You will be remembered

When a tremor went off at midnight on November 1st, none of the costumes and props in Spirit Halloween suspected a thing. The skeletons were used to having their bones rattled, and the pumpkins had experienced a good shake or two. But Spirit’s ghouls and ghosts started to worry when the quaking did not dismiss but grew.

What was happening to their dear store? For a month they had enjoyed new friendships from all of Morningside Heights. Children rushed in to become superheroes. Students jumped at the possibility of wordplay-based costumes. Just the weekend before the shakes, hundreds stopped into the store for pairs of animal ears. Spirit was thriving – so why was the ground now opening up as if to swallow them?

Video game characters jumped off the walls as vampires flew to escape. But the doors locked were shut, and the tremors made it harder and harder to see and move. A loud crack shot off, the trembling floor threatening to swallow a display of hair dye. With one final quake, tiles started to shower. Costumes and props tumbled into a widening cold abyss. Powerful bursts of wind gusted up from the depths and juggled high-hanging masks off the wallss. Those which were spared the deep fall only fell onto the far floors, but they too would soon crumble.

From the frosty sinkhole beneath Spirit Halloween rose a gingerbread spire. Like a screaming herd of banshees, jingle bells ascended and hooked themselves to Spirit’s walls. The growing tower of Christmas spirit shattered steel beams and blew off the store’s facade, but as though held together by magic and cheer, the building remained upright.

Reindeer came up like bats from hell, towing a brand new sign to hang along Broadway. In a final blow against Halloween, the Spirit storefront now read, “Merry Christmas.”

Alas, poor poo via Ana Rael and Youngweon Lee