Halloween

                                                The better part of a decade ago, on
                                                    delicately recalling vague memories of a young dark haired widow
 residing down the other end of a dimly lit apartment hallway. Dingy, dusk-filled dreams of abandoned alleyways. Fetid city streets below echoed his name through her sordid subconscious, forgotten schoolyard idioms precariously dripped from blood red lips among spectral notions of rush-hour traffic, awakening late afternoon to the remote thud of a door slamming through her drywall.
                                         
                                               This particular evening happened to be her first Halloween alone in several years, on mounting three flights of stairs out onto an outdoor landing, she lit a cigarette and vacuously stared
                                                 out onto a whitened
   October courtyard where thinly layered sheets of invisible ice remained torpid beneath soft downy drifts of fallen snow.  Exhaling heavily, her bleak reasoning and futile resistance to night's inevitable apex, she will be involuntarily drunk and intolerable. Stiffly pouring herself a dry cocktail, she pursed her lips before a bedroom mirror, determined not to be alone upon returning. This year she decided against her friends consultation to go as a whore to her work's annual costume party.
                         Couple hours later, feeling lightened and
                                     deeply involved in her getup, set her mascara down upon a varnished dresser-drawer, lasciviously sidled to her front door to greet an expected visitor. Two youngsters, the taller one, a  poorly dressed dracula mumbled "trick or treat", looked down to his younger brother, arrayed in a head-to-toe spiderman outfit, reached out an opened paper bag in unassuming silence. The woman sardonically looked to the older brother gloating "what about him, does he talk?", then maliciously directed her attention to the younger boy, lifting her voice, "huh, what about you, do you talk ?" A soft audible dribble made its way through the boy's costume "trick or treat". Astonished, the lady taken aback by the child's innocence, as a double-edged sword sliced to the marrow of her soul, "oh" she replied and went to reach on her table from a dish of candy, quickly dispersed the treats to the two boys, swung her door shut and plummeted to the carpet in convulsions, sobbing, "great, I'll have to redo my face" sniffling, as she arose and ambled back toward her bedroom.