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If a citizen of Halloween Town had told Sally that within a year of the Christmas Eve Disaster she would not only be married to Jack Skellington, but poisoning him, she would have assumed they’d had a little too much Witch’s Brew.
Yet, here she was, a wedding ring on her finger and a jar of deadly nightshade in her hand.
Sally didn’t like to rely on the plant to solve all of her problems, but she couldn’t deny its usefulness when conversations weren’t getting the job done. She had made various attempts to convince Jack to rest throughout the week, but none had taken root. It was no wonder he got tired of Halloween– the amount of mental and physical abuse he put his body through each year was enough to make anyone hate a holiday. Before moving into his home, she’d only caught brief glimpses of his debonair mask slipping into despair.
The situation was far worse than she realized.
The bedroom was littered with prototypes for new terrifying accessories for the witch sisters and crumpled sheets of moldy paper with half-baked ideas for universal scare techniques. Books were haphazardly strewn on each flat surface that wasn’t already covered by unfinished pumpkin carvings and clumps of orange guts. Zero had to resort to yipping at Sally for some scraps– his master was so engrossed in the planning period that he had forgotten all about his poor pet.
Jack himself looked nearly as weary as he had that fateful night on Spiral Hill. When he wasn’t pacing fretfully with any number of materials in his bony fingers, he was seated at his desk mumbling to himself about deadlines and responsibilities. It had been days since he’d eaten, weeks since he’d slept, and Sally could only guess at the last time he’d taken a day off.
To get Jack to consume anything at all, she had to rely on another town’s assistance.
Luckily for Sally, just the mention of his name was enough to make the citizens scramble to meet her demands.
She stirred the powder into the suspiciously thick mixture and scrunched her nose up in disgust at the smell. It still looked the proper color, and she figured that was enough. As long as he hadn’t tried it before, there would be no reason to doubt why it had a strong aftertaste of her poison of choice.
Sally ladled a good amount into an old misshapen mug and brought it into the space that served as Jack’s study.
He looked beside himself: head in his hands, staring blankly down at an assortment of plans and documents requiring his signature, mouth moving and a slurry of muttered words coming from his throat. His entire body was bent at awkward angles in order for him to fit around the slanted desk. Even his tie and suit jacket were beginning to come undone and slide off of his lanky frame, as if protesting at being worn for so long. He glanced up at hearing her approach and the eyebrow portion of his skull turned up at the corners in a look of exhaustion. “I’m sorry, dearest. I simply don’t have time to drink anything at the moment.”
“Even something with a little… holiday spirit?” Sally offered as she put the mug down on the table. She studied his expression and smiled at the exact moment realization dawned on his pale skull.
"Eggnog?" Jack's eye sockets got impossibly bigger and his signature smile hung suspended somewhere between excitement and disbelief. "Sally... how did you get this?"
"I grew some," she replied easily. "Nog, that is. Not the eggs."
Sally had no unearthly idea what nog was, or if it could even be grown , but she wasn’t worried about him discovering her little jaunt over to Christmas Town, or the fact the steam practically formed a skull and crossbones– Jack was far too tired to think critically about the ingredients of the seasonal beverage.
"Fascinating." He took a sip from the chipped mug, and for a moment, his usual enthusiasm outshone his exhaustion. "It’s even curdled!" His teeth quirked up in the soft half-smile that was reserved only for her. "Thank you, my dear. I'll savor it while I work."
Sally retreated to the kitchen, satisfied that he continued to take gulps of the drink. It wasn’t long before she heard the tell-tale shatter of pottery and the splat of expired liquid. She poked her head around the wall just in time to see Jack's spindly frame slowly relax into an angled heap on the chair. Sally loved seeing him dead; completely at ease, all anxious energy seeped into the floorboards, sockets open but unseeing.
She gathered up his spine and legs into her arms and lifted, his weight a solid certainty that he was at peace. The sharpness of all his joints where the blunt edges had been serrated over the years jabbed into her sides: needles sewing up her mismatched pieces. She carried him over to the bed and gently laid him down, then straightened out his limbs before tugging off his suit piece by piece. His bones began appearing one at a time: a clavicle, then two; his sternum and all 23 ribs (Zero never could find that last one), his right and left humerus. Soon the fabric slid off his femurs, tarsals, phalanges– and then he was bare in front of her.
She remembered the first time she’d seen all of him– he had been so flustered, as if his suit was skin she had peeled back and not an aesthetic choice. She felt a sense of pride at that; only she had the privilege of seeing the Pumpkin King without his pinstriped armor, the ability to strip him of any defense he held against anyone else in their shared town.
It wasn't just the bones and ligaments she liked, but the hollows, too. The negative space between each rib and the recesses of air inside his hips were as familiar to her now as her own stitching, giving her a place where even her own asymmetrical body could fit perfectly.
As much as Jack and Christmas were wrong, Jack and Sally were right, filling in the emptiness of each other with something intangible yet more real than his bones, or her patches, or the maddening combination of both.
She tugged the quilt up over his corpse, and with a kiss pressed against his forehead, let him rest.
Jack's vision returned in small snatches of color: a smear of lime green to his right, pale gray blobs to his left, a blur of teal and red across the room. His empty sockets made the approximation of a blink and he squinted over at his wife.
Sally slowly came into focus and Jack sat up in the bed, making the joints of his spinal column snap and pop as they all aligned. His sight traveled lower as he shifted under the sheets, and his bones flooded with a foreign heat when he realized that his clothes were very much not on his person anymore. "Oh my." His voice cracked down the middle as he continued, "What... what happened last night?"
"Last night?" Sally asked as she knelt down next to the bed. "Jack, you've been dead for two days."
"Dead for–" he stared at his patchwork partner as the gears spun slowly in his skull. Memories of Halloween fretting, late nights, impossible exhaustion, and delicious eggnog resurfaced like decapitated heads in a lake. If he had a heart, it would have been warmed to its very vessels. "Sally, you– you poisoned me?"
She nodded with a small smile, then rested her hand on the side of his head.
He turned and pressed a toothy sort of kiss to her palm, brought his own hand up to grasp hers, and looked back into her eyes. "Thank you," he breathed, his bones filled with a different kind of warmth, one that didn't come from embarrassment or a heavy quilt. The thought that he would gladly give his bones for kindling to keep her warm crossed his mind, but it didn't seem like enough. He wanted to be ground up into a fine powder so he could fit inside the leaves that made up her stuffing.
“Two days,” he murmured to himself, thoughts unfocused and fuzzy with the soft pressure of her hand against his skull. He inhaled sharply as one image clarified in his mind: frayed paper with ink splotches and sloppy check marks. “My list. I was running out of time already, at this rate I’ll be a week behind schedule–”
Jack’s thoughts were reduced to static once more with a silencing kiss from Sally. He really did need to describe the feeling to her sometime, preferably when his duties weren’t a mile long. It was similar to what Christmas Town’s energy felt like, but better somehow, more right, like a tombstone settling into the soft earth.
“I took care of everything.”
His eye sockets opened lazily. “Hm?”
“I took care,” Sally repeated, caressing the hinge of his jaw with her thumb, “of everything on the list.”
He stared at her then, so awestruck that it took Sally’s gaze sliding away bashfully for him to blink again. “Everything?” He repeated, the love coursing through his marrow so intense that his bones were going to shatter, “Sally, that must’ve taken up all of your time. You didn’t have to do that.”
She bit her lip and pulled her hand away, wringing it with the other. “I was worried about you, Jack. You weren’t taking care of yourself. And as your queen now, I have a responsibility to help– oh–” Sally breathed shakily as Jack bumped his forehead against hers and nuzzled it gently.
“Perhaps we could make you the sole monarch of the land. I will gladly be your prince instead. A knight, even.”
“Or,” Sally countered gently, “We can split the burden evenly between the two of us.”
Jack let out a metaphorical breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Visions of him and Sally working together on projects, bouncing ideas off of each other, and stealing kisses between passes of plans filled his skull. For what felt like the first time in months, he felt the fog of dread recede to a fine mist.
“I like that idea,” he said quietly. “I like that idea very much.”