Understated. That’s how I like Halloween. Save the ketchup-soaked costumes and theatrical ax murders. The sound of a creaking staircase does not, as a rule, make me scared at parties. But if you think I’m a stick-in-the-mud beyond fear, you’re dead wrong.
Sinus Sister got the scare of her life on Halloween: minding her own business, she stepped into a subway car and resumed reading The New Yorker, where Canadian Craig MacInnis is a finalist in the cartoon caption contest! (Vote here!) After laughing at Craig’s witty entry, I moved on to read Rebecca Mead’s profile of fashion icon/heiress Daphne Guinness. While it was an engrossing article, I slowly became aware of a building chorus of sneezing and sniffing. Looking up from the magazine, it was like a scene from a Hitchcock movie. Instead of birds flying at me, it was germs, from every direction…There was a sneezing art student with bedhead…a party girl coughing without covering her mouth…Another passenger was picking his nose, staring at me with unblinking eyes. I was trapped. My subway station was three stops away.
Nobody heard my silent scream as I reached into my purse and pulled out a tissue—as if it could save me from the onslaught of germs flooding the subway car. At least the 4-ply Sniff tissue ($1.60) accurately reflected the situation: black with a skull and crossbones. Would it be rude to wave the tissue like a pirates flag, and declare the subway a sneeze-free territory? Probably. Did I fantasize about burying an ax in the party girl’s chest, then suffocating the art student? Yes. The nose picker would get more of a Dexter Morgan treatment, later. Sinus Sister fled at her subway stop, cursing the sneezers on her way out, and disappeared into a safe sea of Harry Potters, Lady Gagas and Jack Sparrows.
