Kevin placed his freshly carved Jack-O'-lantern on the front porch facing the street. He gazed at the horizon, watching the sinking sun cast a glow on a few clouds overhead.
"Almost forgot," he said as he reached into his pocket and withdrew a short, squat candle. He lifted Jared's lid by grasping the stem of the pumpkin, which gave him access to the interior of the hollow gourd. He used a hand as a shield to block the breeze as he struck a match from a pack he had retrieved from the catch-all drawer in the kitchen. Once the match burned bright, he lit the wick on the cancel and placed it inside the pumpkin. He replaced the lid and stepped back to admire the glowing grin and spooky eyes on the face of his Jack-O'-lantern.
Jared had been screaming wordlessly the entire time, mostly calling his brother's name. He soon felt the growing intensity of the warmth from the burning candle that replaced the cold emptiness he had experienced since the carving session with Kevin.
"It's hot! Kevin, please, take out the candle!" The teenager-turned-pumpkin begged without words, without benefit of a mouth, other than the jagged one that his brother had carved with a sharp, cruel blade, onto the surface of Jared's thick rind.
Soon, trick-or-treaters began to arrive at the Webster home. Kevin assisted his mother with handing out treats to a variety of goblins, ghouls and other costumed kids. The wonder of the celebratory evening, however, was lost on the pumpkin as the candle's flame scorched and blackened the interior of the hollow gourd. Not exactly painful, but not at all pleasant, the heat reminded Jared of his utter helplessness.
As the night grew darker, and the last of the treats in his mom's big glass bowl were distributed, Jared pondered his future. He remembered how Halloween Jack-O'-lanterns rarely made it to Thanksgiving, turning increasingly dark and blotched as they rotted in the chilly days of November.
Unfortunately for Jared, he wasn't to last even that long.
Hours after the porch light was extinguished from inside the house, a car pulled to the curb. The impostor exited the vehicle, along with Jared's former baseball teammate, Cy Whalen. They laughed and spoke loudly as they approached the porch.
Cy, attracted by the sputtering candle that had melted into a pool of wax inside the Jack-O'-lantern, hoisted the gourd into the air and turned toward the impostor.
"Hey, Jared," Cy asked. "How far you think I can chuck this pumpkin?"
The impostor knew the pumpkin was Jared, but he saw that someone had already transformed Jared into a hollow shell of his former self.
"He's not Jared," Jared tried to scream. "I'm Jared!"
"See if you can land it in the street," the impostor challenged him.
"No!" Jared screamed again. "No!"
More like a football player than a baseball star, Cy swung his arm and hurled the terrified Jack-O'-lantern toward the street. There was a loud splat as the soft gourd met the punishing asphalt, shattering into several irregular pieces. The candle wick sputtered, sizzled, and then was extinguished.
"I did it," Cy boasted.
The impostor walked back toward the street and pushed at some of the broken pumpkin pieces with his shoes. "You certainly did," the impostor agreed.
In point of fact, many a pumpkin met a similar fate that night at the hands of teenaged hoodlums, but none of them had once been a teenager cursed by the accident of contact with a bored, malevolent, albeit minor, ancient Egyptian deity.