Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology
Page 20
Plaster crumbled into his eyes as Pa hammered, and Pa leaned into the cot and rubbed away some of the grit with his sleeve. Ma said, ‘Turn over, silly creature.’
He pulled himself on to his face until the hammering was over. ‘That’ll keep it fast,’ said Pa, and his mouth twitched at Ma as he jerked his head at the places where the Minkeys lived.
Ma nodded and she said in the little voice he was not meant to hear, ‘He doesn’t mind the rats.’
Loudly, she said, ‘You don’t mind the Mickey Mouses, love. You’re too big to be afraid of them. ’
He smiled at Ma, though the plaster was still hurting his eyes. She meant the Minkeys.
They lived high up and they had fur on their bodies and long tails. And when the dark came and Ma and Pa went to bed, the Minkeys ran about inside the ceiling; sometimes they scratched on the floor below the cot. But when it was light they never came.
‘There’s plenty of room in that stocking,’ said Pa and he laughed. Ma laughed too, and then she said to Pa, ‘Coming now?’ and Pa said, ‘Yes, the usual?’
Ma counted her money again and smiled. ‘We can celebrate tonight. ’
‘He’ll have the house to himself,’ said Pa.
‘Why aren’t there any other people now?’ he asked from the cot.
Pa laughed. ‘They thought there were too many Mickey Mouses.’
‘Oh, it’ll be closing time before you come!’ Ma shouted.
When they had gone, everything was still, only the candle flickering softly.
He looked up at the stocking, hanging straight from the beam; it might have a bulge in it by morning.
He sang to himself in the cot, faintly, a little song that turned out to be about the Minkeys; their strange ways, their quietness and their scuttling walk.
He listened to the noise of ships on the distant river, and wondered why his legs would not move, although he was five.
He wondered about Christmas, and why it was not in the summer.
He wondered about many things, and shivered and tried to screw himself up.
There was a tiny sound in the ceiling; a faint scraping noise as if somebody very small was shifting their feet. That would be a Minkey.
There came another little sound, and another, and presently a soft slither as if something had jumped on to the beam above. The Minkeys were coming out.
He looked up towards the dark ceiling, and saw the green glimmer of two tiny eyes, and then two more and then others.
The ceiling was full of a rustling and scuttling, as it always was when the house became still.
Minkeys didn’t like you to see them.
A loose nail tumbled from above and clattered on the floor.
He saw that the whole wide beam was bulging on each side, and that the bulges were moving and changing; often a long tail twitched and curled.
Everywhere was a scratching and the little squeaky sound of Minkeys’ talk, like the talk of the yellow bird that died, only quicker and sharper.
Suddenly it stopped.
He looked upwards again, and the flickering eyes peeped down from the beam. He saw that the long Daddy Christmas stocking was moving, swaying from side to side, and jerking. It seemed to have thickened at the place Pa had tied it to the beam; then it had thickened lower down, and lower.
And there was a Minkey, clinging to the stocking, and slowly dropping. Its eyes twinkled as it swung and its head shot this way and that.
He could smell the dark smell of the Minkey very close.
When the furry body had reached the end of the stocking, it hung curled upside down; and its tail twisted here and there, feeling the folds in the stocking. He started with the quickness of the Minkey’s jump. For all at once the stocking was tossing empty, and the Minkey crouched on the foot of the cot, watching him.
But when he looked back at the stocking there were three more Minkeys climbing down, swinging like the first one. Yet there was no noise at all.
The Minkeys jumped on to the edge of the cot, one by one; and others took their place at the top of the stocking. They climbed down quickly, and many more bodies bobbed along the beam above.
The first Minkey crouched, and jumped into the cot.
He could feel its weight gently pressing the bedclothes down, and at the same time there was a small, cold feeling inside his head. But he was not afraid of furry Minkeys.
He held out his hand gently towards the first one. It did not move. Then suddenly there was a little sharp pain in his finger and he pulled it back.
The Minkey stared at him, with black, round eyes like the end of Ma’s hat-pin.
There was a tiny red bead on his finger that was salt when he tasted it.
And everywhere was full of Minkeys and strange with the smell and warmth of them. All the whiskers and eyes and pointed faces moved together. They went ‘Now—now—now,’ like the bumping of the heart inside his chest.
There was a gentle weight on him.
He looked down. The first Minkey sat on his chest, watching his eyes with its own.
His hands were as log-heavy as his legs.
He saw its mouth open, narrow and sharp and pale; it gave one shrill cry of Minkey talk.
And instantly the whole room turned to hot, leaping fur. Squealing and tearing and chattering and biting.
Mercedes M. Yeardley
HEARTLESS
“IT’S SNOWING OUTSIDE and I would like to sleep in your bed, please.”
The voice was unfamiliar and she turned over to see who was speaking.
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t look at me.”
He sounded so reasonably polite and yet so cold that she quickly resumed her hunched position.
“Who are you?” she asked. She was strangely calm. She felt pleased to feel any emotion at all.
“I only want to sleep. Nothing else.” He slid under the covers on the empty side of the bed. There was no pillow there. She felt the heat radiate from his skin, and was vaguely grateful for it. She had caught a chill two Christmases ago and it had never gone away.
She should leap from the bed and run screaming for the door. She should fight for her life if he chose to steal it. But was it worth fighting for? Her eyelids were already starting to droop. Unusual, considering that she generally stared at the shadowy walls until the early hours of morning.
“You’re not going to tell me who you are?”
“Does it matter?” he asked.
No. She supposed that it didn’t.
“Would you like a pillow?” She was starting to slur her words, and she heard the smile in his voice. It was not reassuring.
“I’m fine, thank you. You should really go to sleep.”
She drifted away before he had finished talking.
* * *
The next morning she woke up refreshed for the first time since her husband’s death. She sat up quickly and looked at the other side of the bed, but it was empty. The blankets had been disturbed, although whether by her nightmares or a visitor, she couldn’t tell.
“Odd,” she said, and rummaged around in her dresser for her exercise gear. She hadn’t gone running in months.
When she returned, she showered and went about her day until night relentlessly fell again. She read cookbooks and scrubbed bathtubs and did everything that she could think of to fill her time, but eventually she slid a soft nightshirt over her head, brushed her teeth, and climbed into bed. She turned on her side and stared at the wall. An hour passed.
She pulled her knees up to her chest, but still shivered.
“You always seem to be cold.”
She started, but before she could turn toward the voice it said, “Remember that you are not to look at me, please.”
“But why not?” she asked, carefully keeping her back to him. She felt him slide into the bed.
“It’s personal.”
“And this isn’t?”
There was a pause before the voice said, “Would you rather that I leave?”
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She thought about it for a while. It would be much wiser to ask him to go. But Christmas was coming, and she couldn’t bear to be alone for it. And quite frankly, she didn’t have much to lose.
“No, you can stay. But,” she said evenly, “are you going to kill me?”
“Not at the moment, no. Although it wouldn’t really upset either one of us if I did, now, would it?”
She didn’t answer. He didn’t expect her to. He counted her breaths—one, two, three—and then she was asleep.
* * *
The next night he brought her some holly. The night after that, he left her a dead bird. She became used to him and realized with mild surprise that the faint alarm bells going off were so quiet and listless that they were easy to ignore. It seemed almost normal, their brief minute of conversation and then sleep. She didn’t even keep her back to him anymore, but merely closed her eyes when he entered so as to give him the privacy that he demanded. Sometimes she caught a faint, coppery smell, but it was almost familiar and not too unpleasant, so she put it out of her mind. She put everything out of her mind. It wasn’t at all difficult to do.
One night he said to her, “You miss your husband.” It was simply stated, but not necessarily heartless.
She slid her hand into his, and didn’t care when he didn’t close his fingers around hers.
“We’re all going to die,” she said. Her voice was quiet and steady.
He took her hand, pulled it up to rest on his heart. She felt the heat from his skin, but no movement beneath his ribs.
“Yes,” he said. He pulled her fingers to his mouth and kissed them, one by one. “Yes, you are.”
“You sound sad,” she said. She buried her face into his shoulder and sighed. She thought of her father, how he must smell in his grave now. She wondered if he felt the cold or saw the poinsettias that she left for him.
“I might be sad,” he said. His voice sounded like the wind. She didn’t notice the tears running down her face.
“What do you want from me?” she asked him softly. She remembered holding her best friend’s wrists together in high school, the blood running over her hands. The warmth of it had been startling.
He was silent for a long time. He rubbed his chin against the side of her face. She stared at the ceiling, thinking of the moment that she had heard Eric had shot himself in junior high. His brother always fed Eric’s kittens to their dogs.
“Do you think that you could love me?” he asked.
She knew worms crawled through her husband’s eyes. They had been light green.
“The things that I think when I’m with you…” Birds pecking holes in her skin.
“I know,” he said. “I think that I am sorry. It is the nature of things.”
She held her breath. He smelled of death and all things abandoned. She couldn’t hear him breathe.
“Would you want me to love you?” she asked him.
He didn’t speak again. Not for several more nights.
She began showering every day. Brushing her hair. She pulled the worn box of holiday decorations out and slowly put them up. They glittered and it was almost beautiful.
“Blood,” she said one evening. His hand wrapped around hers. “It’s blood that I smell on you.”
“Yes.”
“I want to ask. But you wouldn’t tell me, would you?”
“No.”
“Then don’t ask me to love you.”
The next time that he came, her hair had grown two inches. She had stopped eating and had lost more pounds than her frame could afford. The holiday decorations adorned the walls and mantel, just in time for Christmas. She hadn’t taken them down since he’d left her last year.
“I can’t seem to sleep without you,” she said. “Why would that be?”
He ran his fingers along her cheekbone, into the gaunt hollows underneath.
“I do not know,” he said. “But you are unwell. That is why I am here.”
She turned onto her back, stared at the ceiling.
“I hear carols in my head. That’s supposed to be a good thing, yes?”
He didn’t say anything. The warmth of his body slowly melted her chill.
She turned into his side, rested her head on his still chest. She grabbed his shirt with both hands.
“For a while, I thought that you were Kristopher coming back. That somehow…”
“I am not your husband.”
“I know that now.”
He ran his hand down her hair.
“I could…find him for you. If you wanted. He wouldn’t be the same, but I could—”
“No,” she said, and he fell silent.
“I could love you,” she said.
He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at his face. His eyes were hot blackness, but she reached out her hand and laid it on his cheek. Her skin felt like it was singeing. She nearly winced.
“I am of the darkness,” he warned. “I can only bring horror.” His teeth were sharp, but she couldn’t blame him for that. It wasn’t his doing.
“Horror is relative,” she said, and smiled at him for the first time. When he smiled back, her heart only dropped a little.
Kurt Vonnegut
WHILE MORTALS SLEEP
IF FRED HACKLEMAN and Christmas could have avoided each other, they would have. He was a bachelor, a city editor, and a newspaper genius, and I worked for him as a reporter for three insufferable years. As nearly as I could tell, he and the Spirit of Christmas had as little in common as a farm cat and the Audubon Society.
And he was like a farm cat in a lot of ways. He was solitary, deceptively complacent and lazy, and quick with the sharp claws of his authority and wit.
He was in his middle forties when I worked for him, and he had seemingly lost respect not just for Christmas but for government, matrimony, business, patriotism, and just about any other important institution you could name. The only ideals I ever heard him mention were terse leads, good spelling, accuracy, and speed in reporting the stupidity of mankind.
I can remember only one Christmas during which he radiated, faintly, anything like joy and goodwill. But that was a coincidence. A jailbreak happened to take place on December twenty-fifth.
I can remember another Christmas when he badgered a rewrite girl until she cried, because she’d said in a story that a man had passed on after having been hit by a freight train.
“Did he get up, dust himself off, giggle, and pass on to wherever he was headed before his little misunderstanding with the locomotive?” Hackleman wanted to know.
“No.” She bit her lip. “He died, and—”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place? He died. After the locomotive, the tender, fifty-eight loaded freight cars and the caboose rolled over him, he died. That we can tell our readers without fear of contradiction. First-rate reporting—he died. Did he go to Heaven? Is that where he passed on to?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Well, your story says we do know. Did the reporter say he had definite information that the dead man is now in Heaven—or en route? Did you check with the man’s minister to see if he had a ghost of a chance of getting in?”
She burst into tears. “I hope he did!” she said furiously. “I tried to say I hoped he did, and I’m not sorry!” She walked away, blowing her nose, and paused by the door to glare at Hackleman. “Because it’s Christmas!” she cried, and she left the newspaper world forever.
“Christmas?” said Hackleman. He seemed baffled, and looked around the room as though hoping someone would translate the strange word for him. “Christmas.” He walked over to the calendar on the wall, and ran his finger along the dates until he came to the twenty-fifth. “Oh—that’s the one with the red numbers. Huh.”
But the Christmas season I remember best is the last one I spent with Hackleman—the season in which the great crime was committed, the robbery proclaimed by Hackleman, gleefully, as the most infamous crime in the history of the city.
He called me over to his desk. “It isn’t right that all of the honors that pour into these offices every day should be shared only by management,” he said. “It’s to you, the working stiffs, that the honors really belong.”
“That’s very kind of you,” I said uneasily.
“So, in lieu of the raise which you richly deserve, I am going to make you my assistant.”
“Assistant city editor?”
“Bigger than that. My boy, you are now assistant publicity director of the Annual Christmas Outdoor Lighting Contest. Bet you thought I wasn’t even aware of the brilliant, selfless job you’ve been doing for the paper, eh?” He shook my hand. “Well, here’s your answer. Congratulations.”
“Thanks. What do I do?”
“The reason executives die young is that they don’t know how to delegate authority,” said Hackleman. “This should add twenty years to my life, because I hereby delegate to you my full authority as publicity director, just tendered me by the Chamber of Commerce. The door of opportunity is wide open. If your publicity makes this year’s Annual Christmas Outdoor Lighting Contest the biggest, brightest one yet, there’ll be no ceiling on how high you can rise in the world of journalism. Who’s to say you won’t be the next publicity director of National Raisin Week?”
“I’m afraid I’m not very familiar with this particular art form,” I said.
“Nothing to it,” said Hackleman. “The contestants dangle colored electric lights all over the fronts of their houses, and the man whose meter goes around fastest wins. That’s Christmas for you.”
As a dutiful assistant publicity director, I boned up on the history of the event, and learned that the contest had been held every year, except for the war years, since 1938. The first winner won with a two-story Santa Claus, outlined in lights on the front of his house. The next winner had a great pair of plywood bells, outlined in lights and hung from the eaves, which swung back and forth while a loudspeaker concealed in the shrubbery went ding-dong.