The Horror behind Halloween, Uncle Jimmy’s Tree by Kate Axeford

Halloween is THE fiesta for Ghosts and every 31st October we join the crocodile of family grief. The remaining living members of the Bennett family trudging a solemn two miles alongside that fright of a road, the A22. Eight silhouetted figures shielding their faces from the be-dazzle of un-dipped monster eyes, ‘whoooooar-ing’ as speeding tyres careen through icy puddles or what we know now is termed ‘surface water’.

And each Halloween, the Bennett family will brave the gauntlet of cars, motorbikes, and high-sided vehicles in order to reach that special place where poor Uncle Jimmy met his early demise. We’re grievers, but we’re survivors paying homage to Jimmy’s Tree.

Uncle Jimmy’s Tree. A centuries old Oak, festooned in a rainbow of Pound Shop garlands. A garish display of love and plastic that will inevitably find its way into an ocean and survive considerably longer than the meagre twenty-six years saintly Uncle Jimmy was given to bless this earth.

Tonight we persevere, re-lighting wet candles plasticined into empty jam jars. We push drawing pins into unflinching bark, sticking grinning Uncle Jimmies as high up this arboreal shrine as the Bennett family can reach.

‘Oh Jimmy. Why did you do this to us?’

The A22 Death Choir. My mother has started the keening, my aunties will join in too. A cacophony of wailing, lamenting the poor choices their Little Jimmy made five years ago on that fateful night of the Bennett Family Halloween Party. A night when I was just twelve years old. The night when clean-living Uncle Jimmy swung his leather-clad legs over the back of a Kawasaki 125 and rode blind drunk into the very same Oak tree we are destined now to spend our Halloweens shivering beneath.

‘Oh Jimmy. Why did you do it?’

His sisters weep a harmony of grief, chorusing their question to the multiplicity of soggy, flapping photo-copied Jimmies. And tonight, despite a devil of a wind and the howl of traffic, I still hear the clinkety-clink of ice and feel that custard-fingered stickiness. I taste the gooey sweetness as the glug-glug of stolen Advocaat tips again and again into Mum’s mixing bowl adding more than a dash of spirit to the special Halloween drink I made for tee-total Uncle Jimmy.

Yet tonight, like every Halloween since The Accident, benign Uncle Jimmy smiles down at me from his tree. And perhaps it’s just the rain splattering tears from those unwinking blue eyes, but as usual his lips remain sealed.

Kate Axeford (she/ hers) lives in Brighton, loves the sea. She’s made appearances in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Ellipsis Zine, Janus Lit, Bending Genres and Splonk, S/L Bridport and L/L for Bath and Reflex Fiction. Find her @KateAxeford / @kateaxeford.bsky.social

Illustration by Harry Venning @harrymvenning  – www.harryvenninglive.com

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