’Tis the season of heartwarming holiday novels and streaming rom-coms. But in earlier centuries, the stories told at Christmas were often far darker. Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is, at its heart, a rather grim tale. Since much of this blog explores history, I thought it fitting to share two short holiday horror vignettes.
*Featured image “Gifts from Saville Row” is credited to Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums
The Institution
They are celebrating below. I can hear the plunk, plunk, plunk of the piano. The D and F are out of tune. They have been that way since I was brought here. I wince whenever they are played.
Rachel is screaming next door. It’s that time of night for her. Christmas is no exception.
My roommate, Doris, has turned onto her side, vacantly staring at our sink, her once relentless mind subdued by lithium and a lobotomy.
I am also subdued. It’s how I survive now. I’ve learned to be alive in the smallest things. The flecks of snow, falling softly. The gentlest, finest ping when they hit the pane.
Yesterday, it started snowing. Flake by flake, the exercise garden was covered. Now, it is thick like the quilts my nurse used to sew as I, a young girl, arranged my dolls in their house, making sure all my little pieces of furniture were tidy and straight.
They have started singing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” It sounds more like herding bellowing cows than caroling. My former music tutor would break at the horror.
This morning, a cardinal came to our windowsill and sat there. It peered at me with its luminous black eye. Doris saw it too, raising her head a fraction. I watched it. Vivid red against the snow.
It stayed for almost a minute. A caller, like the ones that graced my mother’s parlor in their finery. I bid it good morning—quietly—so that nobody could hear.
Then it flew away, and my heart seemed to sink below the snow to the deep, dark, rotting earth, where my sister now lives.
I did not put her there.
I did not.
My stepbrother did.
No one ever listens.
To me.
Since this morning, I’ve been watching the window, silently beckoning for the cardinal to come back.
Doris exhales and closes her eyes.
Soon, I shall be like her. A vicious scar beneath my hair where my head was opened, and the truth sliced apart.
I hope my mind shall be quiet like the snow outside, and I’m no longer concerned that the D and F are out of tune.
Tree Lights
The neighbors’ Christmas tree lights flash in a pattern. I can see it in the front window of their ranch home. Those fat old-fashioned bulbs in gaudy colors. The left side of the tree lights up, and then the right.
Left. Right.
Left. Right.
The tree is marching. Did they plan it this way?
I didn’t sleep last night. Or the night before that. I read about a family in Italy with a sleeping sickness. They die miserable deaths, unable to sleep. I know that death or near-death feeling. Your brain running like a dull gray, fluorescent rod. Your lids heavy, your lips thick, but that dull droning deep in your mind. Droning that won’t let the engine of sleep turn. Just start and start and start like a broken car.
My father’s blue sedan. A Honda. The back seat was stained with ketchup and chicken-nugget grease.
The mind that can’t rest knows no time. Its memories flow with no coherence. My brain like the neighbors’ blinking Christmas lights.
Left. Right.
Left. Right.
It’s 3:27 according to my bedside clock—my nightly companion. I won’t sleep. I lie in my bed and watch with burning eyes.
Left. Right.
What happened to that sedan? Oh, yes, it was totaled at the corner of Broad and 14th. My father veered and smashed into a pole. He lived. The car did not.
Left. Right.
Then he got the gray SUV used from a friend at work. I hated that car.
Left. Right.
There it is!
I can hear it.
Dammit! I know I heard it.
That scratching…
I told the pest people. I told them.
They had looked at me. I was tired. No sleep. It’s not how I usually look.
Left. Right.
Just above me.
I can hear it.
Scratching.
Right. Left.
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