A Plastic Halloween Skeleton by Mak Ralston

We hung that cheap plastic skeleton in the oak tree every fall like we always did. It wasn’t special. Dollar store bones, fake glow-in-the-dark paint, plastic joints that clicked in the wind. The neighbors rolled their eyes. My mom said it was “tradition.” My dad used it to scare me in a way that somehow made me feel safer. And then he went to war and didn’t come home.
After that, Halloween stopped being about candy. It became the one night I still felt like his kid.
The first year without him, I tried to pretend I was fine. I stayed in, skipped trick-or-treating, watched safe “scary” movies, and raided the candy bowl early. But when I went to close the blinds, I saw something outside the window. The skeleton hanging from our tree wasn’t plastic anymore. It was changing. Muscle. Tendons. Skin. It climbed down, pulled a sheet around itself, and stood in our yard. And it looked up at me.
It was my father.
He looked whole. He looked at me like he always did. And then he turned toward a light I can’t explain, something bright and wrong and beautiful at the end of our street. Before he walked into it, he mouthed the same words he used to say after every bedtime story: “See you in the morning.”
This is a Halloween story about grief, faith, and the kind of love that doesn’t stay buried. It’s not about jump scares. It’s about what it means when the dead come back to keep a promise.


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Midnight Scares - Fall Asleep to Spooky Storiesl
Candlight Classics - Classic Short Stories to Help You Sleep
Candlelight Romance - Fall Asleep While Falling In Love
True Crime by Candlelight - Drift Off to Dark Mysteries

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**While this is my voice, sometimes I use an AI cloned version of my voice because it helps with my dyslexia.