(1972) The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury

Bang!
    “J.J., this—Bang! From José Juan!”
    “Oh, this is the best Halloween of all!” said Tom.
    And it was.
    For never in all their wild travels had so much happened to be seen, smelled, touched.
    In every alley and door and window were mounds of sugar skulls with beautiful names.
    From every alley came the tap-tap of death-watch-beetle coffin makers
nailing, hammering, tapping coffin lids like wooden drums in the night.
    On every corner were stacks of newspapers with pictures of the Mayor
and his body painted in like a skeleton, or the President and his body
all bones, or the loveliest maiden dressed like a xylophone and Death
playing a tune on her musical ribs.
    “Calavera, Calavera, Calavera—” the song drifted down the hill. “See
the politicians buried in the news, REST IN PEACE beneath their names.
Such is fame!
     
    “See the skeletons juggling, standing high
    On each other’s shoulders!
    Preaching sermons, wrestling, playing soccer!
    Little runners, little jumpers,
    Little skeletons that leap about and fall
    Did you ever dream that death could be
    Whittled down so very small?”
     
    And the song was true. Wherever the boys looked were the miniature
acrobats, trapeze performers, basketball players, priests, jugglers,
tumblers, but all were skeletons hand to hand, bony shoulder to
shoulder, and all small enough for you to carry in your fingers.
    And over there in a window was a whole microscopic jazz band with a
skeleton trumpeter and a skeleton drummer and a skeleton playing a tuba
no bigger than a soup spoon and a skeleton conductor with a bright cap
on his head and a baton in his hand, and tiny music pouring out of the
tiny horns.
    Never before had the boys seen so many—bones!”
    “Bones!” laughed everyone. “Oh, lovely bones!”
    The song began to fade:
     
    “Hold the dark holiday in your palms,
    Bite it, swallow it and survive,
    Come out the far black tunnel of El Dia de Muerte
    And be glad, ah so glad you are … alive!
    Calavera … Calavera …”
     
    The newspapers, bordered in black, blew away in white funerals on the wind.
    The Mexican boys ran away up the hill to their families.
    “Oh, strange funny strange,” whispered Tom.
    “What?” said Ralph at his elbow.
    “Up in Illinois, we’ve forgotten what it’s all about. I mean the dead,
up in our town, tonight, heck, they’re forgotten. Nobody remembers.
Nobody cares. Nobody goes to sit and talk to them. Boy, that’s lonely.
That’s really sad. But here—why, shucks. It’s both happy and sad. It’s
all firecrackers and skeleton toys down here in the plaza and up in
that graveyard now are all the Mexican dead folks with the families
visiting and flowers and candles and singing and candy. I mean it’s almost like Thanksgiving, huh? And
everyone set down to dinner, but only half the people able to eat, but
that’s no mind, they’re there. It’s like holding hands at a séance with
your friends, but some of the friends gone. Oh, heck, Ralph.”
    “Yeah,” said Ralph, nodding behind his mask. “Heck.”
    “Look, oh, look, look there,” said J.J.
    The boys looked.
    On top of a mound of white sugar skulls was one with the name PIPKIN on it.
    Pipkin’s sweet skull, but—nowhere in all the explosions and dancing
bones and flying skulls was there so much as one dust-speck or whimper
or shadow of Pip.
    They had grown so
accustomed to Pip’s leaping up in fantastic surprises, on the sides of
Notre Dame, or weighted down in gold sarcophagi, that they had expected
him, like a jack-in-the-box, to pop from a mound of sugar skulls, flap
sheets in their faces, cry dirges.
    But no. Suddenly, no Pip. No Pip at all.
    And maybe no Pip ever again.
    The boys shivered. A cold wind blew fog up from the lake.

Along the dark night street,
around a corner, came a woman bearing over her shoulders twin scoops of
mounded charcoals, burning. From these heaps of pink burning coals
firefly sparks scattered and blew in the wind. Where she