October is full of candlelight and a smoky wind, dead leaves in the rain. The world is looking witchier as it turns into its quiet winter cape. Stark black silhouettes of trees against pale blue grey skies, scudding clouds and the unsleeping eye of the moon, hanging low and yellow one evening,, pale and haughty the next night. People bring out things that glow and cast shadows, to chase away the uncomfortable presence of waiting-winter darkness. I walked past the witch’s apple tree, left with one lonely poison apple waiting for a hungry child to snatch it. No one else seems the least bit bothered by the changing seasons, by the growing inky shadows…or maybe the lack of sleep is catching up. I hear the veil between the worlds is wearing thin. My heart is full of music. There isn’t enough wind to account for my restlessness. Who will dance with me? Who will sing with me?
I am not me when I wear a mask. That old stage thing showing its colours again, but how can I resist? I know they are just papier-mache, swirl of red, flash of blue, cardboard and glitter, but there’s something about changing your face that changes me inside while I wear it. Did a mask workshop once, where we all got to choose a face, and we had to learn who it was. We touched the mask, let our fingers learn its texture. We looked at the way it was painted, the highlit cheekbones, the sunken eyes, the beaky nose, the full lips, the forehead furrowed in worry or despair. My mask was a half mask, others picked full faces. My mask was decorated with harlequin diamonds, and sported a birds’ bill instead of a nose. Feathers wafted over my forehead. We created a sound to go with the mask-perhaps a soft sssshhhhhhaaaaaaa, or an abrupt ak-ch. Fingers stroking down the mask, like a blind person learning who is talking to them, from forehead to chin, and over the nose, once, twice, now with the sound. We were a wittering, chirrping, spooky, sighing, keening menagerie, a cacophonous zoo with unseen animals.
And then we put the masks on. Carefully, holding the nose and adjusting the elastic so it fit snugly. And then we broke the circle and stood up…and I stood differently. Head tilted to one side, the curious parakeet, I found I could only speak in squawks and hisses. One girl couldn’t speak at all.
The classroom looked different. The shape of the eyes of the mask narrowed my vision, made me see into corners for the hidden dust there where before I was only focused on the light coming through the window, the cool floor.
I couldn’t move like I normally do, I pecked awkardly, and I didn’t know what to do with my arms. I felt like I was the wrong shape for the face I wore.
When we took them off, everyone looked like they were coming out of a trance, a dream. Blink blink, what? Life is ordinary? I’m not some exotic creature looking for food? Colours went back to normal, and I slowly straightened my spine. I looked at the inside of the mask, and thought I felt an echo of the character I could be, there inside the inverted bird features. I liked the smell of the paint, the feel of the inside of the mask fitted over my face, the way the eyes moulded around mine. I put the mask away carefully, slowly, recognizing that something inside me had changed forever.
…Silent auction, for a theatre company that was dying, and my mother bought a pair of masks-the Ugly Sisters, one “for each of us” but I ended up with both of them. I wanted to hang them up, but the masks are old and fragile; they sit in a box, carefully wrapped in thick cloths, waiting. They have eyeliner around the eyeholes,and big fake black bows and beauty marks. They are handheld, like old opera glasses, on thick black wooden doweling. I love their lumpy crooked noses.
On Hallowe’en, catch a little hocus pocus in the owl-still pumpkin spiced air. Wear a painted face, dance a dervish in the street. You can be someone else to fool the ghoulies.
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