Trick or Treat

By P

No bird sang and no crickets chirped. The birds had long fled south and the crickets were deep in their winter hibernation. The still night at the end of October was cold and dark, a preview of the winter to come. Here and there, the quiet cold was interrupted by the bright flashlights and raucous voices of the small knots of trick-or-treaters who braved the cold and dark and made their noisy way from house to house in celebration of the age-old holiday, Halloween.

Margo had taken her own granddaughter trick or treating earlier in the afternoon. The girl, exhausted and over-stuffed with Halloween treats, was finally in her bed fast asleep, still in her beloved ballerina costume. She simply wouldn't take it off and change into her pajamas. Her beloved face, now relaxed in sleep, was still smeared with makeup and gooey chocolate. Margo, an active woman nearing sixty, marveled at the enormous will trapped in such a petite, vulnerable 5 year-old body.

Most all of the trick-or-treaters had already come, shown off their varied clever costumes, claimed their candy, and gone. However, now, as in the past, the late night belonged to the teenagers, the next generation. What mischievous pranks would they think of this year?

Margo would give them one more hour before she herself went to bed. She sat beside her blazing fireplace, pulled her woolen shawl around her shulders, and tried to read. Interruptions had been frequent earlier but now they were rare. Despite her best efforts and the applied skills of the talented author, her mind wandered back to the lunch she had shared with her friends while her granddaughter was in preschool. Like many of her generation, Margo worried constantly about young peoples' boundless enthusiasm and poor judgment. She and her friends fretted about the undeniable shortcomings of the coming generation endlessly. So many young people thoughtlessly wasted their youth and health. However, Margo, unlike many of her friends, also admired their energy and daring, although she admitted it rarely to her peers. Only after a glass of wine or two, could she finally admit to her very closest friends that she did indeed feel a tinge of envy at their youth and prospects. All in all, though, she was glad that her daughter was no longer a teenager and had somehow transformed into a serious, responsible adult with a healthy, bright, and lovely daughter. In fact, her daughter and her friend were coming for dinner on the weekend. Margo thought of the years long past and past Halloweens, chuckling to herself. Her daughter had also loved her ballerina costume that her grandmother had bought for her.

After a particularly long, peaceful hiatus, the doorbell rang once again. Margo shook her head and wondered when or if it would finally stop. Hands on the armrests, she rose from her chair, grabbed a handful of candy bars and strode deliberately to the door wondering wryly what wonder of art or nature would confront her this time. She had seen witches, ballerinas, princesses, dinosaurs, and rock and roll stars. She had even seen a robot, a pirate, a baker, a hunter, and a cartoon mouse or two.

She readied herself as best as she was able for whatever might confront her, braced herself against the cold, and flung open the door.

She jumped back gasping! She staggered, almost tripped on the rug and looked again before her mind could fully process the image and accept the waking nightmare that stood before her. No cacophonous chorus of cheerful “treat-or-treats” greeted her. No unruly gang of wildly attired urchins bobbed up and down eagerly before her, casually shepherded by parents and older siblings.

Before her loomed a massive male, breathing heavily. His large frame practically filled her doorway from doorpost to doorpost and top to bottom. Crowned by a mop of unkempt, greasy hair, his scruffy, unshaven face was twisted in a sort of grotesque smile. His maleness was blatant. He was obscenely naked with his massive male paraphernalia on open display for all to see,

Margo gasped. She froze with fear. She thought to blink and perhaps the nightmare image might disappear. She could not move her eyes. With all her heart, she wanted to scream but she could not even breathe. She thought of her granddaughter asleep upstairs – so tiny and so defenseless. She knew that she must close the damned door and grabbed desperately for the doorknob. She should just grasp the damned motherless knob and slam the damned motherless door shut. Suddenly clumsy, she just couldn't close her damned hand around the damned motherless doorknob. At first, she couldn't even move her arm and then somehow she couldn't close her trembling, feeble hand around the motherless, suddenly elusive knob. She screamed silently at herself, "Close the damned door, Margo! This doesn't happen anymore! Slam the door! Slam the damned motherless door!" She felt more like a character in one of her own grandmother's tall tales rather than the heroine in a late night melodrama. But try as she might, she just couldn't close the damned door and interpose its sturdy oak panels between this monstrosity and herself and her helpless granddaughter Beth sleeping upstairs.

The male lurched forward, crossed the threshold, and actually stood with both feet inside her house. Margo stood paralyzed, like a bird ensorcelled by a snake or a deer transfixed by headlights. She knew with her entire being that she must somehow protect her precious granddaughter asleep upstairs, but her arms and legs just wouldn't move. Simply staying on her feet and not fainting dead away was an achievement of sorts, but she had no opportunity to celebrate her most modest accomplishment. She couldn't even catch enough of her breath to scream.

His gaping mouth was half-open and his thick beefy red tongue protruded oddly. She looked away in revulsion from his twisted, misshapen face. He was larger than twice her size. Involuntarily, her eyes trailed down over his thickly muscled chest and belly and then to his coarsely hirsute groin. His hairiness betrayed his tie to the bestial. His massive, gnarled sex rose rampantly as thick as her wrist and pointed obscenely at her face. His cock was a thick as her wrist and topped by a mushroom-like glans. A hairy fat ball sac poked out beneath. Her eyes recoiled again and she thought that she might be sick. She trembled visibly. Still, he did not speak or make any sound other than his noisy breathing. She felt suddenly faint. She wanted to run but her mutinous legs wouldn't carry her and struggled to maintain her consciousness. Thick, heavily muscled arms hung from his massive shoulders. Slowly and awkwardly he reached out towards her and she quailed. Margo stood absolutely motionless, literally frozen in terror. She was unable to breath, let alone scream.

Suddenly, a disgusting glob of viscous fluid spurted from his erect member and flew directly at her face!

Margo jumped out of the way with a quickness and agility that she had thought she long had lost. As she struggled to maintain her balance, both to avoid a painful fall and a more painful back injury, she heard a high-pitched voice call out pleasantly, "Trick or treat!" and then dissolve into laughter.

Only then, she looked back at the ‘male' and saw the thin thighs in peach colored tights, shaded with black marker to resemble a male's body hair, projecting incongruously from the thickly muscular torso. The legs were too short for the torso as well as too thin and the tights were not quite the right color. Now that she could see, she saw that the legs ended in small magenta tennis shoes instead of bare feet.

She should have known. Once males terrified women and nearly destroyed the planet. She had studied the Patriarchal Age in school. Every since the Revolution, males simply did not run about like this, terrorizing women. The Hunt and ongoing culling operations kept males to less than ten percent of the adult population. Those at large were carefully monitored and knew their ultimate fate should they manifest any slightest evidence of the historical male alacrity for violence.

Margo shook her head. The disguise itself simply did not stand up to close examination - at least not now. At first glance, though, it had been more than adequate. She looked again and saw a thin line of stitches that closed his belly. She saw the sharp lines of tiny stitches that demarcated differing skin tones of belly and groin.

Now Margo could put a name on it. “He” had simply smelled wrong. He smelled of wild flowers. She little to do with males of late, but remembered the males whom her mother kept in the pens on her ranch or thought of the young ones whom some of her friends kept at home, she had never encountered one who used perfume. Cleanliness alone was a seldom achieved accomplishment for males.

Margo then looked up again and saw young Phyllis, the teenage daughter of her neighbor down the street, lift off the heavy headpiece and laugh. Phyllis held a grotesque mask by its ill-kempt hair in one hand and a rubber bulb in the other.

Phyllis laughed until she lost her breath, her petite, fine-featured head surmounting the large, ridiculously muscled torso. She coughed and gasped to catch her breath. Her paroxysms did not conceal her beautiful cheekbones, which were the envy of her friends. "I laughed so hard, Margo, I'd have pee'd in my pants, if I'd have laughed any harder!" she admitted, shaking her neat pixie hair cut free of the odd shape imposed by the confining mask. A plate at the base of the skull had rested on the crown of her head and she had somehow peered out through the half-opened mouth.

Now embarrassed, Margo considered protesting that she had never been fooled, but decided that she was unlikely to be very convincing.

"You weren't the only one I fooled!" Phyllis explained, seeing the ambivalence on the older woman's face and trying to make her feel a little better. "Are you mad at me? Please, don't be mad at me. It's just Halloween!"

Finally, Margo laughed too. In truth, she was more relieved than angry. She had tried to look outraged, but she simply could not maintain her stern demeanor. Finally, she laughed aloud too. "Are you trying to kill a poor old lady? I almost tripped on my man-skin rug. No, Phyllis, I'm not mad at you. Just tell me whom else you fooled. I pray that I'm not the only one. Please,” she pleaded, “help me win back some self respect - please?"

Phyllis smiled with pure glee without a trace of uneasiness and pointed to the torso. She had worked hard to prepare this ruse. “Bozo and I fooled just about everyone.”

"Let me see your friend," Margo went on, now determined to share in the joke. She reached out her hand to touch the torso's nipple and bounced his erect member on her index finger. "He's really life-like!" she admitted. “What sort of plastic is this?”

"Don't hurt my feelings, now!” Phyllis pouted. “He sure cost enough. This is a real male skin, stretched over a styrofoam form. See! In good light you can see where they stitched up his belly." She ran the red point of her carefully shaped nail over the line of stitches. "If you look carefully where the bikini line would be, you can see where they sewed on his male apparatus. I don't think that my Bozo was the original owner." She shook her head in mock regret, then brightened. "He works well enough now with a little plastic plumbing, of course, and gelatin." She squeezed the scrotum firmly, grimacing theatrically with the effort, then milked the penis and pinched the glans to expel the last dribbles and show of what she was speaking. She rubbed her thumb across the pee hole and popped it in her mouth, "Gelatin! Vanilla gelatin."

"Here's a candy bar for your trouble," Margo grinned warmly, running her finger over the fine line of stitches. "No, here's two, one for you and one for your friend Bozo. Try that costume out on Ellen, next store. I hope that she's got her nitroglycerine handy. By the way, did you see where that gob of gelatin landed?"

" There, on your shoe. It'll wipe clean off without a mark." Phyllis suggested after a moment's uncomfortable hesitation. "Happy Halloween!" Phyllis jammed one candy bar in Bozo's partially open mouth and unpeeled the other. "Here, Bozo will hold it for me!" She turned and walked out the door.

Margo decided to allow herself an extra hour to calm down before trying to go to sleep. She returned to the comfort of her overstuffed easy chair beside the blazing fireplace and wrapped herself tightly in her wool shawl. She picked up her book and returned to her reading hoping to calm down before bedtime. She should really have known. Since the Revolution, males did not go about terrorizing women and children anymore.

She just couldn't believe it still. Phyllis had purchased that monstrosity in a store.

In her day, her mother actually kept a brace of males in the shed behind the house. She and her sisters took turns bringing them the leavings of the day's meals. You wouldn't believe the slop that they would eat. Her mom and sisters did all the slaughtering and butchering themselves. Her mother would have made her put down the male and skin him herself.

“This younger generation doesn't know how good they have it - buy him in a store!” Margo muttered to herself as she stood and went upstairs to bed.

Three pairs of unseeing eyes stared out blankly from three artfully preserved and mounted male heads over the fireplace. In the coming Hunting season, Margo and her daughter hoped to add a fourth.