Unwrap these Presents

by Astrid Ohletz

  Unwrap these Presents

  Edited by Astrid Ohletz and R.G. Emanuelle

  Unwrap these Presents

  Copyright © 2014. All rights reserved.

  First Smashwords Edition: November 2014

  Editor: Astrid Ohletz and R.G. Emanuelle

  Cover Design: Streetlight Graphics

  All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are a work of fiction or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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  www.ylva-publishing.com

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  RED CHRISTMAS TRUCK by Nikki Busch

  RED AND GREEN AND GRAY by Jove Belle

  THE MIRACLE OF THE LIGHTS by Cindy Rizzo

  A CHRISTMAS EPIPHANY by Wendy Temple

  A NEW CHRISTMAS CAROL by Eve Francis

  MARY CHRISTMAS by L.T. Smith

  CHRISTMAS ROAD TRIP by Jae

  HOLIDAY SPIRIT by Fletcher DeLancey

  MAMA KNOWS by Cheri Crystal

  ANGELS by Joan Arling

  DOCTOR’S CALL by Patricia Penn

  FLEA by Lois Cloarec Hart

  MEET THE LESBIANS by Ashley Stevens

  OPERATION JINGLE BELLS by Devin Sumarno

  ONE HOT TAMALE by Catherine Lane

  ELFIN MAGIC by R.G. Emanuelle

  FIRST CHRISTMAS by Jean Copeland

  SEASON’S MEETINGS by Andi Marquette

  KITMAS ON PEACOCK ALLEY by Lee Lynch

  A CHAMPAGNE CHRISTMAS by Clare Lydon

  FIRST CHRISTMAS A Sigil Fire Story by Erzabet Bishop

  HOME FOR CHRISTMAS by T.M. Croke

  THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS PAST, CHRISTMAS FUTURE by S. M. Harding

  SLAYING THE GHOST (OF CHRISTMAS PAST) by Nikki Busch

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  OTHER BOOKS FROM YLVA PUBLISHING

  COMING FROM YLVA PUBLISHING

  Introduction

  Family, happiness, love, presents, joy, snow, and plenty of food—all things that come to mind when we think of Christmas, possibly the most wonderful time of the year for some of us.

  However, Christmas is not a merry time for everyone. Some people have to spend it alone; some hate that time of the year and don’t celebrate it; and others don’t even have a home to spend Christmas in.

  That is why we decided to donate all profits from this anthology to the Albert Kennedy Trust in the UK and the Ali Forney Center in New York City. Both organizations provide housing for homeless LGBTIQ youth. Those young people really need our help, and we can’t think of a better way to support the cause than to do what we love—writing, editing, and publishing.

  A huge thank-you goes out to the authors who submitted their stories to us. We have an amazing variety of Christmas stories and even one Hanukkah story.

  Also, thank you to the army of editors that supported us:

  Nikki Busch, Day Petersen, Glenda Poulter, Michelle Aguilar, Sandra Gerth, Andi Marquette, Julie Klein, Blu, Debra Doyle, Alissa McGowan, and Fletcher DeLancey.

  Last but not least, thanks to the team at Streetlight Graphics, who once again created an amazing cover.

  Enjoy the read!

  Astrid Ohletz & R.G. Emanuelle

  Red Christmas Truck

  Nikki Busch

  Your shiny red truck

  at midnight

  Christmas Eve,

  your fortress against festivities,

  let me in;

  let me show you how to celebrate away

  the demons of dysfunction past.

  Inside the cold depths of this silent metal Mass,

  my hand catches yours,

  removes it from its clenched grip on the steering wheel,

  strokes away your refusal

  to see Christmas in a new light,

  with me,

  just me

  by your side.

  I graze the inside of your wrist,

  ignite the hearth within your heart.

  Ah yes I knew it was in there,

  just had to stoke it.

  My fingers lap like errant embers

  beneath your corduroy shirt,

  searing your belly

  and the surface of your bra.

  Plunging deeper,

  I discover your hidden gift,

  moist and waiting for delivery;

  the only present I demand,

  and you give it.

  Plentifully.

  Christmas Eve

  in your shiny red truck,

  we revel in the heat

  and hum

  of a hungry holy love.

  Red and Green and Gray

  Jove Belle

  Dust billows up when Charlie drops the last box on the hand truck. She fans the air, but stifles a cough because Liz is watching her. There’s something about the way Liz’s eyes follow her that makes her feel vulnerable, and that’s never a good way to feel in here.

  As a little girl, Charlie always cast herself as the hero in the movie of her life. As an adult, she discovered that reality wasn’t nearly as shiny as it is on the big screen. With a couple of bad decisions and the bang of a gavel, she was officially declared the bad guy. Now, instead of Hollywood sets, she has drab prison grey as a backdrop.

  “That’s the last one.” Charlie feels stupid as soon as she says it because there aren’t any boxes left on the shelf marked “CHRISTMAS” and Liz can see that for herself.

  “Obviously.” Liz rolls her eyes and flips her hair back. She’s got dark eyeliner swooping out from her eyelids like wings, courtesy of some contraband liquid eyeliner. If Charlie ever tried that, she’d poke her own eye out with the wand and end up with a black smear over the side of her face.

  “Come on, Blanca.” Liz walks away, leaving the boxes behind.

  Charlie kicks the hand truck forward and then does an awkward fast walk to catch up with Liz. It’s not like they’re friends or anything, but for whatever reason, they were put on this work assignment together and it’s just better if they don’t get separated.

  “Hold up,” Charlie yells after chasing Liz for half a block. Liz isn’t even walking fast. She has that “I’m too cool to be bothered” gliding walk that all the Latina girls seem to share, yet she’s always ahead of Charlie.

  Liz glares, but stops and waits anyway. “Hurry up.”

  When they pass Liz’s block, the Latinas yell and whoop and say things in Spanish that Charlie doesn’t understand. Except lesbiana. She definitely knows that word.

  Liz grabs her crotch and lurches her hips forward as she flips them off. They all know Liz isn’t a lesbian, but maybe spending time with Charlie is a problem for her.

  “Sorry,” Charlie mumbles, almost under her breath, and feels stupid because of it. She doesn’t need to apologize for being gay. She never did on the outside. It’s weird—half the women in here are hooking up, but only a handful admit to being anything but completely straight. As far as she knows, though, Liz hasn’t hooked up with anyone.

  “Why? It’s not your fault they’re being stupid putas.” Liz’s words are rough and she doesn’t look at Charlie when she says them.
Still, it feels like Liz is defending her and Charlie likes that.

  “Right.” She shakes her head. When she’d arrived, they gave her a list of rules, both written from guards and understood from the other inmates. She’s been trying to sort through them ever since. She’s pretty sure that Liz shouldn’t be calling her people putas, especially not to Charlie, but she’s not going to point it out.

  “Whatever. Let’s just get this shit done.”

  They don’t talk again until they reach the common area. There’s a card game in the corner and it looks like her friend Mary might be winning. It’s hard to tell because of the way they protect the markers from view. Winnings could just as quickly be confiscated by the guards as collected by the winner.

  Other than the card game and a couple women watching TV, the room is empty. Charlie parks the stack of boxes next to the wall, out of the way in case other people come in. Liz opens the top box and pulls out a stack of paper decorations. There’s a menorah, a reindeer, and a picture of a black woman in traditional African robes lighting a candle. The rest of the decorations are for an amalgam of holidays, but the majority are faded red and green.

  When she was a kid, Charlie used to dream of decorating for Christmas with fancy decorations that they stored in the attic. Except the apartment her mom rented didn’t have an attic and her mom thought decorations were a waste of money. The Department of Corrections seems to agree.

  “Does it bother you?” Liz holds up a string of paper garland that looks as if a kindergartener glued it together.

  Charlie shrugs. “It’s ugly, but I don’t really care. I just want to get this done.” The condition of the decorations doesn’t matter so long as they finish on time.

  “No, not that.” Liz tapes the ends of the garland on either side of the window that leads to the observation room where the guards hang out between patrols. The window gives them a clear view of the area while being protected by the grating between the layers of glass. The garland droops pathetically in the middle. “When they call you that, does it bother you?”

  “Oh.” Charlie doesn’t know how to answer. She and Liz aren’t friends, yet the question deserves an honest answer. But it’s loaded, the kind of thing that can be used against her. She stares at Liz and tries to figure out her motivation for asking. Liz never looks her way, but picks another sad decoration from the box instead. Charlie decides to go for it. “No, why would it?”

  “Because they’re being bitches.”

  “Sure, but it’s true.” She shrugged and taped a round decoration to the wall. She thinks maybe it’s supposed to look like a glass ornament for a tree, but she can’t be sure. Not that it really matters. Nothing about these decorations from 1983 is going to make people feel festive, anyway.

  “Hmm…since when doesn’t the truth hurt?” Liz says it quietly enough so that Charlie thinks she wasn’t meant to hear, so she doesn’t respond.

  Charlie works with an eye on the clock. She’s not sure if she’s allowed to leave at three or if she has to stay until the decorating is done. It’s twenty minutes away, so she works a little faster, just in case.

  Liz purposefully blocks her, standing with one hand on her hip and a crooked half-smile on her face. “What’s your hurry, Turbo?”

  “Nothing.” Charlie checks the time again. “I just have a thing.”

  It’s more than a thing, but she doesn’t like to talk about it because most of the other women in here would think she’s being pretentious. It’s easier to leave it alone.

  “A thing?” Liz looks skeptical, but she steps to the side. “What kind of thing.”

  This time, Charlie takes the box with her. They’ve cleared three of the five, but she doesn’t want to take the chance that Liz will stop her again. “It’s just…reading.”

  That was the simplest explanation. Hopefully, Liz would accept it.

  “What’s that even mean? Just reading? You going to the library?”

  “No, the visitors’ room.” Charlie pulls about a thousand cotton balls from the bottom of the next box and half of them fall on the floor. What the hell is this mess even supposed to be? She looks closer and sees that they’re glued together in little stacks. Snowmen. Liz stops what she’s doing and helps Charlie pick up the ones from the floor. They spread them over the top of a bookshelf like a tiny snow army. Except that they are gray with age, so it looks more like a dust bunny migration.

  “Who goes to the visitors’ room to read? What aren’t you telling me?”

  Charlie sighs. She’s not going to get away with not telling Liz the details. “They asked for volunteers in one of my classes.” Her English composition class to be specific, but Liz wouldn’t care about that. “We read letters to Santa.”

  “That’s it? You just read the letters? That’s dumb.” Liz went back to the decorations. One more box to go.

  “No, we write back.”

  “What? Let me understand this. Little Joaquin writes to Santa, asking for a tricycle or whatever shit, and he gets a letter back from an inmate? Ain’t that something? His parents would shit for sure.”

  Charlie had thought about that and decided she didn’t care. She likes the idea of Christmas. She especially likes that she might be helping a kid to believe in Santa for just a little longer. If she’d gotten a letter from Santa when she was a kid…well, that would have been something. It would have been better than anything her mom ever gave her, including the time she got the art set with the case that doubled as an easel. That only had two colors of paint missing and half the tablet was unused.

  “I like it.” She speaks softly, not really wanting to argue with Liz, but unable to not say something.

  “Yeah?” Liz looks at her for a moment, her face blank. Charlie thinks if she’d ever managed to perfect a look like that, she might not have ended up in here in the first place. “How come they didn’t ask the rest of us?”

  Charlie hangs up a reindeer. Someone had drawn an oversized penis on the animal and she debates putting it back in the box. She decides the other women will enjoy the artwork, so she leaves it up.

  “I don’t know. They said they wanted students.”

  “Shit. I could be a student.”

  Charlie almost asks Liz if she can read, but stops herself in time. Plenty of the women in here can’t. That doesn’t mean they won’t kick her ass for asking. Instead, she nods and says, “Yes, you could be.”

  “That’s right.” Liz nods like she’s decided something important.

  “Why don’t you?” There are a few Latinas in her classes, but they are older. None of the girls Liz’s age signed up.

  “That’s for punks.” Liz’s answer is immediate, but the look on her face says maybe she doesn’t believe the words.

  “Maybe.” Charlie doesn’t agree, but Liz looks like she’s rethinking her answer anyway. Maybe if she gives her some space, Liz will change her mind on her own.

  They work in silence for a few moments, then Liz asks, “You learn anything good?”

  “I think so.”

  “But what’s the point. Nobody gonna hire a convict.” Liz draws out the word “convict” into two hard syllables.

  Charlie doesn’t know if that’s true, but that isn’t the point, anyway. “So what? I’m supposed to be dumb because that’s what people think?”

  “Nobody thinks you’re dumb.” Liz regards her seriously, then ducks her head. It looks like she might be blushing, but Charlie can’t be sure. She’s a little stunned to hear that Liz thinks about her at all.

  “Thanks.”

  “So, these letters…what do they say?”

  Charlie considers the letters, how most of them are from spoiled kids asking for toys that don’t really matter. Those kids get a form letter back from Santa. “Most of them are crap. Rich kids telling instead of asking.”

  Liz purses her lips together and makes a noise that sounds a little bit like a disappointed sprinkler. “Then why read them?”

  “Because, some of them…
they’re kids like I used to be. Hoping for something they’ll never get.”

  Liz nods, slow and thoughtful. She has the last decoration in her hands and the clock has just reached three o’clock. “Maybe I could read some, too?”

  Charlie takes the faded paper Santa from Liz and tapes it to the window. She tries to position it so that it will look like the guard in the chair has a Santa head. She’s pretty sure they’ll make her move it, but she thinks it’s funny, anyway.

  She stacks the empty boxes on the hand truck and says, “We need to hurry, then.”

  This time, Liz takes the hand truck from her and pushes it all the way to the storage room. She doesn’t stop to talk to the other Latinas when they pass her block. “Ignore them bitches.”

  When they get back to the storeroom, they realize that someone locked it while they were gone. Liz taps her foot impatiently and Charlie smiles because who would ever have thought that Liz would want to read Dear Santa letters from a bunch of five-year-olds. But here she is puffing about being late because some asshole locked them out.

  Charlie sees one of the guards who doesn’t give her the creeps and she fast-walks to catch up with him. They’re not supposed to run and the consequences vary depending on the guard’s mood. She thinks this guard might be gay because as far as she knows, he’s never hit on any of the women. Maybe he’s just a decent guy, but she doubts it. Still, she likes that she’s never walked in on him getting a blowjob from one of the inmates.

  She finally catches him. Liz rolls her eyes as he searches through his key ring, grumbling the entire time about being interrupted. It takes a long time, but not as long as it would if she or Liz asked him to hurry. He waits until they put everything inside the room and relocks the door. Thank God for that or someone might steal all the busted-ass decorations.

  “God, that took forever.” Liz walks fast, and not that sliding, cool gait of hers, either. She looks like she’s in a hurry and that makes Charlie smile again. “Hurry up, Blanca.” Liz checks to make sure Charlie is with her.