Haunted Hayride by Frank Possemato

I’m in line for the haunted hayride. Tracy was supposed to come with me but she stayed home to correct essays. We went together last year and it wasn’t easy for her to pass on it today; only at the last few hours did she back out and said, it’s okay if you go by yourself. It’s a long line. I feel like I’m going for both of us. And I really don’t mind the wait. The wait is easier when you have no one else to keep interested, when you can notice and drift and imagine on your own. It’s mostly kids and families and dates all more patient than what’s got to be a thirty, forty minute wait deserves. Haunted attractions make excellent dates especially if you’re not scared but she is. I listen in on a couple discussing last year’s hayride and comparing it to this year’s. It seems like they’re already been here this season:

“Last year was more, I don’t know, atmospheric. This year is more about making you scream.”

For a moment hearing a grown adult say this, I wonder if this ride could actually be frightening. Up till now I never suspected it could be—  I remember years ago, when I was a little kid and my parents took us to Castle Island, when they had haunted Fort Independence and some kid in front us in line said, and I quote, “This better be scary. This better not be, like, an ant saying ‘boo.’” Me and Joey got a lot of laughs about the idea of an ant saying boo. 

But tonight at the hayride it’s certainly atmospheric. It’s almost dark and almost cold, there’s a vague burning smell in the air and the sense that everyone feels it. The autumn, the hayride, the spirit of being alive and outside in the woods.

I’ve got time so I call Tracy to tell her about the line. At the end of the three-minute call I tell her I love her. We usually end calls that way, even the shortest ones. Tonight it hangs in the air in the space between my mouth and the phone.

We’re getting closer; the hay wagon is now in sight, but I doubt we’ll get on in this round. These things must fit more than I thought because it’s filling up and the line is shrinking. A scarecrow holds up one finger to ask me who I’m with. I hold up one back and he lets me on.

The small and big families, the friends, the couples I’d seen in line now spread out in the back of the wagon, sitting on straw. I take a choice spot by the back against a stack of hay. The driver looks back through a painted face and says, “We’re off.”

My ears fill with the sound of the wheels rattling, the horses’ harnesses chiming, and kids talking loudly to be heard. I can feel every stone we go over. As if by sonar, the size and shape of the rock – I can feel it underneath, smaller than my hand and yet pushing the wagon up and off the dirt road. It’s dark now; the line waiting to go after us fades into shadows. Girls giggle. 

I’m glad I’m here. I’m glad it’s night. I like the way my flannel shirt feels and how my elbow rests on the haystack. This is what being alive feels like and when death is less distant and scary. I like watching the little kids jump at nothing; we haven’t even seen anything yet, maybe a few crooked signs on some knotted trees. These are the normal sights and sounds of night made different by expectations of —

And then a wolfman jumps on the back of the cart. He clicks his heels, crawls and hisses and the kids scream that high-pitched waterpark scream. It’s fun to them and no one brought a baby who might take this literally. The wolf crouches right in the face of a boy, who’s leaning hard into his mother’s lap, scratches the air in front of him, hisses and leaps off. The boy opens his eyes; he’s gone. He and his mother look at each other; they smile, exhale; she jumps as we go over another rock. 

The wagon goes through a haunted village complete with zombies and screams from second floor windows. It goes past a pond where a swamp monster of some sort plunges from the “deep” and shakes his fist at the intrusive riders. It goes past trees that are almost bare with shadows you can almost see moving in and around and above them.

We get boarded a few more times. Some of the riders freak out just the same but now there’s a couple taking pictures and the mother and son from before are more smiling than screaming.

Near the end, in a grand finale of sorts, we get raided by a little of everything: a witch, her apprentice, a scarecrow, a couple more werewolves. 

One of the wolfmen, while everyone else is busy being scared, reaches out to me and in his hand is a dirty, Big Gulp soda cup.  “Hey throw this away. Will ya,” he says, looking right at me. Then he howls and leaps off the back of the wagon.

The werewolf just told me to throw trash out for him. I’m sitting there disbelieving and still holding the used cup when I pick up a scent. I’m not sure what it is, something about the woods at night but it reminds me of being in New Hampshire with my brother and my mom and dad. Growing up lucky under the stars, the massive light of the moon, the true darkness with only my family’s voice making the woods safe to be scared in. I heard somewhere that memory is something like eighty percent visual but I’m calling BS. I’ve never seen a feeling. I don’t know what a memory would look like. I know it by the scent.

The wagon suddenly stops with a squeak of its wheels. We’re back already. I’m starting to like it here and I don’t want to leave. 

But, with the trash in hand, I get off the cart so someone else can get on.

“That was fun,” the kid says to his mother, running and looking back at her as she tries to keep up.

I agree. I call to tell Tracy about the werewolf and the Big Gulp cup but there’s no answer. There’s something in her answering message, a message I’ve heard a hundred times, although she’d only recently changed it, that sounded a little like how she sounds when she’s mad at me. The message is for everyone who calls (and doesn’t hang up), but I know that voice in a way the world doesn’t. I met Tracy almost nine years ago. She’s from Oregon and I’d never met a girl from there before. I used to kid her that the Northwest is holding out, that it’s full of roaming Sasquatches and the hottest girls in the country. And no one ever goes there, even the sports teams don’t want to fly there. It’s like Tracy seems to me sometimes. It’s expansive; it’s beautiful; it’s impenetrable. I used to be able to make Tracy smile more and a smile went a long way. Now it almost seems like we’ve made it past the smiling stage. I don’t want to think that. Two days ago, I asked her if she wanted to go out for a dinner with me, get all dressed up (not fancy, almost in costumes, in character and go out to a mystery restaurant of my choice, and no it won’t be Del Taco). She said, “We’ll see.”

It didn’t seem like the flirty kind of “we’ll see.” It seemed like indifference, or I don’t have time for these games or you don’t have to chase me like that anymore. My chain of thought gets broken by a villain darting out of the woods with a chainsaw. He gets close and then pulls off, a trick of the trade. Maybe Tracy isn’t impregnable. Maybe I’m just the one who’s more in love. It wasn’t always that way. And I gave up a lot for this. Behind me I hear the chainsaw villain startling every few passengers making their way from the wagon on the only road toward the exit. But there’s no hurry to leave: on the way out is a big, A-frame barn with a yellow light coming from it at the edge of the trail. Some patrons head for the exit, others go in the barn for one last scare.

On the way in, a character with a ski mask and a noose around his neck barks, “Hello” at the teenage girl right in front of me. Her scream is the best I’ve heard all night. Once inside there’s a candlelight glow and creaking floorboards; I think it’s a recording, these boards don’t look that old. Music plays but it’s more like a pulse, a heartbeat. An arm hangs out of a closet and I watch a couple with their son standing at the door waiting for the inevitable surprise. I look back up at the yellow torch-lit room. The knotty wooden walls a comprehensive map of the unknown. A map to freedom. Then behind me I feel a voice call.

“Hey, let me ask you a question.”

I turn around and it’s a swamp monster standing beside a ghost bride type.

“Do you know the name of that song. From the 80s,” the bog creature asks. “The one that goes like this: wo-oh-ooooo-oh-oh-oh-oh?”

“No. No. No,” the ghost bride adds. “It goes like this:

o-o-o-

oh                      woah

“woah oh

oh 

oh.”

They both stare at me expectantly.

Ghost bride is smiling and swamp creature is smiling if he could. Meanwhile, kids and couples are filing out, walking right past us, as if we’re not there. As if this were normal to be asked 80s trivia by the haunted denizens.

“Yeah, it’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ by Howard Jones.”

“I knew it,” the ghost bride says. “I knew you’d know it.”

“You should join us,” the swamp creature says. 

I ramble something about, ‘How do you get a job here, or who do I talk to about working here, or how much does it pay.’

“You should join us,” my haunted friend says, looking me in the eye as he backs out the front door. The swamp creature holds the door for the bride on the way out. And then I realize — it’s totally empty in the room. No more customers, no more monsters, the arm’s even gone from the closet door. When I’m about to go outside I turn, I’m not sure why, to face the room one more time. I lean my back against the wooden blocks of the door. And it hits me. All of it. The terror of everyday life. The employee login screen I can see in my sleep. The fears I swallow. How hard it is to find things me and Tracy both really want to do together. The picture of Jimi Hendrix I saw in some portrait gallery that was having a free exhibit; he’s never even been one of my favorites but he was younger than I was then and I haven’t set any guitars on fire. Like that, my life becoming something I don’t want it to be, but I blame it on doing it for others, but I think it’s me. All me. My hands sweat and I release my palms; a breeze from outside blows them dry then shivers me, opens my eyes. It’s not too late.

It’s only one step outside and the night greets me. Tracy had called and I missed it. And I see on the ground the cup I was supposed to throw away before. I have work to do.

Frank Possemato is a writer and teacher at Augusta University. He is the first generation of his family to attend college, and has taught at some of the nation's most diverse community colleges. He writes poetry and fiction, and is the bestselling author of How to Live an Analog Life in a Digital World: A Workbook for Living Soulfully in an Age of Overload. Frank loves having fun with his wife and young daughter, hanging out with his brother, and being outside. He grew up in Boston.