Corpse Aristo stroll along pavements, bustles clogging with gore, as human heads roll down the gutters splashed red like autumnal leaves. A duke and duchess, heads inclined to each other in smiling conversation, hold parasols against the streetlamp’s sodium glare their children collecting their trophies in coal sacks.
Boots shining like beetle carapace and sharp mouths locked on bloody toffee apples young wide-eyed witches gaze around like babies at Mardi Gras. Their mothers are about charming locks and dragging boys from their beds, little faces frozen dead before they cross the door jam. They trust their offspring to skeletons who in the wider streets manipulate car alarms to punctuate their dances.
Laughter, violins and the blood beat of drums somewhere in the estates. None visit the home I sit on. I wish they’d not be so formal.
To the north fire blooms like a loved one returning home. Cheery orange waltzes from house to house, tongues of blackened brick and exploding glass beautiful enough even Aristos offer polite applause. The older spirits fail to acknowledge it as they always will.
The rooftops offer a wonderful view. I greedily suck in a lung full of wood smoke and cooking puppy fat. Such merriment, the bruised candy colours of entrails and skin draped in tree branches like festive bunting. Is it the same every year as some suggest? How can it be when humans spend so much time inventing new toys to play with?
Beyond the dome of light pollution monolith shapes blacker than night move with the glacier pace of beings long bored with flippant violence. Their ways are subtle lifting whole buildings with muscle corded arms and moving them like chess pieces a few feet to the left or right. Neat, correct, not a join in sight.
In contrast furry ball like Imps all mouth and leg destabilise a railway’s overpass. Each to their own.
Suddenly below me geysers crack tarmac and splatter upstairs windows with mud and water. A ballet they erupt into life along the street to the ’ohhhh’ and ‘ahhhh’ of passing Banshee. In a large square of grass pumpkin unearth themselves withered and exhausted but content with their work.
A full solid feeling lists drunkenly in my chest; it might be pride.
All too soon a clock tower strikes the hour. I count thirteen and clap my hands the echo travelling miles. There are some frowns but the tide of night is turning. The last pancakes are eaten, the last heads fought over, and my family sink back into darkness.
I wait, swinging my legs from the roof edge, always the last to leave. I notice some of the destruction sluggishly revert to normal, the universe balancing the books like a moody accountant...but only some.
What a pity is it that they’ll explained it all away when they wake. Child run-a-ways, shoddy council road works, teenage vandals; such imagination humanity has.
Dawn is sour to the east, curdled light finding my spot empty of life.
