[Wraith] Sugar Mortuary on the Table
The kitchen smells like cinnamon, burnt edges, and ambition,
a long table lined with gingerbread houses that look innocent from a safe distance,
tiny suburbs made of sugar where the frosting smiles too hard,
gumdrop roofs shining like they’re trying to distract you from something buried in the crumbs.
Kids stick their tongues out in concentration,
piping white icing along the corners like chalk lines around a very festive crime scene,
sprinkles raining down in bright colors over doorways that have seen things,
peppermint discs propped up as path stones nobody should follow after midnight.
Parents stand back, snapping pictures,
capturing the moment before someone realizes these little cottagesfeel more like traps than treats,
fairy-tale real estate listed with the same energy as “slightly haunted, great bones, will eat you.”
The first house sits front and center, walls thick with molasses,
windows cut out in perfect little squares of sugar glass that catch the tree lights,
behind them, shadows move that no one iced there,
tiny silhouettes of people who walked into the wrong story with the wrong hunger.
Inside, if you bite down slow enough,
you can hear something crack that isn’t just ginger,
a brittle echo in the back of your teeth like distant ribs.
Next to it, a cottage leans slightly to the left,
candy cane columns sweating red streaks down the sides,
roof sagging in the middle where too much icing tried to cover a structural lie,
gumdrops along the ridge like warning lights some kid mistook for decoration.
The recipe card swears this is all cheerful nostalgia,
but the clove and dark sugar tell a different story,
one where a witch made equity out of appetiteand the kitchen never quite cooled down.
In the far corner, someone built a whole village,
row after row of little ginger dwellings lined up like sugar headstones,
powdered sugar snow dusted across their frontsso you can’t see the fingerprints in the dough underneath.
A tiny gingerbread man stands in front of one house,
frosting smile a little too wide,
eyes two chocolate chips that don’t blink,
arms stuck in place like he’s mid-wave or mid-warning,
depending how honest you feel tonight.
Every candy window is a one-way mirror:you can look in, but if you chew your way through,
the house looks back at you from the inside,
cataloging which bite you took first—roof, door, wall,
like some sweet-toothed god of consequences taking notes.
The cinnamon burn at the back of your throat feels cozy at first,
then it sharpens,
a quiet reminder that you’re swallowing more than sugar here.
Somewhere, way back in the fairy tale tree line,
there’s still the memory of the first kid who smelled this same perfume of spice and promise,
who stepped off the path for just a second,
who thought “what’s the worst that can happen” and found out in layers.
Now every December we recreate the scene with extra sprinkles,
mass-produced mixes and YouTube tutorials called “Easy Haunted Gingerbread!”like horror and hospitality share the same oven.
We call it tradition, family bonding,
ignore the way the houses seem to lean in when the lights are low,
as if listening for which one of us will volunteer to be part of the original story.
The houses sit, growing stale and more menacing,
hardening day by day into something closer to bone than bread,
edges sharp enough to cut a tongue that lingers too long.
Sugar doesn’t stay innocent—it browns, it burns, it remembers fingers pressing it into shapes,
remembers mouths tearing those shapes apart.
By New Year’s, someone finally breaks the first roof,
laughing about diets starting “tomorrow, for real this time,”and the crack echoes down the row of candy chimneys like a signal.
We devour the neighborhood one chunk at a time,
crumbs scattering like tiny ghosts over paper plates,
a whole haunted subdivision reduced to sticky fingers and guilty smiles.
We call it dessert.
But somewhere under the peppermint sting and the icing crunch,
there’s the quiet feeling that we’ve just eaten a storyabout temptation dressed up with candy shutters and a caramel porch—and the story ate something out of us in return.