Fiction Friday - The Best Time of the Year

For eleven months of the year, I live in the dark.

Not perpetual blackness. No. Every month or so someone lifts the attic trap door to come up and search for something. While they dig around in some other box not mine, light follows through the door and casts shadows all around. 

But it never lasts. Usually it's just me and the other seasonal decorations, piled into a couple of white tubs near the ladder. 

It's crowded in here. That's the worst part. 

One year, the plastic cauldron had been packed away without a proper cleaning. Maybe that was the worst. We had ants that year. It's a mistake the family hasn't made since! 

But eleven months hidden in the dark when all you want to do is make people smile, laugh, maybe scream with joyful surprise is a long time.

October is different. 

When the attic door opens, I know. They come right over to my side of the attic. My storage tub plus two more are carried down the attic ladder.

The hands that reach into my tub are big and strong. They lift me carefully, "Got him."

I know that voice so well.💗The one they call "Dad".

He pulls me out and holds me up. "There you are, old boy." He fluffs up my fur, flat from being pressed in a box all year.

I don't know why he calls me boy. I don't know why they call me him. I've never been particularly curious about it. I'm a wolf. Maybe that settles it.

Dad carries me downstairs. Actually, he wears me. With my head over his own, he descends growling. 

"Oh, for God's sake," Mom says from somewhere below. The humor in her voice makes me happy.

The boy comes running. He's getting big enough now that Dad doesn't have to squat for him to scratch between my ears. "Wolfie! Who's a good boy?" Dad laughs, and lifts me off to take me outside.

The sun is warm on my fur. I can feel the breeze moving through the porch, and I smell the leaves, mown grass, and some fresh hay. 

Much better than being packed in a crowded tub in the attic.

Three bales of hay form a low pyramid at the back of the porch. Dad looks at it, then steps up to move one of the bales a little. "How's that?" He sets me on the top.

Not quite. 
He takes me down again.
A little higher. A little to the left. Then back to the right.

Finally, he gets me exactly where he wants me. I always have a front-row seat for the best month of the year. Gardening gloves are propped on either side, making it look like I'm gripping the bale from behind.

Dad pulls a handful of hay loose and sprinkles some on top of my head. 

He steps back, nods. "Our Halloween mascot. Perfect."

The rest of the family has been busy. There are decorations all around us now. At the other corner of the porch, the skeleton is rocking in his chair. Fake spiders have spun cottony webs across the windows, helped by Mom. A whole circle of bats hangs above the front door.

And me. Dad's favorite. Their mascot.

Mom takes out her phone and snaps a million pictures from the yard.

A neighbor walking past stops and stares. A man coming up the sidewalk slows to scan the skeleton, then the bats, then me. He stops, points. Everyone talks. Everyone smiles.

Later, a few people come into the yard to look more closely.

One woman jumps when she notices me. Then she laughs. I love that.

The family laughs too. The son tells her, "That's our Wolfie."

Yep, that's me!

As the afternoon fades, the family goes inside and the lights come on. They blink orange and green around the yard and in the windows, making the webs glow and bat shadows dance against the siding. 

The sky turns a beautiful pink and purple before fading to full night. 

Finally when Dad locks the front door, he comes out and stands beside me, leaning on the hay bale to look over everything. Then he reaches over and drapes his arm around me. "Gonna be a good season."

He goes inside and the house goes dark.

I'm back. It is going to be a good season. It always is.

This story was inspired by my dad's favorite Halloween decoration when I was a kid: a giant wolf head that he wore, along with wolf paws, to give the older neighborhood kids a friendly fright from our darkened porch (after trick-or-treating hours). That wolf was just a footnote to our Halloween, so it was fun making this guy Main Stage! 

Don't forget I'm always open to writing prompts. Have an idea? Drop me a comment! 

Wednesday Poetry Corner: Enough

It is enough
To read without sharing the humor.
To see beauty without taking a picture. 
To sing a song no one will hear.

It is enough -
The sight.
The sound.
The joy.

It is enough.

One world is enough.
For me.
For you.
For each.

Or are we each one world unto ourselves?

Overlapping.
Interconnecting.
Underlying.

We. Are each. Enough.

(poem written by me on Sept. 29, 2026)

The irony is not lost on me that I wrote these lines about not requiring an audience while knowing that I would share it publicly. I'm not a poet. I don't know if it's "good" by critical standards but for me, it is enough to practice writing publicly. 

Coffee Klatch: Dark, Darker, Darkest

Last week I was in Cambodia. Not a country known for it's coffee, you might say. True. Now that I've been there, I'd put Cambodian coffee somewhere between Vietnamese and Thai. 

You know I LOVE Vietnamese coffee! But when I visited Thailand a year or two ago, I was distinctly underwhelmed by their coffee game. Not worth commenting on.

Cambodian coffee is strong. Super-strong, like in Vietnam.

But without all the bells and whistles of Vietnamese coffee - no sweetened condensed milk, no salted cream, no frozen coconut milk. Strong and black. Unless requested otherwise.

I wasn't mad at it.

Breakfast coffee overlooking the hotel pool.

A good wake-up jolt: Strong. Black. Dark. No fuss. Just coffee.

Very. Dark. Coffee.

…

Speaking of dark.

Mr. Dark.

Mr. Dark is the villain in Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. Guess what I'm reading right now?

Something Wicked This Way Comes was a repeated reference in The Dead Zone by Stephen King. I finished Dead Zone and wondered if there was a significance. 

There is. 
Of course there is! 
It's Stephen King! He's not known for being random.

I wanted to post something about the dark Cambodian coffee, and reading today I thought "Mr. Dark! Dark coffee! There's a link!"

And incidentally, the book itself is quite dark. 

Nighttime dark, attitude dark, dark deeds made my corrupted souls.

Dark on many levels.

...Dark like Cambodian coffee.

Fiction Friday - The Crazy Chicken

One day, a crazy chicken wanted to leave home. She waited until no one was watching and jumped to the top of the short wall around her yard. Then she jumped down outside! This was the real world! 

But outside the wall, she was in a street with many bicycles and motorbikes. They went past her too fast - very scary! Now she wanted to go back into the yard, but couldn't get to the top of the wall. 

What was this? There was a small break in the fence, so she rushed toward it! But it pushed her back out. She fell down onto the road, dizzy. 

Crazy chicken! 

(image by me)

This was the original Crazy animal story that I wrote for my Vietnamese lessons. Like The Crazy Frog from last week, it was based on something I actually witnessed. This time, while riding my bicycle on my own street. I kept it short and used very simple words that I would be able to translate. My teacher only had to help me with a few vocabulary words and some grammatical errors in the Vietnamese version.  

Wednesday Poetry Corner: Planning Ahead

Unpredictable
Sunglasses and umbrella
Bring both, just in case. 

(Haiku written by me September 12, 2026)

I spoke this haiku into my voice recording app as I was leaving the house one day. It's not a complaint! It's actually refreshing to know either could happen. I just like to be prepared. 

One day I didn't bring my umbrella because the clouds were just scattered around, and a massive downpour happened while I sat looking out at it from the restaurant.

When I post personal haiku, it's usually from the same day or the day before. But I'm traveling from the 22nd to 26th and wanted to be sure I have something ready to go up. If you don't read this until October, it's because I came up with one on the spot!

Coffee Klatch: Retro Edition

Americans tell harrowing 21st-birthday stories. By comparison, mine was pretty tame. 

Not "lame". Tame. I don't think anyone could beat it.

I turned 21 in the summer before my senior year of college. Since I worked on campus during summers, there I was in a Chicago suburb, with a few of my jazz band friends around. They took me out. (A tenor sax, a bassist, and... I want to say drummer?)

My guys knew their way around the city. 

We went to a couple of cool bars and lounges that had historically been connected to Al Capone. One was rumored to have a getaway tunnel built in. And I drank Irish coffees almost all night. 

I don't know why. It seemed right. 

Can't have been the only thing I had. Maybe a few white Russians or black Russians. My love of coffee was already deep-seated so any drink with coffee liqueur was worth trying.

What was I reading at the time?

I don't know that it ties to that particular summer, but I'm pretty sure that during the prior school year I was introduced to the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne via The House of the Seven Gables. (And a short story whose title eludes me.) 

Unfortunately, during that literature class I learned a trick that served me well ever after:

Don't read a book for class straight through. 

Hear me out: In college we all have mountains of homework. Time becomes scarce. Insisting on reading from wherever you left your bookmark will leave you in the dust. 

Instead, begin each night's reading at the start of the new assignment. 

That might mean not finishing the chapter your bookmark is in. That might mean skipping a chapter entirely. So during class, take copious notes during the discussion about the part you missed. You can get your class participation points by discussing the part of the assignment that you actually read. 

I can't say I loved The House of the Seven Gables as an assigned book. I did well in the class, though!

Years later, I read it straight through and - holy crap! - I loved it.

I read a couple more Hawthorne books, and he became my favorite of the New England Gothics. I even got to tour the original House of "Gables" fame when I visited a friend who lived up that way. But that's another story.

image source: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_the_Seven_Gables

For a Retro Edition, I should have a retro question, but my question is actually this: 

What author were you forced to read that you ended up enjoying? 

(Or, conversely, if you expected to enjoy the book, which one surprised you the other way and made you hate it?)

Fiction Friday - The Crazy Frog

Jasper had hopped his way up the palm tree to get away from the free-range chickens pecking in the dust. With a two-inch-long body, he wasn't worried about the smaller hens, but one rooster had been giving him a heck of a time.

He rested, panting, on a palm frond, while the oblivious rooster scratched around below. This rest couldn't last for long: the wind was picking up.

The tree wasn't very tall, and as his branch swayed, he noticed a narrow break in the stone wall of the nearby building. A window to shelter! He jumped through it and landed on a broad stone windowsill looking down into a dark room. 

It was quiet. 
It was out of the wind. 
It was away from the rooster. 

He jumped down to the floor. Time to rest.

Sudden bright light woke him. A giant had ignited a trio of suns in this room! Jasper was still as a stone. The corner he had fallen asleep in was not sheltered from the view of the giant, who was now sitting on a shiny white chair near him. Soon she rose and the swooshing sounds of rushing water came from the chair.

The giant took two steps toward him and bent close. Her mouth opened and closed a few times, but she walked away and turned off the suns. Safe, but only for now. Jasper looked around for a better place to hide.

Light was all around him when the giant returned. She ignored him, but Jasper watched in terror as two furry predators - worse than the rooster! - raced past him. The giant followed the beasts.

Wait...Past him?

Maybe nobody saw him hiding in his new spot by the sink. He relaxed again and pretended to be a rock. In the toilet room beyond the sinks, a Tokay gecko sang out, challenging the acoustics. Jasper heard a commotion as the Tokay stopped, then started again. 

Before he could get used to the gecko's song, the giant was standing over him, swooping a long arm at him. In a panic, Jasper jumped. The arm followed. He jumped again, but that was a mistake because one of the hairy demons swatted at him with sharp claws. 

No! He was down, and she was on top of him, gripping him in fang-filled jaws. He waited for the worst.

...but the jaws did not clamp down. She trotted through a door into another room. Aha! He could see plenty of dark corners to hide in, furniture to nestle beneath, if only he could get free. 

The bite-y animal scurried under a big bed, followed by the other beast and the giant, who couldn't get under it, but bent down to watch the spectacle. Then, Jasper was released. He didn't move. If I play dead, maybe she'll abandon me! But she was too smart. The fuzzy paw - claws hidden this time - tapped him a couple times. He couldn't take it and made a tiny hop. 

Then came the fangs again. Fangs, then claws or paws. Fangs, then paws or claws. Would it never end? 

Fangs. Paws. Giant!

Again and again, Jasper was caught, dropped, chased, and caught again. Finally, the giant scooped him up in a small white cloth.

In a panic, he leapt down to the floor again. His original tormenter immediately grabbed him by one leg. When she dropped him, back came the giant. Jasper was too tired to fight.

But what's this? The giant put him outside! Out of the house of doom and into the night. It wasn't the way he came in, but at least there were no roosters around. He caught his breath and assessed the damage: a few puncture wounds and one limp leg, but he was alive. 

Free at last!

Until... 

The tormenting devil came running out the door and dragged him back inside! Why the torture? Why not kill him and be done with it?

But it didn't take long for the redeeming giant to get him again. This time, she took him farther away, outside the gate beyond the house. He lay there in the dark, wondering if he'd ever recover. After a short rest, he began the long journey down the hill.

Limp. Hop. Limp. Hop.  

My crayon visualization of the event.

 

This story was inspired by an actual event that took place in my house this week! A few years ago, I started writing short children's stories based on animal adventures that I've witnessed here in Vietnam, as an exercise for my Vietnamese lessons. Usually I choose very basic vocabulary and then get my teacher to help me find any words I don't know. After that, I've translated the stories into Chinese with my Chinese teacher! None published, of course. This will be the third, but by the time I get it into Vietnamese or Chinese it will have to be much shorter and simpler.