If you thought Halloween was scary this year, you had very good reason to feel that way. And I’m not talking about the candidates running in the November elections, or the sneaky threats to our personal finances hiding in the proposed ballot measures.
I’m talking about wild animals. Zombie wild animals.
Here’s what I mean:
I had carved a really nice (and non-scary) Jack-o-lantern for Halloween this year, and put it out in the front porch, as a seasonal decoration and to let the neighborhood kids know that I’d be dishing out candy again this year.
When I looked outside on the morning of October 31, what to my wondering eyes should appear but the skull of my Jack-o-lantern, with its face completely eaten off, and its brains devoured.
This really happened. I’m not making it up.
All these years, since Zombie movies and TV shows began to assume insidious control of the American entertainment scene, I believed that Zombies were merely the fictitious (and overused) invention of unimaginative screenwriters. I never, in my wildest nightmares, thought that Zombies really existed.
My wildest nightmares have come true.
To judge by the teeth marks left inside the skull of my Jack-o-lantern, I am guessing these were Mule Deer Zombies. My neighborhood is currently overrun by normal, ordinary Mule Deer, and of course, it’s hunting season. I’ve come to the conclusion that, somehow, a certain number of Deer have been murdered by ruthless hunters (from Texas and Oklahoma, probably) but never harvested, and these murdered Deer have somehow evolved into pumpkin-eating Zombies.
That’s my theory.
Anyway, it kind of ruined Halloween for me this year. The neighborhood kids had apparently taken notice of the half-eaten skull on their way to school, and were too scared to knock on my door that evening. So I had four pounds of fun-size Snickers bars left over that I had to eat, all by myself.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.