November

It was November and the sky had been replaced by an empty gray void. The leaves had fallen. The wind blew them around, and men with loud tubes over their shoulders blew them further still. Some snow had fallen and ice had formed on the streets and sidewalks. Driving through the neighborhood, I could see the endless porches populated with rotting, deformed pumpkins, and the yards dotted with no longer useful political yard signs. I’m not sure they were useful in the first place, actually, along with the pumpkins for that matter. It’s an autumnal habit, I suppose, of participation in the social and civic sphere. Put some lawn signs up to show who and what you believe in, and put some pumpkins out to show that you recognize the passing of time, the fact that the season, now, is something called “Halloween”, and that you’re supposed to put pumpkins and simulated dead people out in your yard.

I never thought that much further about it until I noticed the pattern. Something was happening and no one seemed to notice. Driving along as I do, having relunctantly assimilated to the mainstream lifestyle, I am prone to fix my attention on the drivers passing me by going the opposite way. I watch them to see if they are looking ahead or gazing down at the phones on their laps. Of course, many of them are looking down, and I usually mumble some derogatory insult, or if I am in an animated mood, I honk my horn at them and shake my finger in their direction or shout an angry warning to them. My attention to fellow navigators, that some would call overzealous but I found it perfectly reasonable, was now bearing witness to some other kind of inexplicable act then driving while scrolling through Instagram posts.

People were frothing at the mouth, eyes rolling back in their head. Occasionally, and with increasing frequency, they were vomiting into their laps, no doubt all over their precious phones. Oh God, I thought, the opioid crisis. It’s spreading. For, unfortunately, I had become accustomed to seeing slumpers; junkies sitting on bus stop benches, on lawns and sidewalks, heads lolling around, their ultra-relaxed back muscles barely holding their torso upright. So, now, I thought, they’re actually driving through the neighborhood, middle class Subaru and Prius owners, shooting up while waiting at a red light, the lure of the phone screen no longer stimulating enough to escape their blueprint liberal lifestyle.

But the smell of the rotting pumpkins was becoming stronger. It filled your nostrils as soon as you left the house in the morning. I wondered if maybe there was something to that. In October, the squirrels start their winter preparations, which means gathering acorns from wherever they can find them. This leads to a lot of darting back and forth across the streets, more than usual, if you care enough to notice. They are stockpiling, and I’m sure it is known as the time of year in many squirrel families when a couple of beloved relatives don’t make it back across the street. Now, however, the frantic darting sprints had been replaced by wild zigzagging jaunts with no rhyme or reason. And the smell of rotting pumpkins grew stronger.

Finally, after a couple of weeks, even the news reporters started to catch on, as motorists continued to drive off the road, crashing into trees, frothing at the mouth, blank looks on their faces as they stared out into the empty gray void that had replaced the sky. Public health officials and medical researchers, as well as SWAT teams and armed forces regiments were dispatched to the neighborhoods, searching for the cause of this horrible phenomenon. The cable news channels were afire with theories; Russian nerve agents spread through the air from undetected drones, or else a liberal plot to kill people and cause mayhem in order to blame the government, being the most promulgated theories.

But no one could account for the rotting pumpkin smell. They seemed not to notice, as Thanksgiving was approaching and they all had pumpkin pie on their minds already anyway. A salmonella outbreak had recently spread throughout the region’s poultry farms, putting a pall on the thought of eating turkey for Thanksgiving, and thus placing the importance of tasty pumpkin pie even higher in the minds of the town folk. But slowly, all realized that even their beloved desert was going to be forsaken. The cause of the public health emergency was indeed the rotting pumpkins on the porch steps of all the residents who had left them there after Halloween.

The pumpkins had become infected by windblown spores originating from China’s multitude of plastics factories. As they rotted, the infection metastatized and the poisonous spores were re-emitted through the stiff November gales, helped along by a wind tunnel created by all of the political lawn signs that had been left behind along with the pumpkins. The squirrels, accustomed to an energizing breakfast of raw pumpkin before a long day of stockpiling acorns, had helped to spread the disease. Now, half the town was dead or in critical condition, and the rest of us locked ourselves indoors for the foreseeable future. Prisoners were furloughed and outfitted in hazmat suits, paid a dollar an hour to go through the town and collect all of the pumpkins to be destroyed in a huge burn pit out by the airport.

The political lawn signs were sprayed in a dissolving foam that just left two slim little aluminum spikes sticking out of the ground, the messages of better times to come melted away by the toxic spray. Thanksgiving came and went, with nary a turkey or pumpkin pie to be had, although many folks shared pictures of their “season to remember” mashed potato creations on their Instagram accounts. I heard that the “Korean Street Mash” was a popular hit. By the time Christmas came around, things were starting to get back to normal.