy.” 
 
He snatches her wrist with one hand. “We’ll see about that.” 
 
He drags her back toward him, twisting the knife out of her hand like he’s opening a pop bottle. 
 
“Willy, put that knife down. I said I don’t want it around Izzy.” She’s practically screaming now.
 
But he’s got it in his grip, waving it back and forth in her face like a windshield wiper, pounding out each word: “You-don’t-know-a-Goddamned thing-about-carving-pumpkins, Lenore.” 
 
“Izzy. Get-out-of-this-kitchen-now.” Mom’s voice is steely, her eyes dead level. 
 
Izzy’s glued to her spot, eyes fixed on the knife in her father’s hands.
 
“Goddamnit. I’ll show you how it’s done, right, Pal?” He turns a dark eye back toward Izzy. She’s still glued.
 
He stabs the knife into the pumpkin’s eye. The blade bends and springs out of his hand, clattering to the table top. 
 
Mom lurches toward it. 
 
He twists his head sideways, pinning her wrist to the table knife and all. 
 
They’re stretched across the table, both grasping at the handle. 
 
Mom’s cutting him with her eyes, punching out every word in a slow flat monotone. “Willy-I-don’t-want-you-using-knives-around-Izzy. Now-why-don’t-you-just-go-to-b . . .”
 
They’ve both got hold of it now, slamming it from side to side like they’re arm wrestling with a knife. 
 
Izzy stares at Dad’s bulging biceps and the thin sleeve of her mother’s sweater. She knows how these things end in the movies. There’s always a winner and a loser. It’s never good for the loser. 
 
And the winners are always big strong men.
 
The howl that streaks out of her pierces her own eardrums almost to the shattering point. But her parents are locked in the grip of the struggle, and they don’t look.
 
She slams out the front door, bolting across the lawn and under the streetlight, her mind’s eye fixed on the frozen image of the knife in their hands. 
 
She’s seen the movies. In the very next frame, it will twist to one side or the other and come right down through the center of her life as she knows it. 
 
She’s screaming animal sounds now, staring into the streetlight, until the insides of her eyes glow red with the light’s after image. 
 
But the still frame of the hands is still there, superimposing itself over all the knives she’s ever seen in the movies, now falling in a fractured sequence: 
 
A woman pinned to a wall, her silhouette framed by a knife-thrower’s blades. 
 
A sword swallower, thrusting a blade down the gorge of his own throat.
 
A cowboy gasping his last breath, as a knife tears through his shirt. 
 
There are blades and blades, tumbling through the abyss of her fear. Until the streetlight fades from view, and the freeze-frames fall back into black. 
 
And now there is nothing but a smooth frozen darkness.
 
It envelops her as she falls down and down through the blackness, until there is only sound. 
 
Her scream has gone ragged, dragging down to darkness. It’s her voice—and not hers at all, soaring up from the center of a deep pinpoint of emptiness, piercing her ears with its ferocity and rage. 
 
Until it too recedes into the dark. 
 
She’s so far from that voice that it’s no longer hers. It’s a movie scream, rising out of that still image that has returned from the darkness—two hands on a kitchen table, a knife gripped between them. 
 
And now, not even the voice that is—and is not—hers can be heard. Her lips are moving, but there is no sound. 
 
And no her.
 

Fade to Black

Her eyelids are frozen as she struggles to open them. Images and sounds are tumbling in and out of each other: 

 
Her father’s face looming out from the grin of a Jack-o-lantern. 
 
Her own scream rising up from her mother’s mouth. 
 
Dad’s rant piercing through the loud music of a jukebox.
 
Mom’s stiff wrist bones rising beneath the blur of feet on dark grass.
 
And the raucous drumbeat of fists, pounding and pounding and pounding in a deafening cadence on a door. 
 
This is what wakes her. And when her eyes fuzz into focus, the frozen image of the hands is gone. All she sees is the policeman at the door and her mother standing just inside it with her apron on. 
 

#

 
When Izzy grows into Isobel, there will be an ocean of blackness between the streetlight and the knock on her parents’ door. 
 
Each time the dream comes back, she will try to remember how she got back inside or whose hands carried her in or held her when she got there. She will not recall where her father was when she woke to the sounds of a fist on the door and tried to speak but had no voice. And for years to come, she will wonder which neighbor or friend or stranger in a passing car summoned the officer at the sound of her screams.
 
For the rest of their lives, the three of them will never talk of this again. 
 
All that Isobel will remember from that final moment when the still image fades to black will be the fists on the door and the man in the uniform and her mother’s last words as she stood in the doorway, just before saying good night, and closing the door: 
 
“Everything’s fine, officer. My daughter was just having a nightmare.”
 
 
© Susan Hynds 2021