text: [Themes: mystery / thriller, horror, action, fantasy, mystery]
  
  Matthew Mercia, that is your name. Remembering it usually isn't a challenge when you wake up, but today it is. Everything is a challenge today. Your body feels stiff, cold, and unresponsive; darkness is all you can see; claustrophobia has an intense grip on your mind. With great difficulty, you can move an arm. That means you haven't died--but it feels like you have.
  
  Sitting up is more of a challenge. Struggling for a moment you manage to break loose from whatever is holding you down and accomplish your petty goal. Your nose tingles as the distinct smell of the flower of the dead--Mexican marigolds--becomes pungent. Your mother is obsessed with the flowers. She keeps the essential oils infusing in the house constantly, and plants them in spades around both the house and Grandpa's grave.
  
  Usually, it is manageable except for in the fall. Although your Mexican heritage is more of an inconvenient skin coloring and convenient dinner influence to you; for your mother, it is a deeply rooted set of traditions and superstitions. She believes in planting the flowers so she has plenty of gifts for her late father in early November--on the day of the dead. Not that the dead care, they can not return to life. Everyone knows that death is the end, you may become nutrients for the grass, but you can't just come back and walk the earth in spirit-form. That is just ignorance that your mother will never shake.
  
  Standing up you vow to rip up her marigolds; the day of the dead has already passed this year. You certainly do not celebrate it, but it is the weekend after Halloween--a much better holiday where you can at least satisfy your sweet tooth. Although your friends refused to go with you, some even ridiculed you for being too old to participate in a child-like event at fifteen, you made out like a bandit. While your parents were participating in the All Souls Procession, you ended a wonderful holiday gorging yourself with assorted sweets.
  
  After that, your memory is admittedly fuzzy. Did you fall asleep on the couch again? Regardless the darkness is driving you mad. Searching for the light switch proves to be difficult. Your bedroom is not how you remember it; rather, it is only two feet from wall to wall on either side of you. The other two walls you can touch at the same time if you lay on your back with your feet on one and your arms stretched above your head to touch the other--perhaps eight feet in total.
  
  There is no door you can find; however, you do discover that there seems to be a ledge 6 feet above your head that you can reach. This ledge is cooler than the box you find yourself in, and as you pull your head up to it the darkness vanishes. Appearing before you is the sun of another beautifully mild evening in Arizona and a field of marigolds.
  
  You immediately recognize that you are roughly six feet from your grandfather's grave in the small local Tucson graveyard near your house. Heartbreaking sobs draw your attention to the end of the hole you found yourself in where your mother is kneeling in the dirt. Staring at her crying breaks your heart like it always does when you visit grandpa's grave the morning of the day of the dead. Your father stands behind her quietly, rubbing her shoulders with his large hands.
  
  That is when you realize they are not in front of your grandfathers grave. Wide-eyed you turn around completely; behind you is a fresh gravestone with your name on it--dated from your birthday to November second of this year. The world starts spinning and you fixate on your name etched in stone among your other dead relatives.
  
  "We should go, honey," your father says softly, still rubbing your mother's shoulders.
  
  Your mother continues to weep, but replies, "A year, my baby has been gone for a whole year!"
  
  "I know, honey, I know. We will celebrate them in the All Souls Procession tonight. You can make Matthew chicken enchiladas, he would like that"--with that your dad ushers your mother out of the graveyard; she only pauses to lay marigolds on your grandfather's grave on the way out.
  
  > climb out of grave.
  Climbing out of the grave is not as difficult as watching your parents grieve for you. Without a body, you feel extremely light making the task trivial. Your parents did not seem to notice you in the slightest, but you can not be dead--you are conscious after all.
  
  "Never thought you would be the next one to join us, Matthew," a familiar voice says somberly.
  
  Turning you come face to face with your late grandfather and namesake Matthew Garcia. Flabbergasted you respond, "Grandpa? That is impossible--you are dead."
  
  "I am afraid you are too, unfortunately."
  
  "How? Why?"
  
  "I don't know Chiquito, but I wouldn't worry about it. We only get one day now, today, the rest of the year we spend in the ground. I am sure you noticed that you haven't done much in the last year, it makes your joints stiff even if you are young. Worse still we do not get to rise until someone lays marigolds on our grave--thank god for your mother."
  
  With that, he turns to a similar-looking man who you only recognized from an old picture your mother keeps on the mantle--your great grandfather. Thinking of spending an entire day at a family reunion full of old people you have never met sounds like death, even if they are family. Turning back to your grave you see the black morph suit with glow in the dark bones painted on it that served as your Halloween costume last year--hand made by mama Mercia.
  
  Pulling the zipper up you know two things for a fact: you died in this costume and now you are going to get answers in it. You owe it to your loving parents and yourself. As you approach the exit of the graveyard The Urn, a steel receptacle where people can place messages to the dead to be burnt as an offering, passes by signaling the start of the all souls procession.
  
  Blending in is not a problem as there are many families following behind it; they are all dressed in elaborate costumes with face paint or masks and pull small altars dedicated to their ancestors. A part of the spectacle, and not out of place in the slightest, you are swept up into the current of grieving families. Several carry pictures of young children and toys belonging to them--the amount of deaths for kids between 8 and 15 has been unusually high in recent years.
  
  Unsure of where to start you are content following the crowd even as they enter Fairgrounds. While living your mother never joined the procession until after it passed by the seediest area in Tucson--she would always say only criminals lived there. You never followed this rule; especially since it was the neighborhood where you could collect the most candy the fastest while trick-or-treating.
  
  Fairgrounds is more worn-down than usual. Several buildings are abandoned, boarded up, or crumbling away. The Urn presses on, as do its followers. There is screaming, crying, laughing, dancing, and shouting--but something stands out among all of it.
  
  In a dark alley off Park St. a man stands alone watching the crowd in silence. His eyes shine with anticipation as he looks from child to child in the crowd adjusting a large bag he is carrying on his shoulder. Looking at you he freezes--fear overriding the excitement in his eyes as he glances at your recognizable costume and turns to walk away. Finally, a lead.
  
  > run after the man
  Breaking from the crowd you follow the shady figure wrapped in a trench coat down the isolated side street. Turning the man locks eyes with you again--he then turns and breaks into a dead sprint towards an industrial complex. Left with no choice you give chase; thankfully, you do not sweat or feel fatigued as you gain on your nefarious friend. Glancing over his shoulder he panics and ducks into an alley. Dark and narrow the alley looms before you--a place even criminals would hesitate to enter.
  
  Alive you would never enter the treacherous passage, but dead you suppose nothing worse can happen; even so, you pause at the mouth of the alley. With a deep breath, you force yourself to plunge into the pitch-blackness. Despite a significant head start, there is only one way your suspect could have gone; you soon find yourself standing in a dead-end with only a rusty set of double doors under a dim-red fog light.
  
  > open the door
  You have no choice--even rusted shut the door is the only place left to go. Hands shaking with trepidation you reach for the jagged broken half of the doorknob that remains on the door. Your hand passes through the doorknob initially, but you manage to get a hold of it; a grimace spreads across your face even though you can not feel the rusty steel on your hand. As you turn the knob your costume tears and the door does not open.
  
  Digging your heels into the ground you pull with all of your might; creaking open inches at a time the door wines in protest. Several minutes of struggling produces an opening you can barely fit through. Once inside you can see the hinges had been sprayed with something to make them stick; however, that is the least of your worries. This part of town was more run-down than the rest, yet inside these doors is a factory running at full tilt.
  
  Walking among the churning machinery your footsteps are drowned out by grinding gears, liquids boiling over several large furnaces, and large presses slamming onto the assembly line. Smoke blurs your vision--every turn you take you do so blindly. Screams in the distance hasten your step but turn out to just be a dying alarm system; finally, you reach the end of the assembly line. A conveyor belt is churning out small wrapped hard candies into a large oil-drum.
  
  Lining the walls are dozens of drums full of various shapes and sizes of candy--a few are empty or half-empty. No one is in sight, no one approaches you. Even as the drum at the end of assembly line overflows and starts to dump candy on the ground the building seems deserted. Until there is a sudden, frantic beeping, followed by a flash of intense light. Your costume catches fire as the plant around you explodes in an enormous fireball. Alarmed you scream, your voice echoing that of your mysterious friend who screams nearby.
  
  In the end, you never actually feel pain--just disappointment. Candy, factory, elusive villain, they are all gone; reduced to ashes by what you can only assume was a bomb. The All Souls Procession is stopped while the police investigate the charred remains of what was an old chemical processing plant. Nothing survived the blast--you checked. No answers, no explanations, you have nothing.
  
  All you can do is walk to The Urn where your mother and father have built you an altar with a letter. Taking that you leave to avoid your mothers weeping and return to the graveyard; there you sit with your grandfather and watch The Urn burn. Minutes before midnight you open the letter and cry as your mother tells you what you missed over the last year--for the first time you are thankful she stayed true to her heritage.