A lot of things happened to you but I was only there for one of them. Fall, 1989, fully 20 years after the grisly stuff, maybe a little longer after Valley of the Dolls, a boy, not from my neighborhood, dressed as you for Halloween. He wasn’t what you’d call thin, no. Fleshy, maybe. Certainly fuller than you were in the photos I’d see later. Certainly not much of what you’d call a resemblance in a ratty wig and somebody else’s, probably his mother’s, shoes. Tissues balled up at the toe to keep those heels from slipping off, he wobbled up the steps of our development, because that is what we called the place we lived, a “development,” which, as you know, is also a word for growing breasts, this stranger with a pillowcase, floral, queen-sized, moving slowly from door to door, and no one, not even once, asking who he was supposed to be, so that in time, he stopped saying “trick or treat” entirely and simply, upon ringing the bell, announced himself: “Sharon. Sharon Tate.”

Alyson Mosquera Dutemple has an MFA from Warren Wilson College and is a fiction reader for CRAFT. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at Fiction Writers Review, Flock, Pigeon Pages, Emrys Journal Online, CRAFT, and elsewhere.

<<             >>