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” Are you awake Gladys? ” Mrs. Bowman my roommate whispered to me from the darkness.
It was gloomy and a little chilly in our little house that we have been sharing for about a month now, my family were young and had moved on without me . It sounds awful, but if you want to know the truth it was a relief.
I didn’t like the music my family listened to and Fiona Bowman’s husband and son are in prison for murder. She told me when we first met that she couldn’t get a wink of sleep knowing those two were out creeping around the neighborhood at night.
” What were they doing?” I whispered as if her son and husband could hear me from cells in the Supermax prison four states over in Colorado where in all probability they will die.
” They killed people. ” Fiona said so softly I could barely hear her. ” They killed them very slowly and then they’d bury them – what was left of them, in our field.”
” We grew pumpkins out there in that very same field and in the fall we opened up the field and we set up tables with cookies and hot apple cider and people would drive from miles around to pick their own Halloween Pumpkins. But if you want to know the truth, knowing what was buried in our field, well. I guess it drove me here in the end.”
I nodded in the darkness.
” I couldn’t tell anyone what they were doing, I knew of course. But I didn’t want to end up as scarecrow in our Pumpkin patch and I didn’t want parts of me feeding our pumpkins.”
She waited for me to say I understood, and of course I said I did.
You see, I know that Fiona she was eating one of her homemade Pumpkin Field Pies on the night she had her heart attack. She went heavy on the cloves she said and she used to love to savor each and every bite, so it would take her a half hour just to eat one small piece.
The thing about little old ladies who like to bake and speak softly and wear fuzzy slippers around their houses is that we look so harmless, blameless. Sweet even.
All the same, now just before I fall asleep I reach up and make sure the lid on my Coffin is locked and as I drift off I hope I don’t dream about pumpkins.
