Christmas on Crack

by ed. Carlton Mellick III

  “Staged sex jaded me; I tried working an office job. But I’m old and not made for the 9-to-5 grind. Couldn’t take that little bastard of a boss, either. Mr. McCullough was his name. Fucker.

  “I even tried working in fast food, but nothing brought me joy. I had to break away from it all—The North Pole, LA, life in general. 12 years ago, I dropped the Santa- shtick; 6 years ago, I became a bum.” He looked down at his hands. “I am what I am. Take it or leave it.”

  I smiled. “I took it, didn’t I?”

  “Guess you did...”

  As he drank more whiskey, I replayed our little conversation in my head. Though the man told an interesting tale, in no way did I believe it at the time. Still, the experience had been fun, and maybe a touch rewarding. I hadn’t heard so colorful a story from a homeless man since one claimed last year to not only be President but also a time- traveling alien. Rising from the chair, I made my way to the bed and sat beside my friend. I gestured to the bottle in his hand. “You don’t mind if I have a sip, do you?”

  “It’s yours, isn’t it?”

  I took it, downed a gulp and imagined my spit intermingling with Santa’s. After handing the bottle back to him, I made a show of stretching my arms and yawning. Then I lay down on the left side of the bed, head on the pillow.

  “You can do the same,” I told him.

  He seemed hesitant. He looked down at the bottle. “I’m not finished yet.”

  “Save some for later,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you.” Then I patted the opposite pillow. “Just lie down. Relax.”

  He looked from the whiskey to the pillow and back again. Finally, he put the bottle on the nightstand and stretched out awkwardly beside me. His tired old body seemed to resist the reclined position. Knees wouldn’t bend fully; his back arced slightly. Neck, too.

  I touched his hand, the nape of his neck. He felt so cold. I decided I’d be a Good Samaritan and donate a little of my body warmth to him.

  We spooned silently for so long I began to feel drowsy. I looked over at the clock. It wasn’t even 3 AM yet.

  “I’m tired of lying around,” I said, my voice a whisper. “Aren’t you?”

  “No, it’s soft here,” he replied, his voice cracking with

  phlegm. “I’m not used to soft.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We can keep doing this. Guess I owe you, after that entertaining story you told.”

  “It wasn’t a story.”

  I sat up a bit. “But I can’t believe you. See, I know exactly where my presents came from. Mom and Dad and the aunts and uncles—they bought them in stores, wrapped them up and put little bows on top. Same story every year.”

  He turned around and faced me. “I never claimed all the presents were mine,” he said. “Usually, a kid got one of my gifts every three or four years. But if I gave one, it was always the kid’s favorite.”

  “Three or four years?” I said. “Your Bad List must have been huge.”

  “It wasn’t that they’d been bad. It’s just that other kids had been better, and I didn’t have time to go to every house.” He paused, looked so deeply into my eyes I almost flinched. “You were a little better than most. You got four before you turned ten, but you didn’t get another until you were 24.” He half-smiled. “That was my last delivery.”

  “Wait. You delivered to adults?”

  “It wouldn’t be fair if I’d just given them to kids, would it? Adults deserved a little magic too.”

  He still stared at me. I wanted to turn away, but there was something behind his eyes, something that shimmered, and it tried to convince me that what he was saying was true. Conflicting thoughts began to churn inside my head. For a moment, I felt like blubbering.

  I composed myself. “So, if you’re really Santa, what was my favorite gift when I was five?” I paused, smirked. “Or was that too long ago for you to remember?”

  “One thing I’ve got is my memory.” He tapped his head. “Every present that everyone has ever received from me is locked up here. I can’t forget them, even if I tried. That year, you wanted, more than anything, a yellow toy truck.” His eyes twinkled, but it was a melancholy twinkle. “And you got it.”

  I reared back involuntarily, knocking my head against the wall. My palms pricked. I felt my heart in places I shouldn’t. “You’re right.”

  “Of course. I’m Father Christmas. Or Santa, if that’s what you’d rather call me.”

  After a breath, I made myself think rationally. Toy trucks weren’t an uncommon childhood want. It could have been a lucky guess, the color an even luckier one.

  “I even remember it had a decal of a clown-head on the left door,” he continued.

  And that sealed it for me. No more room for doubt. I had given alcohol to and spooned with the embodiment of Christmas himself, and there he was, still on my bed and available to me. There were so many things I want- ed—and perhaps needed—to ask him.

  “But why didn’t I get that scooter when I was eight? I wanted it more than anything.”

  “Well, you were a bad boy that year. Remember what you did to your older brother, Billy?”

  The name plucked a chord in me. I hadn’t thought about Billy in quite some time. He’d been dead at least a decade, and it’d been fifteen years or more since I’d last spoken to him.

  “He was with his girlfriend out in the yard. They were kissing. Billy’s tongue was down her throat, and he had his back to you. You took advantage of that, but you shouldn’t have pulled his pants down. It was the worst possible time, and you knew it.”

  I could only sputter.

  “It was the most embarrassing moment of his life, and he remembered it until his dying day.”

  I managed to locate words and pull them up past my lips. “You—you saw that?”

  He smiled a brown and yellow smile.

  Long-forgotten Christmas memories washed over me, drowning out all other thoughts. The tingle I felt in my extremities when I woke up on Christmas morning. My favorite bow—a red velvet one my parents put atop gifts year after year. The spicy eggnog my great-uncle used to make. “My God,” I said. “You made the world seem like a beautiful place. You really did.”

  “Well, that was my job back then.”

  Now that I’d found words, they started to pour out: “When I was a kid, I had no idea what real life was like, how dirty and ugly it was. But you kept me in a bubble that made my childhood seem like it was spent in a gingerbread house.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing,” he said.

  “Yeah, a good thing.” I continued to look at Father Christmas, but my mind was not on his face or anything he was saying, provided he was saying anything at all. Rather, I thought about the litany of soul-sucking jobs I’d held. I thought about my disappointment with sex, myself, and humanity in general. Maybe I would feel better about such things had I not been shielded, had I known from the beginning there was no magic in the world, and that all things bright and beautiful had simply been imagined.

  “Could I have another drink?” Santa asked.

  I came back to myself. “What?”

  He repeated the question, but I just closed my eyes, saw myself reach for and give Santa the bottle. He took it, and I walked to the dresser and removed one of my old yellowed undershirts, rolled it taut, turned it into a gar- rote and crept up behind him as he imbibed. I wrapped the shirt around his neck—wrapped it, tugged it and saw sugarplums dance in my head and smelled the faint aroma of hot bread pudding as his tongue protruded and his face turned blue.

  Instead, I reared up, now on my knees on the bed. I flipped him over; his body was practically weightless. I yanked down his pants, mounted and penetrated him. Santa’s response was to wrap spindly legs around my back and knead it with his hands. “Faster,” he said.

  A moment of shock, but if that was what the old man wanted, then I’d tear him apart, leave him coiled and bleeding on my bed. I sped up, plowing into his ass as though it weren’t part of something human.r />
  “Harder,” he continued.

  I didn’t know how much faster and harder I could go. I considered seizing the knife I kept between the springboard and mattress. I considered slitting his throat with it, to see if that would get him off. At that moment, however, I detected a little of that old Christmas spirit in my cock and balls—that special tingle I hadn’t experienced in almost thirty years. Suddenly, I felt connected not only to a man, but a rolling ball of power. My head was luminescent, like a bulb burning bright. My whole body felt like a present, being unwrapped by happy hands on Christmas morning. Nutmeg flowed with the blood in my veins, and my interior world seemed covered in tinsel, everything silver and gold, everything shimmering. In reality, I was inside Santa. In my mind, I was eight and sledding down the biggest and most snow-covered hill I could find.

  When my young-self reached the bottom, my old-self came. Spurting semen felt cold, like a billion snowflakes shot from my cock into Santa. I imagined them coalescing inside him to form a troop of miniature snowmen that danced up and down the length of his gi tract. But the flakes were on the outside, too. They fell across the bedroom in waves, gathered on the bureau, the nightstand, the bed and our naked skin in thick tufts of white. I wanted to dig mitten-covered hands into the snow, to taste of it and make angels, but turned when I heard something jingle.

  Santa stood over the bed; I hadn’t seen him arise. Though nude, he wore his trademark bell-tipped hat at a jaunty angle. A ruddy glow brightened his cheeks; his belly looked almost jolly. Below it, a long, thin penis curved like a candy cane. Somehow, I knew it would taste of peppermint. As Santa stared at me—into me—a broad smile enlivened a face that appeared years younger.

  “Not bad,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. “But get on your belly, boy. It’s time to call me Daddy.”

  Edmund Colell is a newcomer in the bizarro scene. I met him for the first time a couple weeks ago at BizarroCon. My first thought when I met him was: “This guy looks kind of like if Shaggy from Scooby Doo was a member of Guitar Wolf.” But after hanging out with him for a while I realized that the comparison was way off because he didn’t once try to solve a mystery while shooting flames from a guitar. Outside of his stories published through Verbicide and LegumeMan Press, I hadn’t read much of his work before he pitched me this story idea. Christmas morning from the perspective of AA batteries? Where being used in children’s toys is a battery’s idea of having sex? Which makes Christmas morning the ultimate battery/toy orgy of the year? In my world, that sounds like a must read story!

  So toss your stocking stuffers aside—nobody likes those fucking stupid wax syrup sticks anyway—rip open some presents, slide some AAs into your new robot dog, and get ready to have some fun . . .

  THE CHRISTMAS TURN-ON

  Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” tickles a wet dream out of a lithium battery named Double, who wakes up next to his sister-brother Discharge. While saying “his” would normally be silly because Double is intersexed like all batteries are, he and other batteries are okay with male words. Words are the least of his worries, because tomorrow morning is the biggest battery orgy of the year: Christmas! To humans, Christmas means money, toys, videogames, and all kinds of things people give to each other. The toys and videogames are the most important to Double, Discharge, and other batteries, because such children’s delights are where batteries get their sex.

  Double edges closer to Discharge to say something, but then takes a slide back. Both of their positive ends would be touching if he really tried to talk to Discharge, and despite being envious of people for being able to have better gay sex, Double is no gay battery. By frequency and the power of their orgasms, batteries have better straight sex than people.

  After an hour, Double gets eager for talking again and bumps Discharge once to say, “Merry Christmas!” Discharge bumps back. “Merry Christmas.”

  Double bumps twice: “I’m ready. You ready?”

  “Yes, very ready.”

  “Me too,” says Double, then he leans on Discharge for a bit to say, “But, I’m still a little bit nervous.”

  “So?” asks Discharge, throwing Double off. Double rears back and leans on Discharge again. “I just hope I like the ones I’ll be fucking. I never met any other batteries.”

  Discharge throws Double off again with a knock. “Stop doing that.”

  Double, getting a cold oily feeling from where Discharge knocked his body, doesn’t speak to Discharge again and takes a moment to question his sexuality. His microeyes look around the room and see the other batteries sleeping in their packs. Sugar plums and bulging prods dance through their heads, Double thinks, as both sets of his glowing blue nipples swell with horny buzzing. He wipes his wet dream cum on the plastic above him and goes back to sleep.

  In the morning, Double and Discharge wake up at the same time as big hands pick them up and rip apart their tiny cardboard box. Both of them tumble into one hand and wince as their pairs of same-parts bang into each other. Then fingers pluck them from the hand and hold them up for a short dizzying moment in the air before Double is flipped upside-down and loaded into a tight space with a strong spring-loaded prong reaching into his negative end while his positive end pushes into a knob. Then, as Discharge is laid down in a different slot and a plastic cover closes over them, the skin of another battery reaches over to touch Double’s skin. “My name is Amp,” says the other battery through his gentle spark-touch. Then, Amp’s same words are made louder as a surge quivers through both of Double’s ends. The prong teases the neg-end as it opens a little and leaks juices, then the prong plunges deep, pulls back a little, and plunges back in. The poz-end expands and reaches further and further until tickling a different wet spot and pushing into it. Then the hard plastic beneath them softens, becoming a wet, glossy, and fleshy bed. Double can now see everybody, all having grown fin- like limbs with long tentacle fingers. Pecs and breasts mold out of their bodies with hardening blue nipples.

  To his left, Amp is stroking Double’s chests with pretty blue electric arcs caressing the skin that say to him, “Relax a little. Touch me back.”

  Double smiles inside and gropes Amp’s chests with his own electric tentacle-fingers. “Ah, that’s better,” he chuckles into Amp.

  Suddenly, Double feels electric tendrils slide up both of his butt cracks. The same fingers grope and claw Double’s body, making him shiver. “Plump and firm,” whispers the battery behind Double. All the while, Double can feel that this battery is not lithium like Discharge and Amp, but something with a slightly weaker current. “I heard that,” says the battery to that thought, “and what matters is that I know how to use it. Still, glad to take a piece like you. Name’s Alka, and I expect you to moan it. Now.”

  Double feels a wide load of energy penetrate deep into his neg-end while his poz-end swells and thrusts harder against the current. His good feelings become so good that they begin to hurt. With tears welling inside of him, Double complies: “Uh-Alka. Alka. HhhAlka!”

  “That’s right, and I own you and everyone else in my teddy-bed,” says Alka, and then his tendrils claw deep into Amp’s and Discharge’s bodies as he penetrates them both and squeezes their nipples. Energy fills in and out of the three to the rhythm of Alka’s tendril-lashings. Outside, the teddy bear holding them named Happy Companion Buddy Bear is being chased around wrapping paper and other new toys like pastel-colored talking Elder God Egg Stackers, a plush streptococcus peelable ball, and the hot new Japanese-imported toy set known as My First Unit 731, complete with battery slots for making the cries of P.O.W. test subjects while the wire-fed doctors experiment on them. A little curly-haired boy with a three-toothed grin is the child chasing the bear, laughing as the teddy bear makes long jumps and cartwheels around the boy’s two sisters who whine about not being able to play with their battery-powered Hussy Huskies and Plastic Surgeon play sets with the boy being so obnoxious. Parents, aunts, uncles, and grandma all chug down convenience store big gulp cups full of brandy-
loaded eggnog, laughing merrily at the sight and falling around with just as much merriment as their head-wound blood sprinkles their Santa hats.

  “Oh god,” Double moans as the moisture in his neg- end squeezes out acidic lubrication by the pint, “oh my god, this is just too much.”

  Alka spikes his tendrils and battery-teeth deeper into Double’s body. “What was that, bitch?”

  Double struggles to leave Alka’s grip for Amp and Discharge, shouting “C’mon, we’ve had enough!”

  Amp wraps his tendrils around Double and attempts to fill Double’s ends with his own energy to block out Alka’s. “Double,” he says, “follow my energy beat. Let me get inside you, and you will get inside me.”

  Double then feels a calmer and more relaxed form of stimulation flow into him. The poz- and neg-ends still flow back and forth, but the tendril-play is less damaging and Double can hear himself think. Amp’s many mouths kiss Double from one end to the other, cuddling him and stroking the pecs and breasts instead of squeezing them.

  “What about Discharge?” Double asks.

  “I have Discharge too,” Amp says as Discharge joins in and feeds in and out of them both to make a threesome. “Don’t worry. If we hold together then Alka can’t exhaust us all. Our lovemaking will be safer.”

  Alka tightens his bonds and breaks the three out of the calmness. “Don’t you fucking dare try to make this boring for me. C’mon, one at a time, I’m going to make you all squeal.”

  Double does his best to feel more toward Amp than toward Alka, failing to ignore the pounding and tingle- binding. As Double reaches orgasm, his limbs all flail about while his ends swell up like balloons. Outside, the little boy catches the teddy bear which has now started to spasm with its eyes rolling in the back of its head. All the grown-ups shout and scream about Happy Companion Buddy Bear being Satan himself. Scared and crying, the little boy smashes the bear against the floor several times, breaking its limbs and popping open the hatch on the batteries. On the boy’s last upward swing, Double, Amp, Discharge, and Alka are flung from the bear’s body. Double can’t catch Discharge and Amp with his orgasm still ripping through him, yet watches Alka’s tendrils catch both of them. Double’s happy and tickly feelings then fizzle out as he flies through the air and lands in the Christmas tree. He tumbles down the branches loaded with pretty lights, shining bulb ornaments, and smiling cartoon characters, crashing and rolling from the bottom of the tree to find that the other three batteries are gone. Amp, he thinks while looking around the other toys and pulling all his parts back into his body, just hold on. I’ll find help. Alka’s too dangerous, I won’t let him take you or Discharge away.