Pumpy's Stain

A sad & offensive Halloween story (really just an anecdote)

by

Tommy Kovac

            Pumpy was a white-ish pumpkin.  He had always been pale and sickly.  Lying in the pumpkin patch with his orange brethren, Pumpy was shunned and ridiculed.  The more robust, darker pumpkins called him "Whitey" and "Puny."  Pumpy wished for the sweet release of a rotting pumpkin death.

            One day, children flooded the pumpkin patch, picking the pumpkins they would use for Halloween Jack-o-Lanterns.  Pumpy watched the others being chosen, and sighed in resignation.  Candy corn and foil-wrapped chocolates rained down amongst the twisting pumpkin vines, and the raucous laughter of the children

made Pumpy cringe with shame.

            The pumpkins on either side of Pumpy were joyfully lifted and carried away in loving arms.  Pumpy felt the chill of loneliness.

            Soon, Pumpy was the only pumpkin left on his side of the patch.

            Then a strange voice came to him:

            "Mom-MEEEE!  Look... at dis one.  It all white... like... ghostie!"  A tall girl lurched toward Pumpy.  Her hair was yanked up into yarn-tied pigtails, and she was much too old to be wearing the child's skirt she had on, which barely covered her panties.  A smear of brown chocolate adorned her drooling mouth.

            Pumpy understood she was a "slow" girl, and felt a resigned kinship with her.  Sometimes the other pumpkins had called Pumpy a "Retard Pumpkin." 

            The slow girl scrabbled at Pumpy's pale skin with her sloppy, clumsy fingers.  She chortled and gabbled nonsense in her excitement.  With a lurching heft, she scooped Pumpy up into her arms and stumbled away with him.  Pumpy noticed she was wearing a hat with furry cat ears, and she had a belt strapped around her waist with a furry cat's tail dangling from the back. 

            The slow girl's parents bought Pumpy, and took him home.  Pumpy tried to make the best of the situation.  He knew he should have been happy to have been picked at all. 

            Halloween night, the family carved out Pumpy's head, and emptied it of the stringy, sticky fibers and seeds.  The slow girl was afraid of the goop, and cried and screamed until her mother gave her a pill.

            Pumpy felt suddenly lighter, but confused.  His insides hurt where they had been scraped raw by the big spoon.  With all his insides pulled out, he almost forgot he was Pumpy.

            "What about the seeds?  Should we roast them and eat them?" asked the mother.

            "No.  This pumpkin's seeds look green and strange.  We'd better not." replied the father.

            The father carved a ghostly face into Pumpy's empty skin, and after that, Pumpy really couldn't remember his name.  He kept telling himself he was a pumpkin, because at least that much he could remember.  So much of him was gone, carved away...

            The slow girl grabbed a stubby candle, and dropped it inside of Pumpy, upside down.  She stuck her hand inside of him and tried to right the candle.  Her clumsy, shaky fingers couldn't do it, and she began crying again once she realized her hand was covered in pale pumpkin slop.

            The father righted the candle and set it afire.  Pumpy burned through the night on the front stoop, whispering to himself, "I am a pumpkin.  I am a pumpkin.  I am a candle.  No, I'm a pump-  I mean, I'm a...  I'm a...???"

            Pumpy's world became just the warm flame, and the fibers turning slowly brown, then black.  Smoldering as children raced by dressed as witches and monsters, and characters from television shows...  A boy dressed as a monster with dripping fangs and bloody fingers shouted, "Hey, look at the gimpy white pumpkin!"

            Pumpy's consciousness kindled briefly.  "Pumpkin!  That's what I am!  I am a pumpkin..."

            But the flame ate away his thoughts, burning, burning...

            The family forgot to blow Pumpy's flame out, and it burned late into the night, eventually setting fire to Pumpy's insides.  The fibers slickened with smoke, turned black and foul.  The eyes collapsed into the nose, which slumped down over the mouth...

            By morning, there was only a vile greenish stain where Pumpy had been.

-the end-