Halloween Harvest: Holiday Anthology Series

By Holiday Anthology, Mark Leslie, Annie Reed and 10 more

Not content to merely thrill and chill readers, these eleven Halloween stories, edited by Mark Leslie, also enthrall, intrigue, disturb, and inspire. They tell of the people and traditions, the age-old rituals that send shivers down the spines of even the most up-to-date trick-or-treaters.

From a farm family confronting the slow death of their way of life to two dead people given another day among the living, the characters in these stories, both human and nonhuman, explore the territory between living and dying.

Settle in by the light of the Harvest moon, and enjoy this enthralling harvest hayride of reading pleasures and treats.

Includes:

"Day of the Living" by Annie Reed

"Huskie and Punkin'" by David H. Hendrickson

"Death Among the Scarecrows" by Tonya D. Price

"Buy Nothing Day" by David Stier

"Offerings for Wandering Ghosts" by Tao Wong

"Harvest Bride" by Jason A. Adams

"A Place at the Table" by Suzan Harden

"Under the Samhain Moon" by Barbara G. Tarn

"Still Here" by Stefon Mears

"Heritage" by R.W. Wallace

"A Feast of Souls Beneath the Gathering Moon" by Lisa Silverthorne

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Nov 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201951917

Book preview

Halloween Harvest

Halloween Harvest

A Holiday Anthology

Edited by

Mark Leslie

WMG Publishing, Inc.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Day of the Living

Annie Reed

Huskie and Punkin’

David H. Hendrickson

Death Among the Scarecrows

Tonya D. Price

Buy Nothing Day

David Stier

Offerings for Wandering Ghosts

Tao Wong

Harvest Bride

Jason A. Adams

A Place at the Table

Suzan Harden

Under the Samhain Moon

Barbara G. Tarn

Still Here

Stefon Mears

Heritage

R.W. Wallace

A Feast of Souls Beneath the Gathering Moon

Lisa Silverthorne

Also in this series

About the Editor

Foreword

If I have to be honest, I think my favorite holiday season is Halloween. I love going into stores and seeing all the creepy items hanging off the displays. I love the ghoulish mugs and the black make-up. I love the masks—the cover-your-entire-face kind, not the medical kind—and the costumes, and the fake spiderwebs. I love the orange and black cakes, with green severed hands holding onto the Happy Halloween scrawled in fake blood.

Yeah, Halloween is my season. But I don’t enjoy reading about it as much as I enjoy experiencing it. I read winter holiday stories, particularly those set in December. Which is how I came up with the Holiday Spectacular concept in the first place. I wanted an advent calendar of stories.

This year—2021—we decided to branch out into other holidays. We have already done a Valentine’s series, and this is our second. We had only one choice to edit it—Mark Leslie.

Mark does a great job of introducing himself in the (wait for it) introduction. He understands exactly why he was not just the perfect choice to edit this anthology, but the only choice.

Mark jumped right in to choose the best stories. There are ghostie and beastie stories you would expect for Halloween, but there are a few surprises here. He expanded this to include fall holidays, such as harvest holidays and the Day of the Dead.

This makes for a lovely, surprising read, with some scary stories and some beautifully heartwarming stories as well.

If you’re interested, you can find the other anthologies we’ve edited under the Holiday Spectacular series on WMG Publishing’s website, wmgpublishinginc.com. Or you can get the gigantic ebook compilations of Holiday Spectaculars #1 and #2.

Now, I’m handing this over to Mark. He’ll be your guide for the rest of the volume.

So, find your plastic pumpkin bucket full of candy, get some kind of pumpkin spice drink (or, if you’re a purist, something thick and blood-like), and settle in for a creepy, delicious, spooky read.

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Las Vegas, NV

Introduction

I wasn’t at all surprised when Kristine Kathryn Rusch asked me if I would be interested in editing the Halloween-themed collection of the WMG Publishing Holiday Spectacular. Halloween is, after all, my favorite months of the year.

No, that’s not a typo, that was deliberate.

Because I usually start celebrating Halloween mid-September and might just finish off halfway through November. There’s no reason why such a fantastic holiday should be restricted to a single day.

Of course, anyone who knows me might suggest I just pulled the wool over your eyes. Because, if you’ve ever seen the inside and outside of my home, decorated with numerous skeletons, and my home office, rife with multiple skulls along my bookshelves, desks, and bureaus, you know I never really stop celebrating Halloween.

Or, if not Halloween, then at least some of the ritualistic things that have long been celebrated in so many different cultures around the world at that special and often magical time of year.

Take skulls, for example. They can be used to demonstrate elements of Halloween, horror and the macabre, but also as a way to honor the dead, or even to promote eternal wisdom. In Latin American culture, where the skull has become synonymous with the Day of the Dead ceremonies, the skull invokes themes of individuality, remembrance of fallen warriors, and the transience of life.

People have been decorating with skulls by displaying them on shelves, floors, and benches in the Middle East as early as 7,200 BC. They didn’t start to appear in European culture until the mid 1300s, shortly after the Bubonic Plague killed nearly one quarter of the world’s population. The skull represented a type of Memento Mori symbol, representing a combination of the recognition of mortality, but also a celebration of making the most out of one’s relatively short time on this earth.

And, in the same way that the skull can take on a significance of the celebration of life, so, too can Halloween and numerous fall festivals represent such things. Because this season, which, in many ways is about the end of the life and the death of the growth that began the previous spring, it is also about celebrating the bounty of the harvest, and the mythical manner of the wondrous circle of life.

Perhaps that is why the fall season, and the many rituals and traditions that surround it have long captivated me. And I know that, through the eyes of the masterful authors you are about to experience, you, too, will be captivated. Whether the tale includes an actual historic tradition, or one made up; whether it is based on a geographic locale that we can either visit or might have been to, or is based upon a completely fictional one in a far off land or planet, they are all, ultimately tales about us and the traditions we cling to as we try to make sense of life and the mysteries of the universe.

You’ll be enthralled, intrigued, disturbed, inspired, and moved by these tales of the people and the traditions, the customs, the rituals, the habits, the patterns, and the self-reflection and discovery that results if you take the time to pause and to acknowledge such special transcendental moments in time. The way that these authors did, in order to bring these stories to you.

Just like the skulls that hide beneath the flesh of all of us, those moments are always there. And these authors so brilliantly bring those experiences, those ultimately all too human moments, into the light so that you and I can fully appreciate them in all their majesty, glory, and wonder.

---

Mark Leslie

Waterloo, Ontario

Day of the Living

Annie Reed

The story opens with two friends Dottie and Cynthia discussing their plans for an annual important day from inside an interestingly ironic long-term care facility setting. The opening may seem familiar, but the story is anything but.

This great premise comes from Annie Reed. A frequent contributor to both Fiction River and Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, Annie’s longer work includes the gritty urban fantasy novel Iris & Ivy, the near-future science fiction short novel In Dreams, and the superhero novel Faster. Annie’s short fiction appears regularly on Tangent Online’s recommended reading lists, and her story The Color of Guilt, which was originally published in Fiction River: Hidden in Crime, was selected as one of The Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016. A founding member and contributor to the innovative Uncollected Anthology, Annie can be found on the web at anniereed.wordpress.com.

As Annie so brilliantly explores in this story, life has rules, and so, too, does death. And, like life, it’s not perfect, but it’s what we do with it that counts.

Who are you going to be this year? Dottie asked.

Cynthia leaned back in her chair and stretched her tired legs out in front of her, trying to get comfortable. Always a losing proposition.

The two of them were sitting at their favorite table in the corner of Sierra Building’s dayroom. The tabletops had a few dings and chips in the white laminate from long years of use, and the chairs were cold, hard, molded plastic. Easy to clean whenever a resident had an accident, as the staff so coyly termed it.

Not that Cynthia or Dottie ever had accidents. Not back then, and certainly not now.

Haven’t decided yet, Cynthia said.

Dottie shot her The Look. You don’t have much time.

True. Outside in the world beyond the dayroom’s bay windows, the sky was starting to blush with the first hints of dawn. October 31 st. The day Cynthia and Dottie looked forward to each year even more than kids look forward to Christmas.

Only a few residents were up and about this early. The staff always left on just one small bank of lights in the dayroom at night. At midnight, those lights created a harsh pool of brilliance in a room deep with shadows. In the hour before dawn, when most of the world was just waking up, that harsh light softened into something that blurred the edges between light and dark, between there and not there, making everything, residents included, look insubstantial.

Mrs. Malloy, she of the amazing head of long, white, wavy hair, sat in a wheelchair near the dayroom’s television, her eyes fixed on the blank screen while she waited patiently for someone to turn the thing on so she could watch the morning news shows. Charlie Beach had shuffled in with his walker a few minutes ago and eased himself into a chair at the checkers table. Cynthia knew from long experience that he’d wait there for an hour or more before his buddy, George something-or-other (she never could remember the man’s last name), joined him. They’d play checkers all morning until the staff came to fetch them for lunch, then they’d come back again and play all afternoon until dinnertime.

What else did they have to do? They were trapped inside the walls of the Sierra Building just like Cynthia and Dottie were.

Except on October 31 st.

That was the one day in the whole year when Cynthia and Dottie could leave the confines of their building and go out into the world.

Cynthia just had to decide who she was going to be this year.

Maybe I’ll be Wonder Woman, she said.

She’d had fun as Wonder Woman. Seven years old with a brunette wig and a bathing-suit-like costume that made her look like a little-girl version of Lynda Carter. Thankfully no mask, not that year.

She’d never liked to wear costumes with those flat, plastic, cartoonish masks. Her breathing always echoed back at her, and she’d hated the fact that she couldn’t see anything out of the eyeholes except what was right in front of her. When she wore a mask, she couldn’t tell what kind of candy people put in her trick-or-treat bag. She couldn’t even tell if it was candy. She could have been thanking them for a piece of fruit (lame) or a popcorn ball (even lamer) instead of a Snickers or Almond Joy.

She’d had a lot of fun on Halloween when she was seven. That costume had brought in a record haul of chocolate.

Another resident appeared in the dayroom. A newbie. No gray hair, no wheelchair, no walker. Tall and muscular and somewhere in his twenties—a rarity for the residents of Sierra Building. Dark skin, dark eyes, and a dark attitude that radiated outward like a sudden blast from a cold front that brought snow in the middle of June.

The newbie had only been there a week, and as far as Cynthia could tell, nobody’d gone near him in all that time. She and Dottie certainly hadn’t. He sat where he always sat, at a table near the back of the room, glaring out at a world that probably didn’t make sense to him anymore.

You gonna tell him? Dottie asked.

Cynthia didn’t want to. She didn’t like talking to strangers, especially strange men, no matter how old they were.

Dottie could do it, but Dottie had given The Speech to the last newbie. Thankfully that had been years ago. That man wasn’t in the dayroom now. He always waited for dawn in what had been his room, sitting at the foot of what had been his bed, chomping at the bit for those first rays of sun on October 31 st to break over the horizon so he could go spend the day with his daughter and grandson.

I’ll do it, Cynthia said. The newbie clearly wanted to be left alone, and she’d be happy to oblige. But today was special, and none of them could afford to waste it.

Don’t have much time left, Dottie said again.

Cynthia hauled herself out of her hard plastic chair. Muscles that shouldn’t have ached did anyway, and she had to take a minute to make sure her knees would hold her steady. Her knees hadn’t been the first things in her body to give out, but they’d certainly been the most annoying. At least she’d never had to resort to a wheelchair, not even near the end.

I suppose I don’t have to ask who you’re going to be, she said to Dottie.

Her friend always went out into the world as the same version of herself. Slim and lithe and newlywed at twenty-one, with the memory of that first night of wedded bliss still coursing through her body.

Dottie beamed at her from a face lined with creases and dotted with age spots. You know it, girlfriend.

Cynthia never asked Dottie what she did during her day among the living. She didn’t really want to know. It felt like she and Dottie had spent an eternity together inside the confines of the building where they’d both died, but she’d never understood how her friend could stand to experience the world again as a newlywed, deeply in love with her husband, when she’d never be able to be with her husband again.

Have fun, Cynthia said. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

Dottie winked at her. Enjoy your chocolate.

Ha. Cynthia could almost—almost—taste the rich, bittersweet memory of eating herself sick on Almond Joys and Snickers and peanut butter cups the night she’d dressed up as Wonder Woman before her mom took the candy away to parse it out in small doses until Thanksgiving.

If she timed it right, she might be able to go trick-or-treating tonight with the little kids, the ones whose parents took them out before it got dark, and nab herself a little free chocolate she could actually eat before the sun went down and her day