Gabriel Jeroschewitz, September 30th^, 2025, a little Halloween story?

“YES, I AM ANGRY!” Mrs. Sexo Thingy’s voice cracked across the stone square like a whip.

It was a Tuesday evening in Nettlesham, which is to say it was already doomed.

Tuesdays in our village carried a curse of their own—the sort of dull vexation that couldn’t be exorcised by whiskey nor explained by weather. The older adults said it was because Tuesdays had neither the optimism of Mondays nor the relief of Fridays. It was a day designed solely for arguments. And oh, how we argued.

This explains why I found a great huddle around the fountain, shouting purple over garden gnomes when I arrived in the town square after sundown.

Yes, gnomes. The Gardiner Gnomes, to be precise.

You might think plaster statuettes of squat men in floppy hats hardly warrant blood feuds, but Nettlesham was no ordinary village. Here, quarrels were the chief currency, and grievances were collected like stamps. Nobody spoke of football scores or weather patterns. No, here we catalogued offences like genealogists of spite. And the gnome dispute—well, that had metastasized into something larger than anyone could quite name.

At the center of the square, standing like duelists ready to stab one another with words, were two pairs of local celebrities.

On one side: Mr. and Mrs. Sexo Thingy.
Every conversation with them felt slightly indecent, though they rarely said anything improper. Their mere existence seemed an innuendo in search of a punchline. Mrs. Sexo Thingy, red-cheeked and stern, had a voice made for scolding bishops. Meanwhile, Mr. Sexo Thingy was a man who looked like he’d been misdelivered by fate—perpetually confused, vibrating with some low-level tension, like a tuning fork that never quite stopped ringing.

On the other side: Mr. and Miss Death.
Now, the Deaths were dangerous. Not because they wielded scythes—though rumour said they owned some—and not because they exuded dread, but because they were unearthly good-looking. Mr. Death, in his immaculate tailored coat and alabaster skin, radiated punctual doom. In her red high heels and fingernails sharp enough to lift the veil between worlds, Miss Death was the beauty that made people forget what they’d been saying mid-sentence. She carried her allure like a loaded revolver, and she never missed.

And the matter of dispute?

The Gardener Gnomes.

Recently, those poor statuettes had been stolen, daubed with vulgar graffiti, repainted with garish smiles, marched through Main Street as if in a parody of a military parade, and deposited in various hedgerows. By now, they were fewer in number than hostages. And tonight’s argument wasn’t about who had committed the acts. No, tonight’s fight was about what they meant.

“YES, I AM ANGRY!” Mrs. Sexo Thingy’s voice cracked across the stone square like a whip. Even the pigeons froze mid-step.

She stood trembling, bun unravelling, her chest heaving. It was not the anger of hysteria but of accumulation—the kind of fury that grows barnacle by barnacle over decades until the hull finally snaps.

“I’m angry that my hands have been forced time and again,” she declared, shrill with righteousness, “that I exhaust myself doing what is right while others—” she glared daggers at Miss Death’s scarlet nails “—serve only themselves!”

Her husband nodded solemnly, as if his entire life had been training for this moment. “What my wife means,” he intoned in his quivering basso, “is that the Gardiner Gnomes represent respect. Boundaries. Trust! They were not just garden ornaments; they were a covenant!”

The villagers gasped. A covenant! In Nettlesham, words like that were dangerous.

Miss Death tilted her head, purring. “Darling. They were plaster lumps in silly hats. One held a plastic fishing rod. You humans are so eager to forge religion out of resin.” She tapped her nail against her teeth with feline indifference. “You project fragility onto figurines; when they crack, so do you.”

Somewhere in the crowd, an older woman fainted. Projection was the gravest possible insult in Nettlesham society—tantamount to declaring someone soiled linen. The tension rose; I swear even the cathedral gargoyles leaned forward, eager for blood.

Mrs. Sexo Thingy’s face shone with the sheen of imminent combustion. “Apologies without change are meaningless!” she bellowed. “You painted over the Gnome Father’s beard and smirked! That was gaslighting!”

“Oh, darling,” Miss Death snorted. “Gaslight. Candlelight. LED lighting. It doesn’t matter. The gnomes were mirrors, not idols. You didn’t love them—you merely plastered your grief onto them.”

Now the crowd murmured dangerously. In Nettlesham, the phrase you plastered your grief was practically a duel-by-dawn challenge.

Through all this, Mr. Death stood still, patient as an undertaker waiting for a coffin lid to settle. At last, he spoke, and his voice rolled smooth as oil across the cobblestones.

“You are not angry about gnomes,” he said. “You are angry that you trusted. You are angry that you opened your heart to plaster, people, and possibility. And when that trust broke, so did you. That is not our doing.”

His words slithered into the square like smoke. A few villagers wept quietly, ashamed at how neatly their souls had been summarized. But Mrs. Sexo Thingy was not cowed.

“Yes!” she roared, spreading her arms like wild evangelists. “YES, I am angry! Angry at takers, destroyers, and those who harm and walk away! And yes—I am angry at myself, for trusting without discernment. But this anger—” her voice splintered into something raw, “—is my messenger. My grief dressed in fire! It tells me where the distance lies and warns me: never again will I grant my vulnerability to those who mock it! Never again will I whisper across a canyon!”

The silence that followed was excruciating. Even the wind held its breath. Her bun tumbled down like a curtain-fall, gray strands wild against her flushed cheeks.

And something happened then that I had never seen before: Miss Death faltered. Just for an instant, that perfect smirk wavered.

Mr. Death, unfazed, began clapping—a slow, deliberate applause. “Well said,” he murmured, with genuine admiration. “Most mortals thrash and sputter, but you… You have given your anger new work. That is rare.”

The crowd whispered like dry leaves.

I thought then of the Professor—our village’s unofficial philosopher, who specialized in eavesdropping and unsolicited wisdom. He once explained that people shout when angry because their hearts have grown distant. The louder they shout, the greater the distance. When they love, they whisper, for their hearts are close.

And indeed, I noticed it now—the Sexo Thingys and the Deaths, with every bitter word, had been physically stepping farther apart. The square stretched between them like a canyon, wide enough for pigeons and children to wander through unnoticed.

Perhaps that is why Mrs. Sexo Thingy’s declaration struck so hard. It wasn’t rage anymore; it was the tearing down of a bridge that had already crumbled.

Of course, none of this solved the gnome problem.

The Gardiner Gnomes, in case you’re wondering, were never recovered. Weeks later, they turned up in a pawnshop three towns over, their paint half-scrubbed, their eyes scratched hollow. The Gardiners bought a pair of flamingo statues instead and claimed they liked them better. (No one believed them, but that is marriage for you.)

In the end, the fight was never about lawn ornaments. It was about armour, what we wrap around ourselves to survive, and what happens when that armour cracks.

As the crowd began to disperse, shaken but satisfied, I overheard the Professor whispering to a wide-eyed pupil:

“Do you see now? Anger always shouts because it wants to be heard across the distance. But shouting never closes the gap. Only the truth whispered can. Sometimes only silence.”

The boy nodded, though children rarely understand until they, too, shrieked in a square over stolen plaster, realizing it was never about the gnomes at all but the yawning cavern between two hearts, where jealousy scuttled like a rat.

That, dear reader, is the thing about Nettlesham: every quarrel is a horror show dressed as comedy. The laughter tastes like ash, the arguments smell faintly of grave dirt, and the echoes linger like whispers from beneath the soil when the crowd goes home.

And when I left that night, I could not help but feel the gnomes were still watching.

They were always watching.