by William Smithy

Created on: October 02, 2009   Last Updated: October 08, 2009

The Agonies of Shattered Dreams

and

Lost Bounties

The air was electrified that day on Halloween. Each gust of warm air from the Santa Anas sent a wave of energy through the eleven year old boy, while he was running around in his backyard, daydreaming of how much candy he'd haul in from trick or treating that night. If you're not a local from Southern California, the Santa Anas are storms of strong winds that come every fall and blow the roofs off of houses, brake windows, tear down cheaply made brick walls whose contractors skipped putting the rebar in, and fly homemade chicken coops around like kites, only to deposit them at the other end of the neighborhood. To say the least, it puts people in this weird mind state, almost like an energized dream state of some sort. People are half awake from being kept up all night from the winds howling, but somehow still alert and energized, it's probably from getting all that clean air. The wind blows all the smog away so one can see that they actually lived next to a mountain, where the day before it was disappeared behind a wall of brown haze or smog; both haze and smog are words that are debatable in the Inland Empire[1].

The air was warm and clean and blowing around 60 miles an hour. The boy could almost let himself fall against the wind and hang suspended in the air like he had summoned the help of some invisible spirit to keep him from falling. He ran inside the house and upstairs to his room where he had laid out three different pillow cases in front of him as to ascertain the one that could hold the most candy. For some kids Halloween was about having the best costume, for other kids Halloween was all about having the license to run around wild and break shit, for this kid, it was all about the loot he would haul in that night. The boy and his three other overachieving cohorts had painstakingly drawn up a map of routes they would take that night, an ambitious plan that included about three or four miles of walking from house to house for a grand total of about two hundred houses or so. They planned to hit one of the richest suburban neighborhoods around and they knew their plan would succeed, but like any insanely successful venture, it would beckon unto those lurking in the background, waiting to take their ungainly share.

As planned, the boy and his groups of ghoulish venture capitalist were taking in candy like foreign invaders that had recently conquered the land and had drawn up concessions stating themselves

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