Fiction Friday - the Costume

“So what’s this great idea of yours?” Dawn asked her husband.

“Look at the gear I found at the surplus store - they’re perfect for space suits.”

Dawn eyed Kale dubiously. His enthusiasm and imagination tended to run hand in hand, totally missing the reality around him. Still, she had come up with no costume ideas herself that didn’t require a massive sewing effort, so she followed him into the garage. Her curiosity grew as he excitedly pulled away newspaper and sheets of brown paper filler from an abused cardboard box.

White overalls came out first, or something like. There was something odd about the shape and cut but she couldn’t quite place it. “You want to go as painters?” she asked, curious if the rest of the box was paint cans and brushes and cleaning rags, which would be effective if not enough to account for his level of excitement.

“No, no, here, look what comes with,” Kale said, and pulled out a helmut and a head piece for the overalls. Dawn recognized what was odd about the overalls: they were chemical safety suits. “They’re super big, so all we have to do is where are warm clothes underneath and put a bunch of silver duct tape around the joints and over the head piece and it will look like space suits. Duct tape over the biggest plastic jugs we’ve got in the house will be air tanks, and there’s a huge panel for venting we can open up for air. Toasty warm and great costumes at the same time. What do you think?”

Dawn frowned at him, but it was already just to tease. She loved the idea, especially as it meant she didn’t have to sew a thing.

That wasn’t quite true. Afterall, the suits were meant to keep outside air from coming in and the venting was barely adequate, so she added more and sewed large white patches on the sweatshirt and jeans they would be wearing underneath wherever they might be exposed by the venting. The duct taping was tricky, and the pants too long, but she used the duct tape to bunch the legs up and it looked more like the bulky joiints on space suits in the end.

“Aliens or humans?” she asked him when she was nearly done.

“Juat tint the plastic face masks and no one will know which it is. Can't you get some sticky stuff, or spray to tint windows, like they do on the car windshield?”

“I’ll see what I can find. Maybe just tiny dots of face-safe paint to shade it, though you might be seeing spots by the end of the night.”

“This party might be pretty lame. Half my office is out sick with flu and they’ve closed another school for the a week.” Kale donned the costume, had to have her repeat her response as the suit mufled sound

“Yeah, and the way people talk, you’d think it was plague, with people dying in the streets and carts coming to pick up the bodies.”

“I think some of them think it really is plague, that the flu is just a code word for plague. Even Larry said he was keeping an eye out for the fomation of spots as well as fever, and Marinne teased him about that mulberry bush song and all. We have it so easy, They have no idea. - This costume is perfect. But say, can we eat with these on?”

She bent close. Face panel to face panel they could hear better and she offered a plastic coated kiss for the complement. “Sure, the bottom of the face mask is just velcrowed on now. I unstitched it. Come on. Want to walk?”

“Of course. I might look more like a zombie than a space man--the knees are a bit stiff, but have to show off the costome, you know.” he said with a grin.
#

They grinned at the kids who sometimes waved and grinned, sometimes fled. The trick-or-treaters were everywhere in their cute little costumes, about half lightly covered by caots and jackets or thick towel and lap blanket cloaks to keep little arms warm over puffy costumes. they laughed and chatted on the way to the party, barely noticing the reaction to their own costumes until a parent quickly pulled away their child from the path of the space suited adults. then another did the same.

He chuckled. “They been watching B-movies?”

“Maybe they had a replay of War of the Worlds and some of think maybe it was real afterall.”

“Never mind. Halloween, people should be scared. Good for the soul to get a fright and remember our mortality now and again.”


The party was at a neighbor’s several blocks away and they noted that several cars aleady overflowling the driveway. they made their way up the steps, tapped on the door. hearing music from within, they knocked a little harder, then stepped in. they were greeted by cacaphony and chaos. As he grinned and waved in greeting, she noticed that the noise was less musical, the merry expressions quickly changing to panic as the movement that might have been dancing turned to flight as their friends scattered in fear. She grabbed his waving hand.

“Whats the matter with you?.” Realizing that they couldn’t hear through the noise and the muffling masks, she reached for the bottom of the face panel but their host shouted “Don’t, don’t, you’ll kill us all!”

Annoyed, she pulled the panel wide open “What is the matter with you? Think we brought toxic air from an alien planet.”

“You have plague spots! You’re contageous!”

Confused and even more annoyed, she turned toward her husband and looked at him, and stared, and laughed. “Looks like the paint wasn’t quite dry.”

--End--

As instructed, no editing (except typos), so I think it gets weak in the middle. It would require more thought on how best to build the atmosphere. I rather think the costume idea wasn't too bad, though I'm horrible at costumes and I don’t know how easy old MOP gear is to come by... Some of the ideas for the story have obvious sources: the challenge, the flu season as well as the season for frights, the pandemic term that has become quickly overused. On my car you can see the dot pattern that they use to shade the area above the rearview mirror, but it's effective so why not... which of course lead to the idea of the bubonic plague, which shifted my original idea of the source of the fright.