Now and Then
The moon is high, shining bright, throwing pale light over the darkened streets and roads. Joyful cheers of ‘trick or treat’ and low-pitched doorbells can be heard far and wide on this one night called hallows end.
Skeletons hanging by a hangman’s noose from the tops of trees and roofs. Bats hang from the branches and eaves waiting for the call of the night to begin. Rags roll on the rattling shutters, stained with the crimson colour of clotted blood.
As you look into the black void above, you can see the swelled super moon and distant stars hovering above your head. You can feel your shadow forming from the presence from it. It feels almost as if it’s piercing light is coming from across hundreds of different dimensions, simply to shine upon you and form this shadow on the ground.
As you walk past the abandoned mansion, you feel feeling of dread, a feeling of despair from the core of yourself. A sensation that we all know well, a sensation so primal, which we’ve known since the dawn of time. Fear.
As you watch the children mustering the courage to ask a door for ‘candy’, you ponder the point of all this, why, just why? What is the meaning of this all? How could something which is meant to celebrate the dead and the closeness of the two worlds, be turned into something which now only represents sweets?
While the sun rises in to the sky, shining a warm glow above all that the warm eye sees. This warm glow from the eye reveals all the reminisce of that which has happened the night before. The sun sees all the dead decorations, all the sticky wrappers and colourful litter, all the mess and disorder left behind, but no one is to be seen or heard from the colourful chaos below.
The streets, abandoned. The drifting toilet paper flows through the bare arms of trees and shrubs. The almost life like pumpkins now have now all but become wilted and rotten. Those that had last night seemed to sneer or smile, have now all become sloppy and sad.
As you slowly walk through the abandoned streets, you can see all the wrappers stick to the outskirt of your shoes.
The silence only disturbed by the pestering of birds and the silent roar of the rubbish men’s collecting machines. When the machines open their back hatches for the cluttered chaos, a tidal wave of mustering stench hits the very corners of your nose. While whole crews exit from the vehicles, to clean the chaos from last night’s events.
As you pass the once terrifying mansion on the hill, you can’t seem to clear your sense of a slight sadness as you see the once mighty building now crumbling to dust and rubble before your eyes, from the greatest killer, Time. Yet, now no sense of fear and terror which was once there, when you looked at the mansion remains, which now seems to all be due to the surrounding darkness, which now is light.

Current Grade: 34/40