My Inner Goth's name is Hestia. She thrives after the sun goes down: in the lengthening dusk, or silent midnight, her little dark spirit flickers like the last guttering candle end in a sootblackened candelabra, her impression in the mirror gazes back at me in shadowy reflection, her pallor streaked with the silvering of the old glass.
Surely her Halloween might be better spent: a kiss in the graveyard, a picnic on a gravestone, summoning shades in a gloomy parlor somewhere. Instead, she'll be with me, trailing behind a noisy, happy, clattering herd of small costumed children. She'll adjust the little black veil on her hat, and wipe the kohl tear-tracks from her cheeks, reciting, sotto voce
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk...
As I step on Skittles, flung behind the revelers, as my boot heels crunch on watermelon Jolly Ranchers, and catch in the elastic thread of abandoned plastic drugstore masks...
...but if you should catch sight of me, across a crowded street, and call to me "Hestia!" I'll raise a languid hand in greeting...
sterling candelabra, from Grandma Eva, on our Victorian organ, a wedding gift from my dad to my mom
