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Lower Voices
Lower Voices A Hallowe’en Tale by S.K. Orr There it came again. Soft, but intentional, like a breath exhaled with measured force, or a hand across the painted wood of the clapboards at the back door. She paused at the stove, the spoon motionless in the stew like an oar in calm water, opening her mouth slightly so that she could hear better. Whissss. Her head came around with as much slow and deliberate control as she could manage. Through the window, she could see the early evening woods marching up the hill towards the eastern pasture, and some sort of bird flitting from branch to branch in the bare…
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All Hallow’s Eve
I remember dragging shopping bags through the damp grass, bags filled with Halloween candy, praying that the bottom of the bag wouldn’t give way like it did on my cousin Debbie that one year, and how she lost all her candy in the weeds outside old lady Hutt’s house, and I didn’t care, because I never liked Debbie anyway. I remember wearing my costume to school, and how my breath condensed inside the cheap plastic mask, and how scary and powerful I felt when we prowled the streets in a mob of ten or twenty, back before the idea of vandalism or violence had ever crept into our minds. I…