Pumpkin Water. ( Original short story)

I got to carve my first jack o’lantern of the season the other day, so I thought today’s monster should be thematically appropriate. Now I’m not sure if it really counts as a proper monster, but oh well.
Opening up a pumpkin is always a delight and I used to imagine all sorts of interesting things within them. One variety would be a pumpkin filled up with water. Sometimes I’d imagine the water as clear, other times ink black, but it was always cool, always with a scent like dust and smoke and the sickly sweet smell of jasmines and lilies.

Now this pumpkin water was special. If you drank a glass that night you would dream of one of your beloved dead. The first night it would be just a glance, but another glass the next night and you may have a brief exchange, another glass and you get a conversation, a touch, a kiss.
It made a certain kind of sense to my young mind. Pumpkins rising from the earth, tied down by their stems, it was like they were rising from the Netherworld itself. And they are a stable of autumn, of Halloween, of the dying year. So it only seems natural that they would be a conduit for the dead, a chance to see those who had passed on.

Of course the water was not without consequences. If you continued to drink it you would grow sickly and frail, thin and washed out, you would start to have trouble telling the world of the living from that of the dead.

You couldn’t afford to drink more than a couple glasses of this pumpkin water, and even then they would need to be fairly spaced out, no more than three in a month. Any more and the ill effects would start to set in. Eventually you would fade away, your body turning to dust in your sleep, your spirit having walked off into dreams and death.

Are you feeling thirsty? 

Image credits: Halloween cocktails on Google