“He needs to pay,” the girl hissed. She removed the scarf from around her neck, revealing a festering, open sore that belched blood and pus when she tilted her chin back.
“Oh, he will,” replied her father.
The three of them formed a line, and Dorian watched in horror as the air around them shuddered. Their faces twisted, gyrating like putty. Their brows crumpled and their noses scrunched, becoming almost batlike. Teeth exploded from their mouths, rows of razor-sharp tusks that jutted from now-ruined lips. Their eyes became yellow, glowing in the darkness. They opened their jaws wider than humanly possible, and from their maws slithered long, snake-like black tongues.
“Yes,” said the creature who had once been Paul. “For centuries we have tried to be good, have tried to behave. But people like you keep dragging us back in. Tell me, do you like what you’ve unleashed?”
Dorian screamed, and the three monsters charged.
Pain filled him as jagged teeth pierced through his thick Santa suit and his flesh. Chunks were ripped out of him, and his blood poured onto the carpet. He tried to yell out for help, but more teeth punched into his jugular, severing it from his neck. He gurgled and choked on his own life’s essence. It flowed from his nose, his mouth, from every gaping wound.
“Wait,” a voice stated.
Paul looked normal again, though his lips were frayed. The man stood up and backed away from the frenzy. He considered Dorian with a cockeyed glance and then leaned over the bed. Dorian watched as he tore the binds from Bethany’s wrists and ankles. He didn’t have to remove the tape from her mouth, however. The girl had grown tusks, just like the rest of her family, ripping through the tape. She clicked her oversized teeth together and crept across the bed. The remnants of the tape flapped on either side of her mouth. The cavernous hole in her stomach opened and closed along with her jaws. She held in her intestines with one hand.
Paul grabbed the knife off the bed and tossed it to his wife. Margaret held it in front of Dorian’s eyes. His vision was going hazy on him as he bled out, but the fear was still very, very real.
“One good turn deserves another,” the mother said, the corners of her tattered lips curling in a smile.
She plunged the knife into Dorian’s stomach, echoing the wound he’d given her daughter. Then the family stepped aside, allowing little Bethany to enter the fray. Her glowing yellow eyes glared at him, her massive teeth clacked together, her long tongue slithered in and out.
Bethany sank her face into the gash her mother had opened up. Her head thrashed like a shark, ripping at his entrails, puncturing his kidney, severing his spine. Blood cascaded around her.
“Just take enough to heal yourself,” said Paul as Dorian’s world went black. “We still need something to decorate the tree with, after all.”
Michael Ian Black
CHRISTMAS, 1976
MOM WAS A feminist and a lesbian. When we were kids, her feminism manifested itself in all kinds of ways. Mostly it was a lot of badmouthing men, and saying high-minded things like, “I think men should have to wipe themselves after they go to the bathroom, too.” This is not to say that all feminism equals man-hating. Not at all. It just so happens that my mom’s version of feminism did. And she certainly didn’t hate all men. She liked Alan Alda.
Aside from subscribing to various feminist periodicals and throwing around the name “Gloria Steinem,” she was not particularly politically active, although for years, we had an inexhaustible supply of blue note cards that we used for jotting down phone numbers and grocery lists; on the reverse of each card was an exhortation to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the feminist’s Holy Grail. I think my mom was supposed to hand out these cards to friends, neighbors, passersby. I don’t remember her ever handing out one. The ERA died in 1979, but I think my mom is still using those cards to this day. She is no longer quite the ardent feminist she was in days gone by, but she is still an ardent lesbian.
My parents split up when I was five, in 1976, and we moved into my mom’s partner’s house. That was my first lesbian Christmas, which was no different than other Christmases except that we started referring to Santa’s wife as Ms. Claus. It was also my first blended Christmas – the first Christmas with Arlene and her son Greg, in addition to my brother and sister. So the six of us were in new surroundings and as a result, the holiday took on extra weight that year. Would this year live up to Christmases past? Would Santa even know where I was living? These were the questions I grappled with that winter – not why is my mom making out with another lady. Oddly enough, that thought never even crossed my mind.
I have no idea what I told my mom I wanted for Christmas that year. The truth is, I was indifferent to most entertainments; mostly I just liked running around screaming, but that’s not the kind of thing you can buy. As such, maybe it was hard for my mom to think of something to get me for Christmas.
(A note: yes, I am Jewish. But I am a bad Jew. This is not my fault. Either you are raised with religion or not. We were not. Neither of my parents were observant Jews, and made no effort to give us kids any religious training. While this was regrettable in terms of imparting to us an understanding of our selves in the larger context of our religion’s rich history, it was great for one important reason – Christmas. We had the fake tree, the stockings, the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, and a neglected menorah in the kitchen that we often forgot to light. Bad, bad Jews.)
When Christmas morning finally arrived, I was shocked and astounded to discover an enormous box under the Christmas tree with my name on it. It was easily the biggest of all the Christmas presents that year. As such, it was also obviously the best Christmas present. And it was for me. When you are five, size really does matter. Bigger always means better, and in this turbulent year, I couldn’t believe that something was finally breaking my way. I had no idea what that big box could contain.
The box was probably about the size of a small television set. There was no way it could have been a television set, though. I don’t care how progressive you are, you don’t give a five year old his own television set. Plus, back then, the only TV sets that size were black and white, and who would want one of those? Not me. No, I knew it wasn’t a TV. It wasn’t a remote controlled race track because it wasn’t flat. Too big to be a model car or even a model airplane. Too big to be anything I could possibly think it could be. I was freaking out.
Now that I am older, I have my own son. When he was five years old, the wrapping paper on a mystery present would not have lasted two seconds. Had he seen some giant box with his name on it, he would not, could not, have waited to open it because he did not, and still does not, understand the concept of delayed gratification. If something is to be enjoyed, it is to be enjoyed NOW. Which leads me to believe that my son is a hedonist.
I, however, was very mature for my age, and instinctively understood that savoring the mystery was part of the fun. I distinctly remember wanting to save that package for last. I wanted to wait to open up that big beautiful box until, not only did I have nothing else to unwrap, but nobody had anything else. I wanted it to be the last Christmas present opened, period. To accomplish this, I paced myself opening my other presents, unwrapping them as slowly as I could, keeping a careful eye on the diminishing pile of gifts beneath the tree. I can recall none of the other gifts Santa and Ms. Claus gave me that year. None. But I remember exactly what was in that box.
Even now, as I write this, I can still feel a little tremble of excitement as I started tearing off the paper, all eyes upon me. I can still feel the delicious, seething jealousy oozing in my direction from my brother and Greg. (My sister has Down’s Syndrome, and so is never jealous of anybody, not even brothers who are lording their incredibly cool Christmas present over her.) And then, finally, the Christmas Present to End All Christmas Presents was revealed.
It was an Easy Bake Oven.
I was crushed. What boy wants an Easy Bake Oven? Answer: no boy. If a boy wants to cook, he wants to do it over a
fire with a stick. He doesn’t want to do it under a lightbulb in a pink and yellow plastic box. If I could pinpoint a moment in time where my sexuality was first questioned, it was this moment: 9:53 a.m., Christmas Day, 1976. My lesbian mom was trying to turn me gay.
She could tell I was disappointed. She said, “What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?”
If I asked my son that question after giving him an oven, he would say, “No. No I don’t like it” because whatever other shortcomings he might have, at least he has balls. I didn’t have his courage; instead I mumbled assurances about how much I loved my girl toy.
Perhaps I wasn’t convincing because I remember her saying something like, “I thought you wanted an Easy Bake Oven.” This is typical of my mother. She invents other people’s opinions for them. “I thought you loved plaid,” she might say. When you ask her why she thinks you love plaid, she’ll lie. “You told me you loved plaid.” If you tell her you never said that, she gets mad and insists it is your memory at fault, not hers.
Even at the age of five, I knew this about my mother and so mumbled that yes, I must have at some point demanded that she buy me the most effeminate toy she could find. If she could have put some panties in my stocking to go with it, that would have completed the humiliation I felt under my brother and Greg’s watchful and mocking eyes.
An Easy Bake Oven? Not a miniature, gas-powered Dune Buggy? Not a three stage model rocket? Even some sort of Donny Osmond action figure clubhouse would have been preferable. Anything would have been better than this shit, and yet I did not have the courage to tell my mother and Arlene how I really felt because I knew it would be taken as not just a rejection of the gift. but a rejection of the new, unisexual worldview they were attempting to construct that Christmas. That single Christmas gift represented their entire post-penis existence, which is a lot of pressure to put on a five year old.
That night, we all sat down at the kitchen table and poured the ready-to-bake brownie mix into the little Petri dishes that came with the toy, then watched as the sixty watt lightbulb transformed that watery goo into tiny desserts. How did it taste? I would be lying if I said anything other than this: delicious. Even though I hated them and everything they represented, I have to admit they were delicious lightbulb brownies.
My mother was a certain kind of idealist, I guess. The kind that wanted to transform a patrimonial society into a gender neutral utopia where all little girls played third base and all little boys braided hair. That’s fine if you’re a little boy who wants to play dress-up, but I wasn’t one of those boys. As I said, I liked to scream and hurl myself down the stairs in a laundry basket. I felt like one of those hermaphrodites whose parents are forced to choose a sex for their child and they choose the wrong one. No matter how much my feminist lesbian mom wanted me to embody the new seventies man, I could never be him. Even at five, I was masturbating to thoughts of Cheryl Tiegs. And for all his dewy talk, I bet Alan Alda did, too.
Over the years my mom’s feminism softened. Now she buys my son Hot Wheels and Thomas the Tank Engine toys. My daughter gets fairy princess wings and magic wands. They both love their lesbian grandma. After our initial foray into dessert-making that Christmas, my mother never asked me if I wanted to bake again. The Easy Bake Oven went into the back of the toy closet, never to reappear, and the next Christmas, I think she got me a Big Wheel.
H.P. Lovecraft
THE FESTIVAL
Efficiut Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant.
– Lacantius
(Devils so work that things which are not appear to men as if they were real.)
I WAS FAR from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.
It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember.
Then beyond the hill’s crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder time.
Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless road was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just where.
As the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merry sounds of a village at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought of the season, and felt that these old Puritan folk might well have Christmas customs strange to me, and full of silent hearthside prayer. So after that I did not listen for merriment or look for wayfarers, kept on down past the hushed lighted farmhouses and shadowy stone walls to where the signs of ancient shops and sea taverns creaked in the salt breeze, and the grotesque knockers of pillared doorways glistened along deserted unpaved lanes in the light of little, curtained windows.
I had seen maps of the town, and knew where to find the home of my people. It was told that I should be known and welcomed, for village legend lives long; so I hastened through Back Street to Circle Court, and across the fresh snow on the one full flagstone pavement in the town, to where Green Lane leads off behind the Market House. The old maps still held good, and I had no trouble; though at Arkham they must have lied when they said the trolleys ran to this place, since I saw not a wire overhead. Snow would have hid the rails in any case. I was glad I had chosen to walk, for the white village had seemed very beautiful from the hill; and now I was eager to knock at the door of my people, the seventh house on the left in Green Lane, with an ancient peaked roof and jutting second storey, all built before 1650.
There were lights inside the house when I came upon it, and I saw from the diamond window-panes that it must have been kept very close to its antique state. The upper part overhung the narrow grass-grown street and nearly met the over-hanging part of the house opposite, so that I was almost in a tunnel, with the low stone doorstep wholly free from snow. There was no sidewalk, but many houses had high doors reached by double flights of steps with iron railings. It was an odd scene, and because I was strange to New England I had never known its like before. Though it pleased me, I would have relished it better if there h
ad been footprints in the snow, and people in the streets, and a few windows without drawn curtains.
When I sounded the archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear had been gathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my heritage, and the bleakness of the evening, and the queerness of the silence in that aged town of curious customs. And when my knock was answered I was fully afraid, because I had not heard any footsteps before the door creaked open. But I was not afraid long, for the gowned, slippered old man in the doorway had a bland face that reassured me; and though he made signs that he was dumb, he wrote a quaint and ancient welcome with the stylus and wax tablet he carried.
He beckoned me into a low, candle-lit room with massive exposed rafters and dark, stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The past was vivid there, for not an attribute was missing. There was a cavernous fireplace and a spinning-wheel at which a bent old woman in loose wrapper and deep poke-bonnet sat back toward me, silently spinning despite the festive season. An indefinite dampness seemed upon the place, and I marvelled that no fire should be blazing. The high-backed settle faced the row of curtained windows at the left, and seemed to be occupied, though I was not sure. I did not like everything about what I saw, and felt again the fear I had had. This fear grew stronger from what had before lessened it, for the more I looked at the old man’s bland face the more its very blandness terrified me. The eyes never moved, and the skin was too much like wax. Finally I was sure it was not a face at all, but a fiendishly cunning mask. But the flabby hands, curiously gloved, wrote genially on the tablet and told me I must wait a while before I could be led to the place of the festival.
Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology Page 97
