Peter Pumpkin Hater

Dear magistrate,

I bring to your attention news of a crime being perpetrated right under our noses. I’ve irrefutable evidence it has been re-occurring year after year in the autumnal season, and I hope a remedy is forthcoming and the guilty persons nabbed and flayed on flaming spits.

To wit the other night I was setting up camp back behind of a hedge row where the wooden rails spared the foot path from the field; wherein floated a insatiate fog, escaped from ethereal spaces within the sentient earth as it exhaled into the crisp autumn air a warmer breath.

The field boasted a inconsolable landscape bestrewn with wilted vine, and littered by orphaned pumpkins that cried out for a surrogate in the apoplectic tradition of a mime; and if you know how depressing and annoying a dedicated mime can become when there is no other diversions, then you might guess my dilemma being surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of the fiends, all performing the same tireless routine.

It was all I could do to hold onto my sanity as I plied my trade as a gourmand, and readied my kettle for the nights festivities what would begin shortly; as soon as some warm-blooded pilgrim came stumbling down the honey-suckled lane and within reach of my brawny hand as it is thrust between the rails and retrieves heem.

It wharen t long before one come along [make that two of them]; young tykes they was, both giggling and conniving as like; but they was armed to the teeth with a wicked butter knife. I seen it and I retreated behind a beeg pumpkin what nested in the densest patch of fog; and I quaked in my bare bosomed feet, imagining the worst possible scenario and wondering what the world was coming to where youngsters went around armed and unsupervised after curfew.

To my utter despair [these two delinquents] they squeezed between the rails like they were on a mission, and they approached the nearest mime; er … i mean pumpkin, and giggling all the while they tackled it like a pride of lions harassing a gazelle and wouldn’t let it get away. My eyes teared over when it turned its pumpkin face my way and put on the performance of its life in a moving plea for assistance; but I was having none of it, not with that wicked blade to contend with.

I near aboot hyperventilated as them two pumpkin haters scalped off its topmast and scooped out the mushy brains and discarded them in the dirt as if it whar nothing at all; but the worst was yet to arise when the ringleader applied the knife and gouged out two eyes where pumpkins have none by tradition, and followed this disfigurement with carving a nose and a toothy grin in the pumpkins rind.

I would have snuck away from there fearing for my own safety as I was but civic duty held me ensconced; and I could not tear my eyes away from the crime as it needed a witness should it ever go to trial, but I was sickened to the core by the brutality I had witnessed, and their callous disregard for a mimes right to practice its trade without persecution.

To pile insult onto injury those two devils placed a candle in its empty skull and struck a match that caused the candle burn and the shell of a pumpkin to glow with candlelight escaping its orifices; meanwhile the knife-wielding duo celebrated their deviancy by doing a vulgar dance around their victim. They laughed and called it a jack-o-lantern, ere they crept back between the rails and sprinted down the lane.

I dared not move until they were away and as I approached I removed my imaginary hat as a token of respect for the newly deceased. [Jack] I says [there be a lantern burning in your head]; but when I looked at the field of stupefied pumpkins they were all kneeling before him as if he were a newly risen god; and try as I did I could not convince them otherwise, but what should you expect from a pumpkin when its brain is mush already; but that does not lessen the severity of the injustice that is being dealt them seasonally.

Good sir,

Look around you at all the jack-o-lanterns strewn about your quiet little town. They are evidence of one, possibly two, serial offenders operating in our midst; pumpkin haters, and I can name them both. They are:

Suzie and Peter Tompkins
3095 Red Bird Lane
ages 5 and a half and seven

Last night at dusk I followed little Suzie and brother Peter home from the pumpkin patch; keeping at a safe distance; and to my horror and disbelief they had a second jack-o-lantern displayed on their doorstep for all to see. It has come to my attention since that they did not stop there. The countryside is littered with jack-o-lanterns: in windows, on stoops, in driveways, etc. So I implore you, Honorable Magistrate, until you apprehend these two young thugs and deal them a swift judgment, I can no longer feel confident your city is a safe haven for a TROLL, and will seek accommodations elsewhere; and I will advise my kith and kin to do likewise

TROLL [yours for the exorcism]

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