all souls' day

Recovering from Halloween - I woke up in the afternoon to a cold, golden-grey All Souls' Day. The scent of firelight and rich smoke lingers on my clothes, a faint aftertaste of intoxication in my mouth.

We scrambled through the woods by flashlight-beams, arrived at a bonfire on the edge of the night. Someone dressed as a pirate stood over the blaze like the leader of a ritual, smashing an empty bottle of wine over the rocks. A bunch of people ran up and threw glowsticks into the clearing, which stuck in the ground, neon markers in the darkness. The ones that broke open spilled over the leaves and brambles and dirt, glowing specks of color looking like scattered stars. Above the fire and the trees, the deep Halloween-veil of the sky was the same as the ground, cold clear stars shining brighter than anywhere else.

We checked cellphone clocks to see if it was still Halloween, but midnight had passed. "It's November," I said, almost reverently, imagining that the space-between-worlds had already shrunk. "Don't worry," said H with saucer-eyes, "it's Samhain."

K was wearing tin-foil antennae and kept saying she was from Neptune, where it's colder even than Halloween night. E left the bonfire and stumbled over rocks and roots to get back to the house, and when she sobered up told us never to let her do that again - "I couldn't stop thinking about coyotes." R was wearing a feather boa as a scarf as he slowly sipped another beer, sitting on one of the bonfire-rocks and talking in an even, reassuring voice. The rest of them were haphazard, woodland boys and girls with specks of neon on their clothes, talking and mumbling, laughing as the flames leapt up.

Halloween night was an enchanted place, a strange one, unsettling at first but then beautiful. Webby darkness and the pinpoints of stars, sharp smells and leaves rustling, rustling.