#festival

Shira, Sumi, and Freya: A Halloween Special

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Freya had been Athena for seventeen minutes when someone handed her a clipboard.

This was not among the goddess's traditional responsibilities.

"Could you manage the queue for a moment?" the woman asked.

Freya looked down at the clipboard.

There were twenty-six names, three columns, and no indication of what any of them meant.

"What am I managing?"

"The queue."

"Yes. For what?"

"The haunted house."

"Is there a capacity limit?"

"Forty, I think."

"You think?"

The woman looked toward the building behind her.

"Look, I'm sorry. We're having a difficult evening."

Freya examined the clipboard again.

She could already see four things wrong with it.

This was irritating.

She had not come to the Halloween festival to correct administrative deficiencies.

She had come because Sumi had purchased three tickets in August and announced, at dinner, that October thirty-first was now a contractual obligation.

Shira had objected.

Freya had pointed out that they were not contracts.

Sumi had explained that the tickets were nonrefundable.

Freya had asked how much they cost.

Shira had looked at her.

"Don't."

Freya had asked anyway.

And now she was standing outside a century-old theater wearing an ivory-and-gold costume, carrying a ceremonial spear, and attempting to determine whether the number twenty-six meant tickets sold, visitors admitted, or a theoretical estimate of the number of people currently hiding in the building.

Sumi had been at the summer festival for six minutes when she realized they were eating incorrectly.

“We need a plan,” she said.

Shira stopped beneath a string of paper lanterns.

“No.”

“You don’t know what the plan is.”

“You said we need one.”

Freya unfolded the festival map.

“What are we optimizing?”

“Food,” Sumi said.

Shira looked from one of them to the other.

“I’m going home.”

The festival occupied four blocks around the old town square. There were food stalls, musicians, local artists, children carrying glowing plastic swords, and a man on stilts dressed as what Sumi believed was either a heron or an extremely disappointed angel.

The air smelled of grilled corn, frying dough, woodsmoke, and sugar.

Sumi had already eaten half a plum pastry.

It did not count. She had bought it before realizing they needed a plan.

“We have to pace ourselves,” she explained. “If we eat the filling things first, we won’t be able to try everything.”

“We are not trying everything,” Shira said.

Sumi looked at her.

Shira wore a loose black dress despite the heat, black boots, and the expression of someone who had been brought to the festival as part of a court-ordered rehabilitation program.

“We can’t try literally everything,” Sumi conceded.

“Thank you.”

“There are two stalls selling kettle corn.”

Shira closed her eyes.

Freya was studying the map.

“We should begin with the north side,” she said. “Highest concentration of small portions. Then the eastern block before the dinner rush.”