12 Deaths of Christmas

by Paul Sating

  The thought of an all-inclusive drink menu, days spent lounging poolside with a good book, and ocean-side port stops at exotic locations helped get her out her mother’s front door. It was the only way she could be okay with leaving Jacob behind. Chelsea hadn’t been separated from him for more than a single night when he had a sleepover at a friend’s house. A week? She wasn’t sure she could survive that.

  At that moment the world went white.

  Chelsea slammed on the brakes. She’d been daydreaming, half paying attention to the road she could navigate in her sleep. The sharp bend was a few hundred yards in the distance one second and, the next, her windshield was a blanket of white.

  A mountain slide, she thought, her throat gripped closed with fear.

  The car kicked sideways.

  Chelsea corrected, in the opposite direction of the side of the road that dropped away. The back wheels caught and whipped the car in a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn. Her head slammed against the window, stars exploding to life in her vision. She hit something, and the car spun rotated in a dizzying circle, too quickly to remain oriented.

  Then the world gave way and she fell.

  The car went over the edge. Without a barricade, there was nothing to stop her from tumbling down the mountainside. The car struck a tree and flipped. Side windows smashed. Chelsea screamed at the assault of shards, wind, and snow that filled the car. A tree branch snapped into the cabin, catching her square in the face. She lost all but the slimmest of senses that she was still falling. For an eternity of seconds, the car bounced through young trees, bouncing and spinning off the larger ones, gaining momentum as it fell.

  She was going to die out here.

  The snow-covered landscape became the sky. The blackness became the ground above which she floated. Turning over and over, tumbling further from the road.

  And then it all ended. The car came to a rest on its roof. Chelsea was alive but in too much pain to think through what she needed to do. Her face felt hot; there was a pool of blood forming on the roof of the car underneath her. Everything and nothing hurt.

  And the night was silent.

  At some point during the accident, the engine stopped running. The bitter smell of gas filled the cooling night air. It was quiet. The headlights that revealed millions of glittering specks of snow dust, the only sign she was still alive.

  Chelsea knew she was in trouble, serious trouble. This part of the road wasn’t a main thoroughfare for the skiers and snowboarders. There was no reason for anyone to come this way at this time of year except to get to the various cabin resorts. And at this time of night in the middle of the week, those types of visitors would be few and far between. Only a great stroke of luck was going to bring a motorist in this direction.

  To make matters worse, she had no safety gear in the car. The trip to her mother’s was supposed to be quick so she hadn’t bothered to grab blankets. At best, and only if she could get to the trunk, the flares might still be there. She could use those to light her way back up the mountain and alert someone.

  Assuming I can walk.

  The pull of gravity placed her weight on the seat belt. The tension eliminated any slack she might have used to unhook it. Panic rose at the realization that she might be trapped in her own car, upside down, in a tight valley at the foot of a mountainside road. Passing motorists might now even be able to see this far down.

  Tears began to stream down—up?—her forehead. Jacob? Jerrod? God, no! She fought the seatbelt buckle, but it refused to come loose.

  “Help!” her cry disappeared beyond the illuminated part of the forest. No one answered. No one should. The nearest house was a few miles away, at best.

  But she cried out again anyway. Throughout her life, she’d been a fighter and that wasn’t about to change now. She was in a desperate situation, but she wasn’t going to sit and wait for the reaper. She would do what she always did, even when things seemed hopeless.

  “HELP!” Her message carried through the night.

  Silence.

  Despair grew to an overwhelming force. A blackout was coming. That might be the best way to go, to fall asleep and never wake up. Painless. She wouldn’t suffer the anguish of freezing to death, watching the world become grayer until her will to live was sucked from her. Sleep, even eternal, would be better than that.

  Her eyes closed. Heavy.

  Chelsea hoped her final sleep would be filled with visions of Jacob and Jerrod. They rescued her belief in humankind after years of hell and torture. They saved her. Would they miss her as much as she already missed them? They would, right? They were a loving family, small but close, working past the scars of the past together.

  Surely they would re—

  — a branch snapped. Chelsea’s eyes rocketed open and she stared into the white waste of the falling night.

  Again, another crack and … and something else.

  Scratching.

  A bear? Shit! Shit! Shit! My gun, where did I put the gun? The glove box? Can I reach—

  More scratching, this time closer, just out of range of the lights.

  But that wasn’t scratching. It was too persistent, too rhythmic.

  Not scratching …

  … shuffling.

  In the beams of the headlights, something moved. The deep darkness was thick, but not impenetrable. A hint of something out there.

  The gun might or might not be in the glove box, but she wasn’t going to wait. She reached, stretched, strained against the hold the seat belt had on her. Her shaking hand stretched as she willed her joints to give just a little more.

  But the glove box was too far away, forever out of reach as long as she was restrained.

  The thing in the blackness shuffled closer.

  In a desperate last move, Chelsea yanked her car keys out of the ignition. Finding the thickest one, she began sawing at the belt. She wasn’t sure it would work but what other options did she have?

  The shuffling now came from the edge of the world, where her headlights met the eternal blackness. Chelsea risked a glance into beams of light, not sure she wanted to see what was coming.

  Her hand went numb at the sight, the keys falling onto the roof of the car.

  Out of the woods walked a … man.

  A man who wasn’t a man.

  A man whose naked legs were as white as the snow that blanketed the ground in her car beams. No, they were whiter, as if the cold that destroyed his legs was deeper, older, than the snow on the ground. Ageless.

  A man whose bare feet tortuously crunched the ground in a festering creep.

  A man who strode through the world as naked as the day he was born, his frozen white cock swaying back and forth as flaccid and loose as if blood still surged through it.

  A man whose flabby stomach betrayed the fact that even in death neglect still had consequences.

  A man whose half-face had frozen in the perpetual state of the moment of his death. The moment he was assaulted by a frying pan containing burned eggs. The face that was beaten and battered after he fell into a sleep from which he never woke again.

  As the frozen half-face smiled, the eyeball hanging from the crushed socket wiggled, laughing all on its own.

  Eddie.

  Chelsea screamed, yanking at the seatbelt, commanding it to separate. She slithered, pushing against the roof. Rip. Tear. Yet it didn’t give; it refused her that which she lusted for. Escape.

  Inch by inch, the frozen corpse of her former lover moved toward the vehicle. Crunching snow. Step by lethargic step. Mere feet away, he lowered himself to clear the hood of the car and crawled toward her with a depraved lopsided grin on his face. She’d seen that smile a million times. It was the smile Eddie only showed when he’d screwed someone out of a deal or scored a big hit.

  It was the smile he wore on those nights when he beat her.

  The corpse drew closer, its white arms extended outward. His sky-blue nails promising to dig into her. Deep.

  “Hello, bitc
h.” Frozen death had robbed Eddie of his voice, leaving only a wispy emanation to it.

  His claws made the first contact with her skin. The ice-blue nails closed around her throat.

  “E—Eddie?” she choked.

  The corpse shook its head, the loose eyeball swaying side to side. “No, cunt,” it answered, “I’m the mother fucking snowman.”

  And then the nails dug into her skin, beneath her skin, into her esophagus, into her.

  And the world went white.

  END

  I’m Dreaming of a Whiteout

  “When are we going home, Kai?” Dad asked.

  Again.

  It was the fifteenth time in the past hour. I know because I counted.

  Both me and Mom knew when we were going home. It was the same as every trip to the cabin.

  “Soon, Jim,” Mom answered. It was her fifteenth time as well. I know that because she says it every time he asks, even if I’ve already answered him.

  We smiled at each other across the cabin. Knowing, patient smiles, filled with a mix of pain and love for the ghost of the man who sat in the front room with me.

  “Why isn’t Max here yet?” she asked me. I was hoping to get through my first coffee before she brought him up.

  “I don’t know, Mom,” I tried to make my reply sound absent, disinterested with the topic. But Mom was always good at picking up on subtleties except when it came to me and my love life. She got better at it over the years, mostly because she let go of her biases. While I was in college she was all over me. If it wasn’t my major, it was my grades. If it wasn’t my major or my grades, it was my love life.

  That was a lot of fun.

  I’d hidden the fact that I was gay from my parents throughout high school, even dating a few girls to throw them off. But leaving to attend the University of Washington delivered freedom on a level I didn’t think was possible. Not only was living in Seattle a hell of a lot better than living in the small town of Centralia, two hours down the road, but the people of the city and the campus itself were much more open and accepting of its gay, lesbian, and trans members. It was the first place in the world where it was okay to be anything but straight. I could have stayed there forever.

  Some of my excitement about this new identity liberty slipped through in a text to my mother during my freshman year. I don’t even think I was into my second semester when I mentioned finding someone attractive. It was at a party. In my drunken stupor (or was it courage?) I told my mother the secret I’d hid from her my entire life. She didn’t reply. When a few weeks passed and I still hadn’t heard from her, I knew we’d crossed a threshold that redefined our relationship.

  That’s how conservative families operate. The expected blowups and accusations, yelling matches filled with painful comments from parents not yet ready to deal with having a gay kid, followed by months, if not years, of silence. We didn’t start healing until I came home after that freshman year. I guess it was a lot harder for them to ignore or reject me when I was standing on their doorstep.

  To her credit, Mom came around. Who said you couldn’t teach old dogs new tricks?

  Dad … well, he never changed, not until that decision was taken from him.

  By the time I returned to Seattle the following September, she was at least convinced I wasn’t torturing small animals in my spare time. Before long she was even ready to meet my boyfriend. Dad had a serious aversion to thinking about his son planting a hand on a man’s ass the same way he’d done to Mom my entire life. He seemed fixated on the image he’d created. Back then, the hypocrisy of straight people infuriated me. After too many years, even after college, and too many screaming matches, I gave it up. If he didn’t care about the true me, I wasn’t going to care about what principles grounded his opinion.

  I was okay with that; time was on my side. He was the older one, the parent who was missing out on his child’s life. The weight of it bothered him, even if he tried to never show it. At least he tried to deal with something.

  We almost ended up being a decent family.

  Sitting here, with him, I grimaced at the memory of us. The family we never quite became.

  “What’s that about?”

  “What?” I put the mask back on.

  “That look?”

  “Oh,” I laughed. It was fake and I knew she’d notice. “Nothing.”

  “Hmmm, okay. Well, I hope Max gets up here before the storm,” she commented as she washed the last of the dishes. I breathed again. “I don’t want him getting caught out in it. He’s a city boy, after all. You might want to get into town and grab him.”

  This time my laugh was real. I loved when she talked like this about people from cities as if we were mountain people. We were as ‘trashy white’ as everyone else in Centralia, a decent-sized town in its own right. But in Centralia, we were as satiated with the comforts of modern living as someone from Seattle. The only difference? Seattle had mass transit.

  “We’re city people too,” I reminded her, glancing away from the book I was reading long enough to smirk at her.

  She flicked her soapy fingertips at me. “You’re a brat.”

  “And you’re a snob,” I said, being playful. I set my e-reader down in my lap. “But, I promise, I’ll head into town in a bit.”

  She glanced out the window that exposed the Pacific Northwest’s majesty. A shadow passed over her face as if she saw something out there. “You should call him. If he’s not close, tell him to turn around.”

  I didn’t like her change of tone or her suggestion. Lifting myself off the chair, a challenge since I’d draped my legs over the arm, I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my cell phone, wagging it at her. “Kinda hard to do without reception, Mommy.”

  Now she flicked a spatula covered with soapy water at me. “Don’t say that,” she chided. “It’s gross. Plus, I can’t help that you’re addicted to that darn thing. Use the house phone.”

  I laughed. “It’s not about being addicted,” I groaned. “It’s about being connected. You know? To the world? The big, round globe we live on?”

  I stopped immediately. That was a stupid thing to say. What happened with Dad wasn’t her fault. Mom’s face blanked. “I’m sorry.”

  But she only shook her head, concentrating on that small, soapy pile of dishes and utensils from the night’s dinner. “It’s okay.”

  It wasn’t. It hurt. I should have been more sensitive. I crossed the small living area to the kitchen. Mom continued washing the dishes. Putting my arm around her, I leaned my head until it touched hers. She softened immediately. “Does he still do it?”

  All Dad seemed worried about was that stupid desktop globe. It had to be everywhere he was. Mom kept one at the cabin, convincing him it was the same one from the house. He didn’t know. But he needed the globe, Mom said. It helped him feel grounded because his way home was illuminated in the lights in the globe.

  It didn’t have lights.

  But Dad saw them. Ever since the accident.

  Going home. He always worried about going home. Even when he was home.

  The accident really fucked him up.

  The soapy water served as a wonderful distraction for her. After a moment of silence, we shared a look at Dad. He sat in the rocking chair facing the tall windows. Back to my middle school years, I could remember him enjoying the view, almost at an unhealthy level, like he had some deep connection with this part of the world that went beyond normal. But now, decades later, it was the only thing that brought him out of his vegetative stupor. And that only happened on rare occasions. Maybe that was why Mom brought him up here so often. Maybe that was why we were spending Christmas here at the cabin, instead of back at the house in Centralia.

  Below us, the dark green canopy of western Washington forest darkened with the oncoming winter evening. It was four in the afternoon. Night came early in this part of the world. The night promised our first snowfall of the season.

  “Yeah,” her soft reply wa
s barely audible above the sound of running water hitting the dishes under her hands. She stole a glance at my immobile father.

  “It’ll get better,” I served up the platitude with practiced ease. It wasn’t going to get better, we both knew it. It hadn’t since the accident that took my father from us and replaced him with that shell sitting in the living room. He’d been in the Olympic Mountains when it happened. No one was with him; Dad had so few friends out here. A steep grade on a mountain, a misplaced foot, we guessed, and the man we knew tumbled from the world, replaced by this reserved and incomprehensible person. Rumors from town about an ancient evil being responsible for Dad’s disappearance filtered out to the cabin, out to Mom. People said inconsiderate things, ridiculous things. Blaming some ancient creature. Spreading stories of how it terrorized the region and that Dad was its latest victim. Irresponsible things. How many times had she called me in tears because of the stupid things uneducated people said? I hated that she came up here with Dad. I hated that she stayed here when he disappeared. I hated the people in town for tormenting her like that.

  And I hated myself for not being there for her. For them.

  But Dad proved them wrong, wandering to safety after days of being lost.

  How it didn't kill Mom, I’ll never know. When he came back though, he wasn’t the same. He never was again.

  Docility easily switched to rage with this new man. After the medications mutated his brain’s pathways, he started disappearing for hours at a time, getting lost in the neighborhood where he’d spent his entire life. It caused Mom endless heartache. But she stood by him. Even when he’d wander off during a dark period when Ember Lake was terrorized by a serial killer a couple years ago. Every year since the accident, he’d disappear on her. Most of those times were up here, too far away for me to help. She was alone in more ways than one. When most people would have broken, she stayed strong.