I.

Release the Fu dogs, stone lips stretched in a snarl. Jangle the chimes and prepare the grave offerings: oranges bursting with the sweetness of summer, and paper money, burnt and acrid. Fix the toilets inside the house—hungry ghosts who roam the earth beneath the autumnal moon are drawn to stagnant water like ants to sugar. But we never performed these rituals. We were trapped in the boreal forest, cut off from the homeland. When I was a child, my father tried to fix the upstairs toilet. In the morning, the bathroom echoed with the clang of tools against porcelain. Days later, his rusty wrench lay on a dirty towel in the hallway. I know now that my father could never finish a project. My childhood was haunted by dishwashers that leaked on the hardwood, and a cold concrete basement filled with predatory arthropods that moved like the serpent as it slinked out of the Tree of Life. Perhaps that is why we could never keep the malevolent spirits away—the ones that possessed my father, giving him the strength to tear my mother’s nightgown off her body in frayed pink strips. He was closer to his demons than to his family.

II.

Maybe that is why my father loved Halloween. One week before the big night, he laid newspapers on the hardwood floor. Propping his reading glasses on his nose, he sketched precise lines on a pumpkin: wicked eyes, a triangle nose and the slash of a grin. He then gutted the pumpkin with a knife, tearing the flesh like the fabric of my mother’s nightgown, before depositing the slimy entrails onto the newspaper and folding it into a neat square. Next to the door, he laid out the treats. “Sort these,” he told my little sister. Her hands grouped one bag of Lay’s chips, one chocolate bar and one candy wrapped in cellophane crinkling with promise. When the children came, he deposited the treats into open pillow sacks, smiling at their exclamations. On a green Post-It note, he scratched a tally of the children. As we grew older, their voices faded until one Halloween, he said, “There weren’t so many this time.” Years later, I asked my sister what she thought of those nights. “You know what the scariest thing about Halloween was?” she said. “It was the only day of the year that Papa was happy.” On that night, the demons outside outnumbered the ones inside him.

Lacey Yong is an emerging Chinese-Canadian writer. She writes creative nonfiction and is working on her first YA novel about airships. Her work has been published in Prairie Fire and Lammergeier. Instagram: @lacey.yong. Twitter: @lacey_yong