Guide to Being a Grown-Up

buy a pumpkin. take out its guts. disembowel it. save the seeds for toasting and adding to a questionable soup-stew. cook porridge in the pumpkin, with milk and apples and cinnamon. spoon out the porridge-pudding when steaming, each eager feaster manned with their own teaspoon. scoop the semi-soft pumpkin flesh, making perfect circles. play with a sparker-lighter, throw shards of spiky light. burn plastic-coated business cards in the holey pumpkin-husk out in the garden. add lighter fluid and burn some more. add phlegm-soaked tissues of ill people to the flames to try and burn burn burn the damned plastic. conduct a voodoo ritual around the burnt-orange, orange-flamed pumpkin. sing 'Burn Baby, Burn' into the dark. smell satisfyingly of lighter fluid all night, the stench stuck to wool jumpers.

a pumpkin should come with the keys to a starter home. they are for grown-ups.