"Yesterday and the Day Before" by Ed Gorman
Cemetery Dance's A Halloween Short Story ebook series
Readers unfamiliar with "Yesterday and the Day Before" by Ed Gorman may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.
"Yesterday and the Day Before" is a story that aims to get the reader conflicted. It's trick or treat night. Parents Elly and David can only feel a demolishing, helpless rage at the thought of it. Their twelve year old daughter Danielle, a target of bullying, recently committed suicide. Her chief tormentors will soon be knocking on the door, asking for their treats.
Halloween. With a stab, she remembered they could never find costumes large enough for Danielle. Elly always made her costumes by hand. The neighbourhood kids were especially mean to Danielle on Halloween nights. Finally, Danielle just stayed in, hiding in her room as she did so often.
As she reached her own block and saw the kids who had tormented her daughter—she could recognize them even beneath their costumes—she felt some of the rage that David felt constantly. Here they were out and enjoying themselves. They’d forgotten Danielle utterly. Life was so unfair sometimes. She thought again of the idea she’d been discussing with David recently. Maybe they needed to move. New city. New lives.
Two Freddy Krugers were washed by her headlights as she pulled into the drive. They didn’t move, just stood there boldly, glaring at her. She knew who they were, Ronnie Haskins and Bob Nolan, two of Danielle’s most relentless tormentors. She had an impulse to floor the accelerator. She could almost feel them crumpling beneath her car. How satisfying that would feel. How terrible they had been to Danielle.
Finally, they moved on the walk leading to her front door. They were trick–or-treating.
She pulled up the drive and into the two-stall garage.
The kitchen smelled of brownies. Freshly baked. For a moment, she let the scent carry her back to her Minnesota childhood. Her mother had been a pretty bad cook—there were a lot of good-natured family jokes about that fact—but her older sister Doris was wonderful in the kitchen. These brownies smelled like something Doris would have made.
“David? David, are you here?” But of course he was here. His car was in the garage. But he didn’t answer. For some reason, this made Elly uneasy. Even when he was at his most depressed, he answered her calls.
Elly walked over to the counter. It was a mess. Mixing bowl, Pillsbury brownie box on its side, half full quart of milk turning warm. And a small paperback book. She wondered what it was. The instructions for brownies would be right on the box.
She picked up the paperback, which had been flattened to pages 61-62. A sentence was underlined.
Swallowing or smelling a toxic dose of cyanide as a gas or salt sprinkles can cause immediate unconsciousness, convulsions, and death within one to fifteen minutes or longer.
Then she saw the small rumpled paper sack pushed far back on the counter. She looked inside and found the cyanide. It had been opened, used.
She knew what he’d done, then.
My God....
One parent, confronted with opportunity, finds they have feet of clay. The other cannot believe they themselves will fill the breach.
Gorman handles the topic with measured and restrained style, akin to the authorial voice Ray Garton employed in "The Man Who Killed Halloween."
Jay
