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The first thing to know about getting eaten by a cursed pumpkin patch is that it sucks. Seriously, if there’s one thing to take away from this story it’s that getting eaten by a pumpkin patch is the worst.
Alyson Franklin’s favorite season was Autumn. She was what she had often been told was a basic bitch. She loved nutmeg and warm drinks, cute fluffy scarves and fingerless gloves. Her idea of a perfect afternoon was a cup of coffee while wrapped in a warm blanket on a comfortable couch next to an open window with a cool breeze and the sound of leaves blowing around. Judgy dudes who think having a favorite football team counts as a personality could make fun of her as much as they like, she knew what made her happy.
Another thing that made Alyson happy and occasionally earned her ridicule was her job. Alyson was in her fourth year of working for the local grocery co-op, and she loved her job. The pay was good and provided health insurance, the work kept her busy but wasn’t complicated. She liked making the displays look pretty and pointing customers in the direction of their favorite treat. Some days she felt like she made someone’s day better. Generally the customers were polite, not every day, but generally. And she really liked her coworkers. Everyone got on everyone’s nerves now and then, but for the most part they made a pretty great team!
Which was why Alyson was surprised to find herself pissed at her coworker Josh. Maybe former coworker?
It was gourd season. The most wonderful time of the year! And also a super crazy busy time at the co-op. Despite living in a place that had a little farm stand on most streets and farms with pumpkins by the dozens everywhere the co-op did an enthusiastic business in gourds. Generally there were carving pumpkins, tiny pumpkins, baking pumpkins, and decorative gourds everywhere at the start of the day and most of the displays were decimated by the end of the day.
Today was different. Today there were no displays of festive pumpkins. Today there was just a whole lot of pissed off disappointed customers. Their usual shipment of local pumpkin produce had not arrived that morning. For the last week Josh had been volunteering to swing by the Thompson farm with his pickup to bring in as many gourds as he and Glenn Thompson can fit in the truck bed. This morning Josh hadn’t shown up for work. He wasn’t answering his phone. It was incredibly uncommon for someone to no-show no-call this job. There weren’t that many well paying grocery jobs with benefits and most people don’t mess with that.
After an hour of exasperated shoppers expressing frustration, Alyson's boss Craig pulled her aside, gave her the keys to his own truck and asked her to please go get some damn gourds. Alyson had been having an ok day restocking cheese and avoiding most of the irritation but now she was delighted to be taking a sunny autumn ride on work time. He’d even passed her a 20$ and asked her to swing through starbucks on her way back.
The drive to the Thompson farm took 20 minutes. 10 minutes to get out of town and 10 minutes of sun dappled back roads in the glorious height of foliage. There was nothing in Alyson’s opinion as magical as the glow of golden sunlight on vibrant leaves, or the fluttering rain of leaves when the slightest breeze blew on a perfectly seasonal tree. She found her way easily since the Thompson farm was the biggest left in the area and known to all the locals. She turned off the dirt road and down the driveway toward the farm.
The farm was separated from the road by a narrow strip of woods that opened into a corn field. The driveway twisted through the tall corn on either side and opened onto a large dirt parking lot in front of an old farmhouse. Behind the house she could see a bit of the long greenhouses where seedlings were sold during the spring.
The house was large and in good shape. It was a clean white with a front porch decorated with apples, gourds, corn stalks, and hay bales. Most farmers around here struggled to make ends meet. The Thompson farm was established enough to have a corner on the local markets and it looked from the state of the property to be prospering.
To the right of the house rows of tangled vines traveled out from the parking lot into fields of growing gourds. Where the field met the dirt parking lot there were several bushel baskets with CO-OP printed on them full of tiny pumpkins, and stacks of full sized pumpkins piled up. It looked to Alyson like the setup that Josh was meant to collect this morning.
Alyson wandered up the porch, appreciating the warmth of the sun on her back as she climbed the steps. The porch was warm and inviting. She pushed the button that she assumed rang a doorbell but she couldn’t hear it chime. After a sensible moment she pushed it again. And after another sensible moment she tried knocking. Still nothing. Now what?
Alyson wandered down to look at the pile of pumpkins. There was a sheet of paper pinned to a bushel under a mini-pumpkin. She carefully pulled it out and noted that the word “co-op” was scrawled on it, followed by a count of pumpkins, mini-pumpkins, and gourds. Alyson sighed and eyed the pile, uncertain for a moment. She didn’t want to misjudge and create any tension between the co-op and the Thompson farm, and also she wasn’t 100% sure she could move all of this into the truck bed by herself.
But the situation was what it was. She went back to the truck and grabbed her phone and a pen. She snapped a quick picture of what she assumed was a receipt of sorts, turned it over and jotted down the time and date and signed it. She jogged it up to the door and slipped it through the mail slot. Now for the work of loading the truck.
It was slow, heavy work and it took Alyson almost a full hour. She was working in the sun, hauling and lifting the pumpkins by herself, and it likely would have taken Alyson even longer if there wasn’t a cool mist that blew over her legs from the pumpkin patch. Even with the cold misty air blowing like a little winter cloud from across the patch and over her lower body, giving her a little chill, the sun was direct and warm. It created an odd feeling of being too hot and too cold at the same time. There was no denying that as beautiful as it could be autumn could be hard to dress for. Alyson found herself wishing she’d worn her flannel lined boots and a short sleeve shirt. She was proud and tired when she finally finished the work, but mostly just relieved to climb into the truck with climate control.
It was almost midday when Alyson finally rolled back into the co-op, handed Craig his keys, his coffee, and his change, and politely declined to help unload her haul. Craig was sympathetic and there were plenty of other people he could rope into helping. It wasn’t until Craig mused out loud that there was usually a receipt from Mr. Thompson and Alyson reached for her phone to text him the image that Alyson realized she didn’t have her phone. Great. It must have fallen out of her pocket in the Thompson’s parking lot. She still had hours of shift left and by the time she was done and able to go look for it day would definitely be over and she’d be searching in the dark.
After spending the rest of her shift watching every single gourd she brought back be sold she finally waved goodbye to Craig, hopped into her very beat up old Subaru and pulled out of the co-op just as the sunset changed from deep red to purple blue. The purple sank to black as she drove the winding road. Maybe Alyson would get lucky and farmer Thomson had found her phone in his driveway and was holding on to it for her. As she parked on the dirt lot for the second time that day she guessed from the dark empty looking farm house that she was not that lucky.
Alyson found her emergency flashlight in her glove compartment but not before twice thinking “I can just use the flashlight on my phone” before remembering. She rang the doorbell one more time for good measure without much hope, and wasn’t surprised when the blank, impassive face of the farmhouse yielded no response. Sweeping the flashlight in front of her she attempted to search the area around the edge of the parking lot where she thought she remembered the bushels had been.
Without the sun the evening had become much colder. Alyson wished she’d brought a real coat instead of just an extra flannel she’d tossed in the back seat that morning. The shiny white fog gathered over the pumpkin patch and drifted into the parking lot and whisped icy tendrils over her feet and ankles, chilling her. The cold wrapped around her legs and crept up over her knees, tugging at her, gripping her.
Alyson has the brief thought that she should be getting frustrated. Multiple times she had the idea to walk back further into the parking lot to search around the area the truck had been parked, but she never seemed to manage to walk away from the edge of the pumpkin patch. The stars were laser bright and the moon was a spotlight flooding the property from high in the sky. Just as she had the idea to be frustrated she lost the thought and it was temporarily replaced by the thought that the moon was much higher than she expected. The question came to mind that it seemed like a lot of time had passed here and she wasn’t sure how, but the cold fog wrapping itself from her now numb toes, up her legs, and around her waist brought her mind back to the pumpkin patch.
The vines were still so lush and green for the nights being this cold. They twisted around each other and bent over themselves like swells of waves in the ocean. Green and thick, with broad leaves. The pumpkins glowed orange amongst the green and gave the impression there were suns burning inside them. Alyson had the impression some of them had jack-o-lantern faces already inside, just waiting for those faces to be discovered. The ocean of green and orange stared back at her from a hundred barely concealed faces. The fog has drifted almost entirely off of the patch and into the parking lot. It was flowing past her almost knee deep, silvery and biting cold. It wrapped up around her middle, up her wrists, and over her elbows. Her fingers felt stiff with cold and she idly wondered when her flashlight had stopped working. The moon was bright enough that she didn’t need it.
She really wanted to touch a pumpkin. There was something wrong about them and she felt like she wouldn't understand them until she touched one. Her nose was freezing. It felt like ice in her throat. She took a step forward. She had the impression of movement under the fog. A hand gripped her shoulder firmly from behind.
“Hey, look out!”
Too late. As she turned to face the man who grabbed her she put a foot into the tangle of vines at the edge of the parking lot. In an instant the vines had her legs wrapped tightly and pulled her into the mass of plants. Instinctively she grabbed for the man as she started to fall. She got a brief glance of the man pulling at vines surrounding him, and another man a couple of steps behind taking a hurried step backwards.
Alyson glimpsed all of this while she was pulled forcefully toward the ground, she could feel that the man behind her was pulled along as well. She braced for a hard hit onto the ground, but it never came. Instead she was enveloped tightly, squeezed, pulled, and twisted. She was being moved along by the vines. She struggled but the vines bent and twisted and prevented her limbs from moving and prevented her flailing from having any effect. With each flail the vines tightened. Alyson remembered a documentary she watched years ago about anacondas squeezing their prey with every exhale. Her head swam and she knew she was losing consciousness.
And then she was free, and she really did hit the ground. Wherever she was it was dark and warm and slimy. Finally the panic gripped her and she froze. How long had she been standing in that parking lot? She had been in a fog while in the fog. This wasn’t how pumpkin patches behaved. The obviously inexplicable way the fog had behaved, the way the vines had looked, it all clarified for her in a creeping panicked horror. She thought she might scream or wretch and wasn’t sure which it would be until the terrified piercing scream escaped her.
“Hey hey hey, come on, I’m still attached to those ears.”
The slightly annoyed voice of a man. She tried to be reassured by finding she wasn’t alone, but she had an almost overwhelming urge to claw her way away from him. Instead she focused on freezing her body and breathing as carefully as she could. She was pretty sure she was still at risk for screaming or retching.
The sudden appearance of light struck her eyes and she flinched away from it before squinting in its direction. The man was holding his phone.
“No service. Of course not.”
He sighed and turned on the flashlight and swept it around their surroundings. She wished he hadn’t and almost wretched again. They were in a smallish round room, orange and slimy. The floor felt slippery and the low ceiling felt compressed, and as though it was pressing in on her.
Worst of all they were not fully alone. There were two large lumps against the wall to her left. They were covered in lumpy orange ooze and string in a thick blanket, but behind the thick layer Alyson caught sight of flesh and dead eyes. This time the scream was more of a strangled yelp and she instinctively pushed away from the bodies and bumped into the stranger who put his arm around her shoulder and pointed the flashlight to the opposite corner, where she spotted her discarded cell phone laying on the floor. Had she been pick pocketed by a pumpkin?
Alyson reached out and grabbed her phone. It was half charged and also had no service. She also turned on the flashlight and shakily pointed it around herself. Alyson’s brain struggled to process the very obvious truth all around them. They were inside a giant pumpkin. The space was round and maybe 10 feet across. It looked exactly like the inside of every pumpkin she had ever carved.
She tried to brace herself to examine the faces in the corpses, but when she looked her stomach turned and she physically flinched away. She was pretty sure it was Josh and Farmer Thomson. They were wrapped up in what she could only imagine were pumpkin ‘guts’. The pumpkin was digesting them. Suddenly the soggy warmth of the space felt as though it was pulsing with a malicious life and Alyson realized she was trembling.
The man put his hand on her shoulder again.
“We should turn off one of these flashlights and save the battery.”
He gently took the phone out of her hand and deftly swiped it off.
“Listen to me. I’m going to get us out of here. And if I don’t my brother is out there, and he will. We’re going to get out of here. There is no way I’m going to let us die in a freakin pumpkin like a cut-rate Cinderella mouse. We’re going to get out of here, you hear me?”
Alyson tried to fight the rising panic and focus on his words, but her brain just would not engage beyond blind terror of the touch of the slimy innards of the pumpkin. He shook her shoulder.
“Hey, look at me”
Alyson looked. It is the first time she’d bothered to observe the man she was trapped with. Her eyes, wild with fear, met his calm green eyes. At least he was dressed for adventure in heavy jeans, a couple of layers, and a jacket. She was no longer cold in her work blouse and flannel, but still felt deeply unequipped. The green eyes crinkled as he smiled at her, and leaned back against the wall of the pumpkin.
“That’s better. We’re going to be alright. We just need to keep our heads.”
As he spoke her attention was grabbed by movement just over his shoulder. A little tendril of pumpkin guts lifted slightly off of the wall and draped itself on his shoulder. As she watched it seemed to grow a tiny bit and reach for his collar.
“Maybe...” Her voice came out shaky and timid. She hated the sound of her own constricting fear. She took a calming breath and tried again. “Maybe we should sit further back from the wall.”
She reached out and plucked the bit of slime from his shoulder. She may have imagined it but she thought it went rigid for a moment before turning limply into plant goo. He glanced at it in her fingers for a second, shrugged a bit and scooted a little more toward the middle of the pumpkin. She hesitated for a second, irrationally nervous about turning her back to the corpses less than 8 feet away from her. A little flicker of surprise crossed his face, but it passed immediately. He reached out and picked a little orange tendril out of her hair. The flicker of surprise returned and disappeared again, she presumed it had briefly stiffened under his touch too. She scooted away from the wall immediately.
“Dean” He said, and held out his hand.
“Alyson” She answered, and shook his hand. It was rougher than she was expecting. He must work with his hands.
“So, what’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”
As he asked it he plucked a tendril off of her shoe.
“I was looking for my phone. I lost it earlier when I was loading up the pumpkins. I figured I just dropped it in the parking lot. I was hoping Farmer Thompson found it and I could just get it from him”
An image of his slime covered face behind her flashed in her mind and she fought the panic and pushed the image away, though her skin crawled.
“But no such luck I guess. What about you? What brings you and your, uh brother you said? To this, uh, little spot”
She noticed a little tendril creeping up his knee. She picked it off, making a little face at the way it went rigid for a second.
“Well, I’m not sure if you’ll believe me” he said with a little smile, stopping to pick a tendril off of his own elbow “but monsters are real.”
“You don’t say.”
“Yeah. It turns out the word is full of things that go bump in the night, and some of those things eat people. My brother and I try to do what we can to save the people. Or at least kill the monsters. We hunt them”
Alyson picked another cord of pumpkin off of her leg.
“And that’s what you think we have here? This is a monster situation?”
Dean pulled a thread of pumpkin off of the back of his neck.
“What my brother Sam and I think we’ve got here is some sort of Harvest God. The big question is which one, and from where. Unfortunately I think research time is over.”
Alyson felt a little tickle on her neck, just under her ear. She instinctively itched it and found a piece of pumpkin there that surprised her with its size. She tried to reach behind her to check her back for more slime, and found some, but she couldn’t quite get her fingers around it.
“Here, let me.”
Dean gently turned her and she angled her back to him. She forgot for a moment and accidentally looked at the corpses. She closed her eyes tightly. She could feel Dean picking tendrils off of her back.
“There” Dean declared, and gave her shoulder a pat.
“Ok, let me check you.”
He turned his back to her and she was alarmed to see several thumb thick ropes of guts splayed along his back. She spent a minute working in quiet pulling them off of him. When she was finished he turned around and pulled another off of her upper arm.
“Let’s sit back to back” He suggested.
Alyson turned to face away from him and flinched at having to face the corpses again. He noticed and turned so that she wouldn’t be facing them directly. They pressed their backs together to keep the vines from creeping up behind them where they could not see, and both set to work pulling the little threads as they made their way off of the pumpkin and onto their bodies.
“So, theoretically speaking, what does one do when they find themselves on the wrong side of a God. Let’s say, theoretically, the inside.”
A bit of pumpkin had wound its way into Alyson’s shoelace and while she struggled to untangle it one had made its way fully around her thigh. She marveled at how being body temperature made them so hard to feel. Marveled in a completely grossed out revolted way.
“That’s the bitch of it. It depends on the deity. What do they hate and fear. What hurts them. There’s usually some kind of metal they don’t like. Sometimes you just have to try some things and see what sticks. Maybe there’s a clue there somehow you can find. Maybe something with brain fog, or something to do with farming? Anyway Sam is the best I know at figuring out the lore. He’ll solve it.”
They worked in silence for a while. The tendrils were creeping faster and faster. Alyson pulled a stubborn one off of her ankle and noticed there was a raised red welt on the skin under it. They worked partly in the dark and the light bounced around as Dean juggled his phone, trying to keep it away from the creeping pumpkin, but still it pointed at them. The light swept erratically around Alyson.
“Fuck!”
The light suddenly held still, to the side of them and pointed directly at the roof.
“This damn pumpkin stole my cell phone!”
Alyson could see the phone a couple of feet away from them slowly being covered in threads of guts. The light was overlaid with an orange glow, and then was covered entirely. They were dropped immediately into a stifling blackness. Alyson was instantly reminded that she was sharing a tiny claustrophobic space with two corpses. She managed to resist the impulse to scream, but barely.
Struggling against the tendrils that seem to have suddenly tripled, she pulled a wrist free and managed to get a hand in her pocket and wrapped her fingers around her phone. She could feel Dean struggling and flailing behind her, hear his grunts of effort and frustration. Even touching her screen woke it up enough to shed a little light on the dismal situation. Her legs were half covered and there was pumpkin wrapped around her waist.
Working from muscle memory Alyson managed to get the flashlight turned on. She pulled away from the pumpkin twine that reached for her wrist and tucked the phone into her bra strap. She could feel Dean attempt to stand behind her and fail. She used both hands to try to strip the tendrils off of her faster than they could grow, but she knew she was failing. She became aware of a stinging everywhere her skin was exposed. God, she thought, it’s going to digest us!
She felt Dean hit the ground heavily, letting out a frustrated breath. As she struggled to pull her ankles free the tendrils wrapped around her arms and legs, pinning them together. She tried to struggle, but she had lost. She wanted to ask Dean how he was doing but she didn’t dare to open her mouth. There was no point anyway. She knew the answer.
Alyson felt herself dragged down and pinned to the floor. Her heart was beating so hard it hurt. She thought she would choke on the panic. She was desperate to take deep breaths and scream, but her terror of opening her mouth prevented both. She thrashed in a blind panic. Her only thought of being digested. She was hopeless and her muscles burned.
A discordant thumping reached her ears, but not her awareness, until a shaft of light hit her. She attempted to look toward it but couldn’t move that far. A moment later hands were tearing at the pumpkin guts that pinned her. As soon as Alyson was able she squinted toward the light and discovered a sizable hole cut in the side of the pumpkin, an ax discarded just outside. She set to work freeing herself, and Sam moved on to freeing Dean.
The three of them stumbled and slid out of the pumpkin and into one of the sprawling greenhouses behind the farmhouse. Sam grabbed his ax and led them out into the open air. Alyson and Dean stumbled into the sunlight gasping. A young woman casually leaned against a pillar at the top of the stairs on the back porch. The golden morning sun cresting the horizon framed her perfectly. Alyson was struck with the urge to put a picture of her on instagram.
Her hair was a golden, warm, dark, auburn, Alyson struggled to place the color but it never seemed to settle into one. She wore a chunky plaid scarf over a perfectly oversized cardigan. Her thick, warm leggings ended in fur lined ankle boots. Her arms were crossed and she looked annoyed. Everything about her said “hungry” to Alyson. She straightened her posture and stepped down to their level.
“Just where do you think you’re going? I’ve been waiting all night for my meal and this is how you treat me?”
“Listen Bitch” Dean still had pumpkin goop over much of his clothes “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care. We’ve dealt with your kind before and we’re not going to lay down and be eaten by some glorified gourd.”
“Honey… You’ve never met anything like me. I’m something new. I’m the spirit. I’m the season. I’m the hashtag PSL. I’m the nutmeg in your candle and the flannel on your sheets. I’m the lowlights in your hair. And I’m not going anywhere.”
“Sweety, I have no fuckin clue what you are talking about.”
“You don’t. But she does.” She turned her hungry gaze on Alyson “This one knows all the right hashtags for tiny pumpkins. This one has a mental ranking of every pumpkin spice latte in town. This one has taken Autumn, the season of entropy, and death, and diminishing sunlight, darkness, and Halloween, witches and evil spirits, and turned it into a cutesy mug and some buffalo plaid. She trivializes the dark, and romanticizes the cold. She turns the encroaching power of death into a snapshot and puts a fun filter on it and uses it for likes. And she, and those like her, worship the chintz. They build false idols to the basic bitch and they create me. And now she will feed and nourish me.”
Alyson could hear the blood pounding in her ears again, but this time it’s not fear (though the fear certainly existed), it’s fury.
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Excuse me? I’m a new God and you are food.”
“You. Don’t know. What the Fuck. You are talking about.” Alyson spoke with deliberate emphasis lest this new God be too stupid to understand. “You think I don’t know about the creeping threat of death? My mother died of stomach cancer when I was 14! One day she said she was feeling sick. It took them 2 weeks to find the cancer, she was dead in a month. I’ve lost friends to suicide, car accidents, drug overdoses. I watched my grandmother disappear into dementia. You think I don’t know death is everywhere?
“You think nutmeg and cinnamon and plaid are a denial of death? You miss the fuckin point entirely. They are a mockery of death! We are mocking you! The leaves die and we frame them. The only thing that grows are hard, thick gourds? We roast them, put sugar on them, and put them in our coffee. You steal the warmth from the air and we wrap ourselves in comfort. You kill the leaves and we dance on their graves. You think we are too stupid to be afraid of you? You are too stupid to be afraid of us!
“You actually think the warm drinks and the cozy boots make us weak? It makes us stronger than you. It makes us fearless! You bring your worst and we buy a nice sweater about it. I’ve eaten 5 pumpkin products today! So you tell me who is who’s food!
“And before you even think of talking shit about cute photography…”
Alyson had a hell of a lot more to say, but she didn’t get to it. As she was pointing an angry finger at the shining woman made of instagram filters and autumn sun Sam was carefully making his way behind her. Distracted by their argument neither woman had noticed until Sam’s ax neatly separated the new God’s head from its body. As both body and head fell to the ground it dissolved into pumpkin goo.
Alyson finally did retch. She leaned away from the brothers and dry heaved for a minute. When she stood up suddenly she was very cold in the morning chill. The air felt lighter and clearer. The sun glinted on the windows of the greenhouses and shone on the now empty farmhouse. She was aware of a fog that had been numbing her thoughts all night lifting. Now that it was over she felt she could finally think clearly.
“ Do you think she’s gone for good?”
Sam and Dean looked tired. Sam answered her after a sigh.
“It’s gone from here. If you mean is it gone for good? I doubt it. As long as the cultural fixation on autumn exists, or maybe it’s the cultural backlash that feeds it, but either way I think it’ll regroup somewhere else. Hopefully it’ll take a while though.”
“Yeah, well, when it does we’ll be there too.” Dean gave her a weak smile “You did good keeping her talking. I don’t know if challenging her hurt it at all, or if it just distracted her, but either way, you really kept your head on straight.”
“You know Dean, I’ve worked retail customer service for a long time. I’ve learned a thing or two about how to take down a being too full of their own self-importance. “
Alyson looked out over the pumpkin patch, still shivering with cold and adrenaline. It seemed to her that the luster was gone from the plants. The green was tinged with brown and the pumpkins looked drab. The vines seemed to have wilted into normalcy.
Sam followed her gaze
“Do you think you can drive?”
“Oh yeah, no problem.” Alyson was relieved by the idea of cranking her car’s heat.
“Ok. daytime is here and someone is going to show up soon, and I really want to burn that giant pumpkin just in case, and I think that’s going to take some work. Would you be alright to get yourself home before trouble starts?”
They shook hands and the brothers gave her their phone numbers should more monsters appear. She climbed into her Subaru, drove a mile or so back toward her house, and pulled over to call in sick for the day. She told them honestly that her stomach was a mess, she’d gagged less than an hour ago and she was shaking like a leaf.
Later she watched footage of the weird electrical fire that burned down the greenhouses behind the Thompson farm from under the comfort of a pile of blankets on her couch. She turned it off when they started reporting two bodies found.
The next day Alyson went back to work. She didn’t even consider giving up the co-op, and was more dedicated than ever. The world, it seemed, was full of terrifying monstrous dark corners where a person could easily be consumed by the things that could lurk there. She felt like most people suspected this was true. She reveled in the ability to help farmers who loved to farm sell their cheese to locals who were delighted to buy it. She loved helping people find treats, or seeing them smile at a bouquet of flowers. She took a little bit more time to make the displays beautiful. If this was the way the world was going to be she was going to do what she could to bring what light into the world that was possible. And she still loved autumn.
And if Alyson switched her coffee order to a brown sugar latte no one would be concerned. She decorated with more apples and leaves these days, and never again went to pick up a pumpkin order. She didn’t buy tiny pumpkins, and she donated the pumpkin decorations she already owned. But she did get really into decorative dried corn husks.