I held Felix up for them all to see and I cried, She left me a son, in defiance of all nature, because nothing could hold the force of her. Then I took my son and left those people to the confines of their ceremony.

The month wore on and more and more other pumpkins on the street and on the television were carved with faces, some with the loving intricacy of a Faberge egg and some clumsy as a toddler’s finger-painting, and lit with flickering candles, their skulls all charred and smoke-stained on the inside in payment for the light that poured from their eyes and mouths and filled darkness with life.

Felix met this change in the world with silence and constancy, and I realized he had not changed since the day of his birth, and I knew this was not the way a child should be. A child must change.

What choice did I have but to sit Felix down at the kitchen table and take a sharp knife to his flesh? The face that waited to be revealed already seemed obvious to me, so I did not mark him, did not draw my intentions as though my own son’s appearance might be a mystery to me. I told him, Tell me if you want me to stop. I pressed the point of the knife into a spot some three inches from Felix’s stem.

My hand shook, but I would not have passed that happy duty to any other living man. This was a rite of passage, a becoming, and Felix’s mother would not have wanted anything but this, anything but her husband and her son together, moving on, moving forward. I felt her there, felt her fingers steadying mine, felt her breath on my cheek, smelled her lilac shampoo, as I had any day I cared to take her in my arms, any moment I cared to bury my nose in her neck, let her hair catch in my stubble, and how she was warm, and how we would hold each other, how we would wait for some signal we should part, and no signal ever came, and the end of every embrace was awkward, was an awkward, tiny death, like a spider caught in a tissue by its legs and broken apart, and how unlike a candle, how unlike a flame, how unlike a fire was every moment we consumed each other. I felt her hand on mine, and I plunged the knife into our son.