This month, I wanted to highlight as many micro-horror stories as I could, but life got hectic, and I decided, to share them all individually today, on Halloween!
Happy Halloween!
Cempasúchil
by AP Thayer
The kitchen smells of anise and orange peels. Of marigolds and cinnamon.
I grind the golden petals along with the citrus zest before tossing them into the dough.
“¿Y eso?” Asks my mother, eyeing the bunch of cempasúchil on the counter.
“Something I had in Mexico City. Thought I’d give it a try.”
My dead grandmother scrunches her face in disapproval at the unconventional adding of the cempasúchil. The same face she makes when I use pinto beans instead of mayocoba. Her dead sister, the one who gave me nata spread over fresh bisquets when I was a child, rolls her eyes and smacks her sister’s ghostly shoulder, defending my choice. My mother sniffs, unknowingly agreeing with her mother. She can’t see the ghosts of our family, invited back to the world of the living by baked goods.
Not everyone in the family gets the gift.
At the kitchen table, my grandfather, the one who smoked a pack a day even as lung cancer was taking him, plays dominos with an unfamiliar older man. He has the family nose. A brother, maybe, or a great-great-uncle. Maybe his dad. Beneath the table, a Maltese mix who passed when I was six, eyes the tamales my nephews are eating, hoping for scraps.
“What are you staring at?” My sister asks as she wipes her kid’s mouths.
I smile.
“Nothing.”
She narrows her eyes, but her two boys are pulling her away, ready to go out trick-or-treating.
“Yo les llevo,” says my mom. My grandmother is already putting on a shawl. My grandfather and some of the other ancestors have found a bottle of tequila to pass around. My great-aunt slips an arm through mine.
“We’ll all go,” I say.
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A.P. Thayer is a queer, Mexican-American author based in Los Angeles who writes cross-genre speculative fiction. His work has previously appeared in Neon Hemlock anthologies, Uncharted Magazine, Loud Coffee Press, Made in LA, Dark Recesses, Space Fantasy Magazine, Dark Matter Magazine, Latine Lit, and more.
Public Domain Image: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/halloween-postcards/