Halloween, Shaker Heights, 1992 by Thomas Price

Michelle wasn’t thinking about her little sister as she crossed Euclid Avenue that evening. She wasn’t thinking about trick-or-treating or her lazy costume, a black fright wig and bloody lips. She wasn’t thinking about her mother’s repeated nagging, to always keep an eye on Chrissy while collecting strangers’ candy. Instead she was thinking about Candice Bishop’s Halloween party. She was thinking about sneaking some more of her mother’s cigarettes from the pack in her purse and a few of her father’s beers from the fridge in the garage. Michelle was thinking about Monty Phillips, how he was going to be at the party, probably, about his supposedly big dick, how cute he looked in his letterman’s jacket, and how hard she cried listening to “November Rain” over and over because she loved him so much.

Michelle wasn’t thinking about holding Chrissy’s hand or the absence of the little smacks of Chrissy’s tennis shoes behind her. She wasn’t thinking about running back across Euclid to catch Chrissy’s arm and escort her to the next block. She wasn’t even thinking about her own tired feet, how the wet grass had dirtied her new shoelaces. Instead, she was thinking about how her little sister was strange. How she demanded a ghost costume made from an old sheet, how she turned her nose up at every department store option, plastic wrapped Disney princesses, all blue and pink glitter. She was thinking about how Chrissy was in for some rough high school years, how she didn’t even seem to understand the insults lobbed at her by other kids, and how it made Michelle’s heart break a little. How she sometimes questioned why she was so mean to her sister. How Chrissy stood, awkward, on the opposite curb, one hand rifling around in her pillowcase, and how she was going to trip on the front of her costume again as she stepped down into the street, candy scattered and scraped knees.

Neither sister saw the speeding Trans-Am.

Michelle tried to not think about that moment. Tried not to think about it through family counseling, her parents’ screaming matches, the decision to name her youngest daughter Chrissy, her own failed marriage, choosing to buy Fruit Rings over Froot Loops, graveyard shifts at the shipping warehouse, weekday happy hours at a dozen dirty hole-in-the-walls, during interventions and seventy-two hour holds and court hearings.

She didn’t want to think about how she yelled at Chrissy to watch out, but it had been too late. That she should have looked at the car’s license plate as it sped away. That Chrissy’s sheet had wet orange leaves stuck to it. That ambulance sirens sounded far off like they would never arrive. That she found one of her sister’s shoes and held it for her all night. That it was the same Halloween, no matter how hard she tried. That she had been yelling out her sister’s name for twenty-five years, hoping for a different result, but Chrissy always stepped down from the curb.

Thomas Price is a writer living in New Orleans, where he serves as an associate fiction editor for Bayou Magazine. His fiction has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, Inscape, and The Barcelona Review.