Vampire teeth are to a 10 year old boy as a whip and fedora are to Indiana Jones. He can get by without, but he’s so much cooler with.

Meditation is one of those things you learn to do when you’re sitting in a dark pantry waiting for your mom to come for a can of green beans so you can jump out and scare her. You hope she hurries because your fangs will only glow in the dark for so long. One of your rubber “gory gashes” keeps peeling and threatening to fall off, and the trickle of Vampire Blood on either side of your mouth is beginning to itch.

You can hear shuffling around in the kitchen. A clash of dishes in the sink, Geraldo Rivera buzzing dramatic on the little black and white set on the counter. Then silence. Silence. Si——-lence. It’s stuffy, so you crack the door just a bit to see if you’re all alone and gulp a quick, fresh cool breath.

“Wham!” The door flies open and mom pounces on you! “Yaarrghh!” Screaming, you bolt from your hiding place and tear around the corner and out the back door, not daring to look back until you are well across the backyard. Breathless and not a little freaked out, you dive beneath the picnic table under the big magnolia tree. There’s an old piece of canvas draped over half of it to make a fort. Now you catch your breath and think. Hatching plans isn’t always easy, but you’ve got fangs, blood, and Scar Stuff. You’re going to scare somebody. The smell of dried canvas and dust fills your head.

Nobody needs to know about what just happened, about the kid whose mother turned the tables and scared the everliving stuff out of him with one of her Niagara Falls screams. “Slooooowly I turned. Step by step I came…”

Shiver. Anyway, somewhere there is an unsuspecting kid who needs sneaking up on. You pop the little stopper from your tube of Vampire Blood, squeeze more of the red viscous ooze onto your arm and smear it around. Cool. This will trick somebody into believing you were just in a horrible bike accident, or that you got into a fight with a bear or a wolf – no, a werewolf next to the trashcans behind Mulineaux Funeral Home down at the end of the alley. All kinds of crazy things went on back there, and even though you admit that you’ve told a few long ones about the things you’ve seen, you still swear that one evening right before sundown you saw the gray old man wheeling Frankenstein* himself on a gurney up the ramp and through the back doors. Really!

You carefully replace the stopper and tuck the precious tube into your shirt pocket. Making slurping sounds through your fangs, you head out. Three bounds, touch the ground, three more, flatten against the wall of the garage. You hear someone in the alley. Girls playing. Creep to the back gate and peer through the slats.

Dried Vampire Blood pulls at your cheek as you play out what’s about to happen. Deep breath, unlatch the gate. Now!
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* Author’s note: Boys don’t make a distinction between Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster. They are one in the same, and the fact that there is an evil scientist named Frankenstein is simply accessory to the whole topic.
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Special thanks to The Imaginary World for the great pictures.

Category: Halloween