Hello, it's me, Lily, a frog, wishing you a happy Halloween. I'm wearing my Halloween costume.

How about a Halloween story? There is a little town at the edge of things called Shadowick. It is a small town. It has small streets with small houses and a

tractor store that used to sell tractors, but doesn't anymore.

And at the edge of the small town is a farm.

There is a for sale sign on the farmhouse.

The sign is crooked and sun faded, and the windows of the farmhouse are all boarded up.

Nobody lives there. The apples in the orchard just dropped to the ground and turned to mush.

Nobody eats them, but the bunnies and the birds

and the coyotes and the worms.

At the edge of the Shadowick Farm is a boneyard, which is a place where the bodies of old cars and trucks and tractors and bicycles go to rust in the rain and snow.

Their doors hang open and sometimes squeak in the wind.

Their wheels are bent.

Anything useful in the boneyard has long since been unbolted and carried away.

In the back seat of one of the rusting cars with busted out windows,

there's a round divot in the cracked upholstery where a dog

used to curl up and sleep on long road trips. One day, when he felt too tired and too old to make his way back home to the farm,

he went to the boneyard and curled up in his usual spot in the car that had stopped running a long time ago.

And he turned into a skeleton there.

Don't cry for him. He didn't need anything that he didn't have. He was at peace in the

sunniest spot in the boneyard. He would have stayed there forever, curled up on that backseat, with the sunbeams and spiders for companions,

no one knowing he was there, but for one stroke of Halloween magic. A crow flying overhead dropped a pumpkin seed near the

rested o' car. The pumpkin seed landed in the muck where it sprouted and turned into a pumpkin plant.

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