At first, it was simply a pumpkin, growing in a sandy patch of ground, soaking up sunshine and drinking sweet rain. It was a pumpkin in the wild, not yet separated from its tether to the great Earth on which it grew. It was living the good life, unaware that a change was coming with the crisp coolness in the air and the lengthening nights.
One sunny fall day, change came. No more would the pumpkin bask in sunshine and wake to morning dew. Workers arrived with blades and severed the pumpkin from its strong green lifeline. They gently placed it into the harvest truck, mindful that pumpkins have tender flesh which, like that of all living things, will bruise if treated roughly.
As soon as the truck arrived to the hillside by the highway, the workers quickly, and ever so gently, tossed the pumpkin and others like it onto the ground, forming neat rows, much like those in which the pumpkin once grew. The pumpkin felt more at home, especially as the sun was still warm on its firm rind. People admired its warm color, too.
The woman had
sought The Great Pumpkin, but had not found it. She spotted the pumpkin with its deep orange skin and warty veins. Only five dollars? She picked it up, careful of its remnant of a stem. She cradled the bas-relief flesh close to her side, then stowed the unique pumpkin into a cloth bag. Soon, it was the belle of the ball at a carving party.
Carving?!? The pumpkin's rind was pierced repeatedly near its stem until finally the stem could be used to lift the separated circlet away. Pumpkin innards streamed down, entangled pumpkin seeds gleaming whitely in the sudden light of the afternoon sun. The creamsicle-hued inner flesh was firm and moist.
As the pumpkin was divested of its seeds and the stringy goop in which they existed, another woman was already at work on its companion from Burt's Farm. The pale, green-tinted skin had hidden a deeply orange interior, which was now being revealed by the deft strokes of the knife. A ghost kitty face was in the making.
What design would be carved into, and through, its flesh? The purchaser started with one design, but changed to better accommodate the quirks of the warts on this shapely pumpkin. Some slow cuts through the rind, some quicker knife scrapes to the spongy inner flesh, and the work was done. A rotund face with one eye open and one eye gone, wearing a crooked, narrow-lipped grin, now animated the pumpkin's surface.
And when the lights go out... Boo!
