In a Perfect World by Laura Kasischke

nodded at him, started up the car. “Yeah,” she said, and then, as an afterthought, quietly, “Sam, I think you’re not supposed to say ‘sucks.’” Wasn’t that one of the admonitions she’d heard Mark give him?
    Sam nodded with the infinite weariness of a very old child.
    They drove to the drugstore. The school receptionist had given Jiselle what looked to be a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a handout on head lice, and a list of the products you could buy to rid your child of them. Sam held that list in his hand beside Jiselle as she drove.
     
     
    It had rained hard the night before, and the weather—still like early autumn although it was the first week of November—had the feel of the tropics, although the leaves had fallen from most of the trees. Humid, bright air lingered over everything. Blue puddles of rain and oil dotted the drugstore lot. After she parked and picked up her purse, Sam said, “I don’t want to go in.”
    “No one can see them, Sam,” Jiselle said.
    “Mrs. Hicks saw them.”
    “No, she didn’t see them. She just—figured. Because you were itching.”
    “No,” Sam said. “She saw them.”
    Jiselle looked at Sam’s head.
    In truth, she thought perhaps she could see something black, and maybe moving, in the silky part in the hair at the top of his head.
    She said, “Okay. You can wait here if you want.”
     
     
    Inside the drugstore, Jiselle scanned the shelves for a few minutes for something with the word lice on it, until, finding nothing, she had to ask the girl behind the counter, who called across the store to the pharmacist, “Where’s the head lice stuff?” She felt relieved that Sam had waited outside.
    It took a minute or two, but the pharmacist came out from behind his glass cage and led Jiselle to the shelf for “pests and critters.” To get to it, they had to walk past the cardboard displays of flu “cures.” Life-size cut-outs of healthy-looking men and women holding bottles of Immune Master. Pink-cheeked children running across a green field overlaid with the words Dr. Springwell’s Secret!
    They made their way through the leftover Halloween costumes and candy and decorations displays, and a variety of gags, such as battery-operated plastic hands that scooted across the floor, tarantulas and bats on strings. That year had been like no Halloween Jiselle ever remembered, festive and commercial beyond anything she would have imagined for what had, at one time, been the simplest, briefest of holidays.
    Mark had been home Halloween weekend. He’d donned a top hat, Jiselle had worn one of his trench coats, with black sunglasses, and they’d walked door to door with Sam, who had dressed as a soldier. Red vest over a white T-shirt. White pants and black boots. A tall red hat with a blue feather in it. He’d carried a pillowcase. By the end of the night, it weighed forty pounds.
    Not only were the children out trick-or-treating that night, but adults were, too. Alone and in crowds, with their children and without, wearing elaborate costumes—beggars, prostitutes, Abe Lincolns, Grim Reapers—they were swigging from flasks, passing the flasks to strangers, exactly the kind of germ-sharing they were constantly warned against. But they were happy, friendly. Raucous with laughter and polite at the same time. Some of the houses in town had absurdly elaborate Halloween displays. Enormous inflatable cartoon animals on their front lawns. Hundreds of them. Pranksters had taken to stabbing them with screwdrivers and box cutters. All over town, deflated decorations littered lawns. Their owners, playing along with the pranks, erected tombstones over them. R.I.P. SCOOBY-DOO. HERE LIES SNOOPY, STABBED THROUGH THE HEART BY A HEARTLESS KILLER.
    There were light displays, too, and someone had strung naked baby dolls from telephone poles all along one street. Someone else had built a scaffold in the elementary school parking lot and hung an effigy of the president wearing a