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There were too many pumpkins in Gerry’s house. He’d woken that morning with static to blink out from behind his eyes, which meant that Michael was in the house. What Michael was doing in the house he didn’t know, and that should have made him concerned but it didn’t. It had once, but Michael was, if not someone he trusted, at least somebody he loved.
“Good morning, sunshine,” he’d called. Michael’s laughter had sounded from at least three different rooms at once.
It turned out that Michael was unloading what appeared to be the entire stock of a pumpkin patch into Gerry’s kitchen. Gerry blinked at it from the door, pushing his hair back from his face as though the image might change, but it stayed the same: a pile of round orange squash and Michael’s twiggy frame, too tall, hunched over it. Its eyes were spirals, blinking rapidly; its hair tangled its way to the floor, the occasional flyaway strand or loose curl moving of its own accord, wrapping around a stem or stroking a pumpkin idly.
“Hello,” said Michael, laying a long hand over one of the pumpkins.
Gerry stared at it.
“It is polite to greet guests,” Michael said, “especially when they bring gifts.”
Gerry continued to stare at it.
“I thought we could carve pumpkins together.” It was starting to sound almost hurt, but then it brightened. “You looked like you needed something to stab.”
“Michael … what?” Gerry picked up a very small pumpkin that was sitting at his feet. “I … don’t need this many pumpkins.”
It crossed the room and pet his cheek affectionately. “I do.”
Gery raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t certain Michael was aware of how disconcerting it was sometimes. But it was smiling at him so eagerly and its hand skimmed down his arm to take hold of his, gently, and he wanted nothing more in that moment than to indulge it.
It had left a patch clear in the middle of the pumpkin stacks, a strange cavernous space that felt foreign, somehow, orange-walled and secluded. Michael sat down crosslegged and presented him with a pumpkin, grinning proudly. Gerry glanced at the floor; it was definitely his, scratched wood and old bloodstains that had faded less than he would have liked. He took the pumpkin.
Gerry couldn’t remember when he had carved a pumpkin before, but he must have because the motions were familiar. It was almost soothing, which meant it had probably been with his father, and he smiled imagining it. His memories of his father were few and far-between but he treasured them, and even images that he knew his mind had fabricated were some comfort.
He looked up at Michael, who had unceremoniously stabbed the pumpkin with one of its fingers and was using it to saw around the stem; Gerry didn’t know what he had expected. It was difficult, sometimes, to remember that Michael could do that, that its fingers were rarely as soft as it made them to hold his.
“Michael,” said Gerry, hesitantly. “What are you doing?”
Michael blinked at him without closing its eyes. “I’m carving a pumpkin,” it said blithely. Gerry frowned and the pumpkin’s innards were in a bowl, though he wasn’t sure whether he’d seen Michael scooping them out.
Gerry shook his head and went back to his own pumpkin, not entirely sure how to proceed. He thought it might be nice to have a spoon to scoop it out, but he didn’t want to get up and fetch one.
Michael tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up again and it was holding out a spoon, grinning three inches to the left of its face, on level with its eyes. It was dizzying to look at. Gerry smiled at it gratefully and took the spoon, trying to ignore the fact that the pumpkin had developed a door that did not look at all as though it led into a pumpkin.
He started scooping out his own pumpkin, vaguely aware of Michael setting down the one it had just finished and reaching for another. He wondered what to carve; he snuck another glance at Michael, who was looking at its pumpkin with an uncharacteristically ponderous expression. Its eyes were half-closed, its head tilted to the side, considering, and it looked very nearly human. Gerry went still, watching it — he always did in these moments when its monstrousness faded and he could imagine, for just a second, that the person sitting beside him was more like him than unlike — and then it flickered, and he saw it had hallways instead of eyes, and the illusion was over and he chuckled slightly and turned back to his own pumpkin.
He started carving without a plan, and then after a while it was obvious that he was carving Michael, and he glanced up again for reference.
The pumpkin in its hands had grown bigger and smaller at the same time — he was almost certain it hadn’t taken up so much space before, but there were also empty spaces between the fragments of its shell, and something that might have been shell and might have been an endless staircase of seeds spiralling inward, inward, and drawing the eye with it until the pumpkin seemed very small and the room and Gerry and everything shrunk eagerly around it.
He blinked hard. It took considerable effort to lift his gaze to Michael’s, and it grinned at him wrongly, like nothing was wrong. “What … what did you do to that pumpkin?” Gerry managed.
Michael tilted its head, a curious bird. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Narrowing his eyes, but not looking back down, Gerry gestured at the thing in Michael’s hand.
“This is a pumpkin,” said Michael helpfully.
Gerry looked back at it. It might have been a pumpkin if one held a very loose definition of what constituted a pumpkin, and it was even harder to look away from this time. When he managed his head was swimming and Michael’s gleeful laughter was making his ears ring, and he didn’t dare look back. He went on carving Michael’s face — a strange, static version of it that didn’t come close to capturing the real thing — into his own pumpkin.
When he next looked up, Michael had moved on through several pumpkins already. One was sitting by its feet, strangely elongated, twisting and branching in a complicated pattern of fractals, that turned in and in on themselves before branching again and again and again — he wasn’t even certain whether Michael had carved it or just changed it. It was holding another in its hand, one which seemed abnormally flat and also to be spinning at a high velocity; spinning and then slowing, dancing itself to shreds that curled in the palm of Michael’s hand into an orange rose that shifted — or maybe it didn’t — again, Gerry was having trouble looking away, unsure whether his eyes were playing tricks on him or if the pumpkin-petals really were moving, just slightly, in the corners of his eyes, stopping when he tried to focus on them.
Michael smiled sweetly at him and held out the rose, and Gerry frowned, clutching his own pumpkin a little closer. “Go ahead,” it giggled. “As a token of my affections.” Narrowing his eyes, Gerry reached out tentatively and took the thing in his hands — it was lighter than it ought to have been and still it seemed to be shifting, minute movements against his palms that fell still as stone the moment he paid attention to them.
“This is really weird, Michael,” he said. Michael laughed, delighted.
Gerry set the flower aside delicately and tried one more time to focus on his pumpkin — a concentration that lasted only a very few minutes before a long, spindly finger tapped him lightly on the shoulder and something soft and delicate brushed against his cheek. He swatted at it idly, felt it give under his fingers and slowly wrapped them around the vine that was curiously poking at his face. There was another, by then, gently curling around his wrist, and when at last he looked up, Michael was proudly holding out a pumpkin that looked like it had been inverted, carved with impossibly intricate patterns, optical illusions that dizzied Gerry’s attempts to follow them, and vines sprouting from somewhere he couldn’t quite fix his gaze on, too many, all moving of their own accord.
The one holding his wrist tugged lightly, and he frowned but followed it, letting it coax him gently toward Michael until it could set down the pumpkin it was holding and cup his face in spindly fingers, gently tracing his eyebrow with one of its thumbs. “Hello,” it said. “I want to see your pumpkin now.”
Gerry laughed under his breath and held it out, feeling almost bashful. “It was … supposed to be you,” he mumbled. “But you didn’t really…” one of Michael’s hands took the pumpkin from him delicately, though there were still two cupping his face. He tried not to think about it. “...fit,” he finished, as Michael’s eyes regarded him and the pumpkin at the same time.
“Oh,” it said — and there, again, that uncharacteristic softness in its voice, almost surprise. “It looks like me.”
Gerry couldn’t help smiling a little at that, pride warming him despite still not really believing he had captured it. “I tried,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Michael, and its voice, too genuine, broke into pieces that were not sound but more color, more softness, more the way Gerry was suddenly in its lap, wrapped in its incomprehensible embrace, and he could feel it pressing its face into his hair and sighing. So close to human and so far from it, and the pumpkins stacked in the kitchen flickered and glowed and not one of them, save Michael’s portrait, was the shape it had started as.