appeared originally in the Massachusetts Review

He was teaching art to his sixth graders. They were making papier mache masks for Halloween. He was thinking of the turning of leaves, the sunburst colors, the acrid scent of leaf rot and tannin, leaf stains on the sidewalk like paleolithic handprints. One of the boys had just painted both of his hands red with tempera--as though he'd dipped them in a bucket of blood; he was flashing them like spooked bats over the girls' heads. Some of the girls squealed in delighted fright, others laughed. He sent the boy to the vice-principal. The boy regarded him with resentment and disbelief as if Teacher had no sense of humor.

He, conscientious teacher, was tempted to say to them all, "What a stupid waste of paint!" but why be a bore?

The boys were making super-hero robot faces that looked to him like Kabuki masks. The girls were making cartoon teddy bear faces--inspired by the latest fad, the grinning teddy-face blazoned on their backpacks, their wristbands, their t-shirts, their water bottles.

The boys had grown silent, grimly intent on their painting. They were fantasizing, no doubt, about destruction wrought by their own super-heroic strengths.

The girls were chatting, painting purple bears, blue bears, pink bears. And fantasizing, no doubt, about dancing and magic: their brand of deliverance.

Will this never change? he wondered.

Then: the ghostly goggle-eyed vice-principal appeared at the window of the classroom door.

A startling sight.

Among the children, he was notorious for his stealthy approach.

Maybe he wanted a word about the hand-painter.

But the VP seemed reluctant to enter and, through the door's window, beckoned with raised brows and a slight nod.

The children watched with feigned disinterest.

Halloween was just a week away.

The VP had bad news--somehow this was clear.

II
When he found his wife at the hospital, she was sitting in a cubicle of the emergency ward. She wore a green smock, her feet were bare. She looked embarrassed.

He took her hand, kissed one hot cheek, kneeled beside her, their eyes meeting at last.

"They said you're all right," he began, "but--"

"It's stupid, really," she said.

He was aware of examining her, his eyes running over every limb, like checking his son after a fall.

No blood.

But the absence of visible wrong made the hairs on his arms stand on-end, his voice quaver, his fingers tremble as if he himself had just escaped a harrowing accident.

"It's my face," she said. "It stopped working."

He saw it now: half her face--the right side--was frozen. Paralyzed. How odd, how damaged, it made her look. When she attempted a smile, it was as if she were wearing a cruelly mocking mask. Bell's Palsy, the GP guessed, though a neurologist would have to confirm. It could be nothing.

Had she sat in front of an air-conditioner lately, received an uncommon chill? Bell's usually subsides in a few days. Or a few weeks. Unless it is the symptom of a tumor.

But that was unlikely.

"Let's hope it holds till Halloween," she said. This time, when she attempted a smile, a loop of saliva slipped over her lower lip.

III
One week and many tests later, it was Halloween and still half her face was frozen. On that side, she looked drowsy, doped. She was a good sport about it. Their son, seven, kept saying, "You look so weird, mom."

The doctors had ruled out a brain tumor. Bell's is a mystery, they insisted. The longer she remained frozen, however, the less likely her chance of recovery.

Every night before sleep, she would lay her head in his lap and he would drip saline solution--three drops--into her droopy-lidded eye to keep down the inflammation since she could not close the lid.

And now she made love with a desperate enthusiasm that both exhilarated and scared him. Did she know something he did not?

"We'll get to the bottom of this," he assured her.

"How deep would the bottom be?" she mused.

"Remember what my father used to say to me?"

"No," she said.

"When you hear hoofbeats behind you, what do you expect to see, horses or zebras?" He perceived the start of a smile in her lips.

"Depends where I am," she said.

"You should expect horses, of course."

"Oh, I see."

"Horses," he said again.

Sometimes she wore a patch over her afflicted eye. Their son loved the patch. "Wear it for Halloween!" he begged.

She did, with a broad-brimmed hat, a black body stocking, and a black cape that fluttered in the breeze. She needed help negotiating the stairs because, with the use of only one eye, she had poor depth-perception.

It was a blustery, cloudless night, a blue wedge of moon, dead leaves scuttering in sidewalk eddies. Nine years previous they had thought of getting married on Halloween but hadn't the patience to wait that long.

As they watched their son--a Ninja Ranger--run from door to door, he said, "We could have another child, don't you think?"

She raised her eye patch to get a better look at him and said, "I didn't know you were that scared."

He was terrified, he realized: he'd had it too easy.

IV
The next year, a week before Halloween, he was teaching another class of sixth graders. They were painting their papier mache masks. He had made one too. It was the face of Fate, he decided: inscrutable and half-palsied. The children said it was frightful, though he hadn't intended it to be.

His wife had long since recovered. The doctors could not explain how or why, the Bell's having subsided as mysteriously as it had appeared. He had thought that now--after their brief brush with catastrophe--everything would change for him, that he would enjoy life more fully, be more grateful for every moment with his wife and his son. But now they continued as before.

Sometimes he lost patience with his son, some days he did not want to talk with his wife. Her paralysis seemed no more than a fit of coughing that one soon forgets.

Only he had not forgotten.

Hence, the mask.

He thought he'd make her a gift of it but then thought otherwise. What was he trying to prove? Then he tried giving away the mask--which he had painted purple--but none of the children would take it, as if they knew that he had made something too weighty for their little heads. So, at the day's end, he threw it into the school Dumpster.

That night, lying beside his wife, who slept with a soundness he had come to envy, he imagined someone finding the mask and taking it home and wondering, maybe for years to come, What could have possessed the maker to create such a face, that drowsy right side, that odd half-smile?