2022 Year

As we near the end of 2022 and reflect on this past year, we are so grateful to be a news provider in these amazing communities of Southwest Arkansas! For our 2022 year-end review, viewers will get to hear from your favorite SWARKansans about their favorite projects of the year and what made them so special! Today’s staff pick is from Jeff!

It was a lark to write my feature on the Halloween drive through Fair Park in the voice of Edgar Allan Poe filtered a bit through Vincent Price, and it was gratifying to shine a light on the efforts of local first responders and business folk to put on a show for kids and adults alike in Hope. Special mention should also go to my series on area teachers because of how extensively my subjects gave of their time and their experiences. These professionals contribute mightily to our communities and deserve as much recognition as we can muster.

WARNING: Some of the imagery and the images below will be disturbing, nay, even fatal, to sensitive readers and viewers. The very young and the very delicate of sensibility are urged not to read or scroll down.

. . . I arrived the back way, driving into Fair Park slowly westward. An officer in a beige uni- and vest bade me stop my Impala, my SWARKmobile, so he could ask me my business. “I’m a reporter,” I said, lifting the laminated pass that hung from a black ribbon around my neck. “Pass,” he said, as the cliché goes, gravely. And that’s when I realized this blackest of ribbons, holding a laser-printed amulet of my name, my station, was tightening. Indeed, tightening as a potential hint of my fate this half-mooned evening of Halloween 2022.

It was beside the Coliseum that I exited my maroon metal and chrome Chevrolet armor and from its backseat lifted my garment, a most sponge-like apparatus by way of a tunic whose texture would appear to all within sight of me like that of a most delicious cake whose anterior side showed two rounded orifices through which twin injections had been made of a most creamy but most assuredly non-dairy substance that was cloying and yet strangely satisfying to the taste. I thrust my upper appendages through its arm holes and was at last attired as a foodstuff neither vegetable nor flesh nor quite even baked good and one posing a certain effrontery to the people of Hope and Hempstead County as a reminder of what could have been, yet was not. I would walk the earth in the half-moon night as a Hostess Twinkie.

I headed north, toward what I had learned would be called the Halloween Drive-Through, being held under the auspices of the Hempstead County Sheriff’s Office, the Hope Police Department and, dare I say it, Pafford Medical Services. And, after a journey through darkness, past ghouls and golems carrying bags of what I knew to be freshly removed eyeballs, fingertips and severed noses, I joined a staggering sum of no longer human creaturedom.

First, I thought I saw a Santa Claus guarding the pathway, but this could only be a vision my cream-filled center conjured to slow my pulses. In reality, half-transformed wolfpersons drifted in my path, clowns with bloody mouths, clones of Jason Voorhees loomed with bloody knives (for what is Monday October 31 but an inverted Friday the 13?). All looked at me in ominous curiosity, followed by what was surely a demonic hunger. I walked briskly alongside a column of cars and trucks filled with parents and children. Innocent though they all may have been, they would have their punishment in the series of tableaux their headlights imperfectly lit alongside Fair Park. As would I.

First, I beheld the result of a massacre committed by graveyard light, with at least a dozen cut in their prime and lying mouldering as the wind teased their now inexorably cold and thread-worn cloaks. There’d be no burial, no dignity for these unlucky. Then, amid more skeletal inhabitants I beheld a veritable ghost king of the fallen, its mouth aghast as real screams erupted from its maw as the recently claimed souls of the blackest reaches exclaimed at the first play of eternal flames creeping up from their feet to their shins to their . . .

Next, I saw an outdoor hospital, its staff dancing in fanatical delight, their formerly white clothes besmirched with the blood and brains of patients, some brought full of hope of healing or surgical relief to see the doctors, but now moribund, dismembered, lying glistening with exposed viscera and brain matter. I trudged on, resolved to continue to avoid red meat in my diet. And other twinkies. I think I walked by one Freddie Kruger. He wanted to know my dreams.

Parked between the court of the king of death and the Arthur Conan Doylean scene to its north was a stalled ambulance, utterly vacated by its crew, but one figure remaining, its legs tethered to the stretcher and its pale hands holding a morsel of some sort, from which the lone creature took bites. I am not tempted to look closer.

But oh, I trail off of necessity, for I have walked out of its sight and out of range of the noise to speed my way past a ridge in the earth in which crouch, snarling, expectant, three dark hounds with eyes that are of flame and teeth that are of whitest finality. Their muzzles reach for my artificial preservative-laden body, but I am fleet and step lively.

All the while, cars, trucks and—gasp!—SUVs, each full of innocents I am sure, cruise past, confronted with the surreal vision of a snack cake seemingly floating by the kind of sights audiences once paid what are considered today minor fees to behold on a vast screen next to Patmos Road, but which are now all too three-dimensional, all too alive with the sound of chainsaws spinning, wielded by representatives of the late Mr. Leatherface, move along to their final destination.

The weird sisters of the Hope Junior Auxiliary and their costumed familiars stood just before the cars reached the curve around the abandoned Fair Park Pool building handing out to any driver who dared stop a large quantity of . . .

The blur begins to clear from my vision as the fog recedes. I see they’re handing out handfuls of candy! Kit-Kat Bars! Starbursts! Even the succulent and much sought-after Milk Duds. Christie Burns of the Junior Auxiliary and—I tell you—of the Hope-Hempstead County Chamber of Commerce, told me she had seen many vehicles afraid to roll their windows down, so frightened were their drivers. Not even for Sweet Tarts would they face their terror!

And as for me, I am undone. O, I am toppled. No ordinary twinkie can contend, let alone one as stale as myself. Not even if I were Pumpkin Spice flavored could I compete with the caramel delight, the surprisingly full-flavored fruitiness, the chocolate coating and cookie solidity, the . . .

Oh, I shall perish!

I made my escape as best I could. But at the Hope Public Schools Trunk and Treat event, I reappeared, sating my crumbly ego by startling youngsters who, at the sight of me made such confessions of their fright as, “Oh, that guy’s a Twinkie,” or “That flash is too bright” or “Will I be in the paper?” as I used my camera to document what I assumed would be my success in inspiring gasps and screams among the other night creatures. Didn’t happen.

But as I made my way northward and home, my Impala and SWARKmachine passing a slow line of cars, trucks and diesel rigs going south, Orson and H.G.’s War playing out from Texarkana’s KTXK, I realized I had survived to tell my tale. In my apartment, I took up this tablet, and I wrote . . .