Blood-Stained Feathers on Halloween
Happy Halloween, my friends. For those of you who have been reading Absurd Anecdotes for a while, you know my dad should have probably been arrested years ago for the intensity and borderline criminal nature of his pranks. One of his most cardiac tickling pranks was committed in the late evening of Halloween night in 2002. My dad was supposed to arrive from work at 7pm to take my brother and I trick or treating. Alas, it was 10:30pm and my brother and I were in our room nervously playing with our Yu-Gi-Oh cards in an attempt to drown out my mother’s wails and the occasional burst in to our room: “Tu papa! Have joo heard from tu papa?! Ayyy dios mio!!!!”
After four hours of hysteria, two fatalistic calls to 911, and 50 “SOS! SOS!” messages sent to his beeper, we still hadn’t heard from papa. But we heard something else. The swoosh of a single feather, squeezing through the broken screen of my bedroom window. Then, another feather. Then, a handful of crumpled feathers, many of them with bloodstains on them. My brother and I didn’t know what the fark was going on, but I hadn’t felt fear this crippling since watching the Exorcist for the first time at a sleepover with my best friend the year prior.
We fled out of our room shrieking for our mother, who was still on the phone with 911 trying to convince them to bypass their typical protocol for launching a missing person investigation.
Mom: “He ees meesing!!! He ees suppose to be home more than 3 hour ago! He is probably kidnap! THEES is jor job, plees carajo!!”
Police: “Ma’am…are there signs of danger? Foul play? And you said…3 hours? Not 3 days right?”
Mom: “JES! I send “SOS CALL ME” on his beeper, he does not call me for 3 hour!!!”We jumped around the kitchen, frantic and surely forever traumatized, showing her the feathers that fell in to our room. She shooed us away, but we kept pressing on until…
Bang!
At that moment, the front door flung open, and a man wearing white feathery wings, a cheap looking, glittery halo, and a white suit burst through the door, tossing a pile of feathers in the air (they fell with a plop, probably not the intended effect).
It was my dad (dressed as…an angel?), shouting “halleloojah, the angel is here! HalleloOoOoOojah!” in his thick Peruvian accent. Upon seeing it was him, my mom’s face turned from panicked to pissed, then she bolted in to her room, shouting a poetic string of expletives before slamming the bedroom door.
My mom didn’t talk to my dad for a week after that. My dad turned to us, laid a bouquet of flowers he had behind his back on the couch, and said. “Joo want to trick or treat?”
A few years ago, I remembered this incident and realized I never quiet understood the reference. So, I asked him what that was all about.
“Oh…we got in a fight that morning. She said I was being a bad example for you and Pablo. Ridiculo! She called me a devil. I was so mad. So, I became an angel.”
“But…why arrive so late? And why the blood on the feathers!?”
“Oh, I was making de wings. Took barry long. And by the time I was complete, the flower shops - eberybody closed. So I went to peeck flowers from around the neighborhood. I could not see, barry dark. I cut myself with the rose thorns, so bad.”