Rake Tine Tear

There's a Halloween he remembers. He had gone as a gypsy with clip-on danglers swinging from his lobes. Cis was Frankenstein's monster in a musky second-hand fedora and orange polyester sport coat. She wore green tights under her denim cutoffs and had fixed real bolts to her neck. She cahlumped after him the whole night, slowed down by their dad's heavy-soled cowboy boots.

It was a house he'd raked leaves for. He led Cis down the alley to the spot where the slab of shrubbery walling it in broke down dead. She knew it, too, from her paper route. The house was too big and too dark so she'd hold her breath and go, sprint-paperlob-dash. She wouldn't stop until the next house, the one with a porch light. She'd stand there a minute, sucking down the throat-scrapingly chilly air. It gave her a jiggery, ants-marching sound in her ears and the dark got even blacker, creeping up at the edge of her vision. 

They tentatively scuffed down the loose gravel path to the compost shed. Henry lifted up on his toes to flush out the little key hidden in one of the troughs of the corrugated tin roof. His belly stretched out of the cracked elastic waistband of the thrift store skirt. His skin glowed pale like a moonstone. He could've just a well broke the flimsy padlock, but he liked the proprietorship of the key. 

Inside-all those crumbling leaves he'd collected. The air was thick with the kind of dust you could feel in your lungs. It looked solid when the moonlight hit, like he could have cut out a chunk to take home. 

He picked her up, the light little slip of her. "Throw me high, Hen," she said in a voice barely restrained to a whisper. He tossed her. She shuffed into the pile, bounced like on her bed a t home. He crunched in and flung leaves like tissue paper out of a gift box until he dug down to her upturned face. She was laughing, choking back the sounds as best she could so they wouldn't get caught. On her feet she took a few dancing steps, like she'd tripped on something, then bounded outside. "Again!" she whispered.

"Oh, shit." He doesn't remember exactly what he said, but that was probably it. On her green tights he saw red ribboning down one leg like a Christmas package, the fabric and the blood both running from the rake tine tear in the meat of her thigh.  

"Higher this time," she insisted.

"Oh, shit," he'd probably said again. They told anyone who asked it was a part of the costume. Cis hadn't cried, hadn't really even winced, so no one caught on.