Miss October 1976 by Kale Choo Hanson

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

​It started, as it always does, with a small movement. We sat at the dining room table, our heads bowed for grace, when I noticed it. Just beside my chair the tattered fringe of my mother’s hand woven Persian carpet lifted ever so slightly and curled over on itself. I slid my foot closer to my body as we said Amen.
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Then she began to escalate. There were the blonde hairs that fell across my shoulders and lap while I read, the sound of sheer fabric sweeping the floor as I scurried across the hardwood to get a glass of water at night, the single wool socks that never make it back from laundry. I hid my mother’s lipsticks because I knew she was using them. I could smell her perfume lingering on everything, the eyeshadows, the cakey translucent powder. I prayed my mother wouldn't notice. 

At school, Marcie from Spanish warned me about Artie’s, the old firehouse-turned-antique store in town. Things come home with you when you go there. And I’m not talking about the items you buy, she said. Other things. But when I decided to skip 6th period and wander through the unsteady stacks of yellowing books and walnut desks, I found her on a shelf between A Curious Farmer’s Field Guide and Best Baseball Stats: 2001--the centerfold page falling open to reveal her photo, the white lace, the barn setting, her eyes at half mast, her sheer skirt dipping across her lap, Miss October 1976. She wasn’t on a sketchy website, or hidden behind a group of snickering high school faces; she was published in gloss across three pages, elegant, proud. And I couldn’t leave without her.

But the haunting was getting worse. Small fires began to start in the basement, my father’s church shirts turned up shredded, boiling cups of tea tipped and fell into our laps. My mother had to stick a wooden spoon in the kitchen window frames so they wouldn’t slam shut while she cooked. On a night when Father Bard came for dinner he left the table to use the bathroom and after ten minutes tore down the hall and out the front door, his coat still swaying on the coat rack. 

That night, I knelt beside my bed and slid her from her hiding place between the pages of a biology textbook. Please stop, I begged, I’ll do anything. I don’t want anyone knowing you’re here. Just then, a draft moved through my bedroom, fluttering the captivating look in her eyes, and I understood. It all made sense. I knew why she was so agitated.

The next morning I rummaged through the box way in the back of the closet and found one of my mother’s wool hats, my father’s scarf, a thick pair of socks that were lined with fuzz. I folded them neatly and tucked them under the bed, next to the stack of textbooks.

There was silence for a while, and I laid awake each night, worried that she had left me. 

But I was wrong. The hauntings returned, but now, they were sweet. The trashcan nudged closer to the counter to catch a falling potato peel, our clothes already warm when we dressed in the winter, a soft hand on the shoulder when things got tough. I was relieved. Now, Miss October 1976 is there for me when I need her, perpetually smiling through deep red lipstick, her clothes slouching away from her body, her hair poofed with hot rollers, her thumb grazing her cheekbone. I admire her most nights. Take her out and gaze over her. I imagine her voice, her laugh. I’ll keep her forever. I’ll learn to be seductive in her specific way. She is everything. She was just cold.

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Kale Choo Hanson is a writer from Philadelphia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Peatsmoke Journal, Grande Dame Literary and Lunar Lit Magazine. She holds an MFA from Temple University and is working on her first novel.