Pumpkin Past

“What’re you smiling at?”

“Huh?”

“You. What’re you smiling at?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. Or everything. You look really familiar. Have we met?”

“That’s the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard.”

“Nah, you look really familiar.”

“Well, I grew up in a field—”

“Me too!!”

“—and I was plucked from my vine and dropped amongst other pumpkins in a cardboard prison. Lots of jiggly, wide people moved past the prison. Some peered in. Some manhandled me. It was awful.”

“I hear ya. I hated my prison. It smelled like pee. And not friendly rat pee like out in the field.”

“I know, right? What was that smell? Anyway, I got picked up and now I’m here. How long you been here with your gap-toothed smile?”

“Aww, gap-toothed? Really?”

“Dude, you look like you have three giant teeth. Two up top, one on the bottom.”

“You don’t look like you have any teeth.”

“Yeah, no doy. Pumpkins don’t have teeth.”

“Now that you mention it, I don’t remember other pumpkins in the field having teeth, neither.”

“Either.”

“What?”

“It’s not neither in that context. It’s either.”

“… And just who gives a crap?’

“Sorry. Just thought I’d try and… never mind. You were saying? Bland, faceless pumpkins in your field? None of them smiling wide like a maniacal serial killer?”

“Nope, not a one. Then I get here a couple days ago… and it’s murky, but I still see flashes.”

“Like from a camera? A strobe light?”

“Not that kind of flash. Like, I’m having pieces of memory float around. I think I was attacked.”

“Oh.”

“I think I was stabbed!”

“Oh, Great Pumpkin!”

“Yeah, I remember now: I was stabbed, cut open, my guts were scraped out. It was humiliating!”

“But you’re still smiling. You’re smiling, you sick son of a bitch!”

“I didn’t like it. It was awful! But…”

“But what?”

“But, at night, I get this warm glow inside. And I feel okay. I think.”

“You think?”

“Dude, I don’t know. This is all very traumatic.”

“I’ll say. I wonder what kind of house of horrors we got here.”

“Have.”

“What?”

“You corrected me with that neither/either stuff earlier. Don’t say got. Say have.”

“I hope you get stabbed again. Or worse!”

“What’s worse than stabbing?”

“When I was outside that jiggly-walking-humans place, I would see their stuff. I saw on some of their things about something called pumpkin pie.”

“Oh! What?! What’s Pi? The numerical constant?”

“No, dummy. It’s food that the jigglies eat.”

“What the crap?! They want to eat us? That’s barbaric!”

“Tell me about it.”

“Okay. It’s barbaric: being eaten, devoured, hunted and slaughtered and baked into a numerical constant—”

“No, no. Stop. No.”

“I see someone familiar. She’s coming this way.”

“Who is she?”

“I didn’t catch her name as she was gutting me. But she’s got that glint in her eye and that knife in her hand. And… she’s… right… behind you…!”

Word Count: 491