[1] Halloween

(crystal ball)

I wore my long skirt, made in Yei, in Southern Sudan, and tied an Ethiopian scarf around my head, and people got it, right away, for possibly the first time in my adult costuming life. "Tell me the future! Who's going to win the election?" they said, and I sighed and peered into my (Christmas ornament) crystal ball. "I can't see anything about the election," I said, "the ball is too clouded with my own emotion about it. I can only see things further away from myself." But I didn't like the ball, anyway. Not for fortune-telling. I pulled an old deck of cards out and used those instead, because the numbers give me ideas. "Six means that you are above money, but four means that money is below you. You don't have to strive for it. It will come to you."

The scarf on my head started to itch my forehead, and it felt very, very familiar. When I was little in Liberia, we wore scarves on our head to church, my mom and I, little squares of fabric, and they had to be tied tightly to stay on my slippery white-person little-girl hair. They dug into my head, and they itched. (As a result, in later years, I just ignored that head-covering rule throughout Rwanda and Uganda and Kenya and Tanzania and Liberia and Sudan. I figured my skin made me a weirdo regardless, so my lack of headtie would not the noticeable feature. Educated African women, anyway, who get their hair permed and such, often don't wear headties to church.) My fortune-telling headscarf yesterday wasn't so tight, not like those long-ago Liberia headties, because it was long enough to stay in place. But it still began to itch on my forehead.

I shared the back seat of the car with a robot and a sea captain. The front seat held Hans Solo, a flapper, and a gold-digger, and they dropped me off by the library. A Joker walked past me at the train stop and said, "Don't be afraid" with his wide red mouth. "Oh," I told him, "I'm not."

On the train, four girls were a bee, a devil, Supergirl, and Sigfreud (of Sigfreud and Roy). They tried to take pictures of the Joker, but he turned his back. "Joker!" they called, "Joker, we want to take pictures of you!"

"Some people think I'm Beetlejuice," he said, his back still turned, holding the bar above his head. "I'm not Beetlejuice."

A teal and pink Spiderman got on, and the girls took pictures of themselves with him, instead, until the Joker got jealous and turned back toward them, "Okay," he said, "the Joker is ready for his paparazzi now."