Every Christmas, my family booby trapped the chimney. I never knew why until
one year we finally caught something coming down. That year, my trap did
not work. They never worked. The week before Christmas, we'd gone shopping
as a family, burst to a craft store for the kids and then a
hardware store for the grown ups. Walking the color of Lyles Mariah Carey in
the background, I had excitedly bought a pack of orange HB pencils, flat
on either end. They made me think of the scaffolding the builders had put
up around school one year, full of endless possibilities. Along with the pencils,
I bought a bag of rubber bands to bind them together. In my
imagination, I conceived of a truly fantastic catapult that would pelt the invaders with
marble and thumbtacks. Come Christmas Eve, my sister and I sat at one
table and went to work making our own traps with the materials we had selected.
I had my pencils, and my sister, a few years younger than
me, was busy making something out of pipe cleaners and play dough. I
remember scoffing out of work and thinking whatever she had in mind wouldn't even work
on a table beside us. Our mother made her own traps. I always
remember thinking that the grown ups put no real imagination into their creations, but
every year the sight of them would turn my stomach. Nonetheless, Mom like
broken light bulbs hung on ropes, and this year she prepared another five or
six to be nailed on the inside of the chimney. She also fashioned some
heavy wooden planks with dozens of rusty nails and bent, jagged knives driven into
them. She always made the same things, and would stand at her table
every year, furiously soaring or hammering, with sweat pouring down her forehead.
Dad did his work in the garage. He had a welders torch in there,
and something called a lathe, and all sorts of other interesting tools.
His traps were almost always made of rusted metal and razor sharp edges, creaking
hinges, and quivering springs that made even my childish fingers weary. When he
finally emerged from his workshop this year, he revealed a funny looking contraption that
looked to me like some kind of cannon with a large hair canister attached,
the sort of thing I'd seen on a diver's back. When a pressure plate
was triggered, a sharp looking metal spear came shooting three feet out of the
barrel in a heart stopping explosion. Dad grinned with pride when we all jumped
back during the test fire. Then he spent thirty minutes swearing angrily as he
tried to reload the spike. After that he set about hiding it in the
fireplace. This in forore digging a hole, and there was a brief moment
as he knelt there, covered in soot, where he reached his hand out
toward me and called me Alex, asking me to grab the gas canister and
bring it over. Before I could even try and do what he asked,
Mom intervened and did it instead. Of course, she could not pick it
up, so she had to sort of raw walk it over. Dad was
quiet the entire time that happened. Whenever someone mentioned my older brother, people
went quiet. He could have picked up the gas canister easily. He had
always been big, even bigger than Dad. He talk after Grandpa, who
was a giant at five six. In later years, my pee teacher would
lament I never got those genes. My sister and I both took after our
father, who, while big, was no giant after all. This was
done after the loose rock and the ash was put back in place, after
the pressure plate and the trip wires were hidden or disguised as standard Christmas decorations.
After the bear traps were draped with all clothes or empty boxes, and
Mom's knife covered planks were placed beneath meticulously crafted false floors. My sister and
I gave Mom and Dad our traps and they were placed carefully in the middle
of the ambush. I loved this moment. I don't know why. I
think looking back, it was the feeling of being a unit, a family.
We helped. I was still scared of the dark, and my sister
had barely mastered the toilet, but we were helping, and good God.
Ever since Alex had gone, I'd wanted to help so bad. The shape
of my older brother was a vague one. I loved him, but I
didn't really know him. Couldn't have given my age instead. I grew up
in a world where Mum and Dad cried a lot and fought even more than
sometimes they themselves would admit they fought over nothing at all. They fought because
it hurt because even after my sister had been born, they still couldn't bring
themselves to touch Alex's room, or to even really ignore knowledge that it existed
without it causing a painful, sullen silence. So for that brief moment where
we stood surveying the fireplace in the living room, it felt like our version
of the perfect happy family. After that, it was bedtime for my sister
and I. We liked our special Christmas beds. I liked that they were
cozy and special, and that Mum would put the telly on and turn the
volume all the way up, and no one cared if we ate too much
candy or even watched films we weren't allowed to watch. So long as we
stayed in the basement, it was fine. We had all these blankets and
pillows so we could make thoughts, and no one came down to check if
we were asleep and good time. Despite all the excitement, though we usually
never made it past midnight. There was only so much much our little bodies
could handle. Mom and Dad, though they stayed up. I thought that
was normal. You don't know how much your parents sacrificed until you become one
yourself. Never appreciated what it meant for my dad mid forties by this point,
to stand upright and stay awake all night, or for my mom to
do the same, the two of them all night, shaking each other awake
when the other one started to flag. That was the year I lost the
privilege of ignorance. Isn't it funny had the best and worst moments of your
life often overlap. Maybe it's just a light bulb effect. I don't know.
That night, my sister and I went down to the basement, climbed
into our blanket fort and watched the never ending story. She fell asleep ten
minutes in. I stayed up and watched every second of it. I can
still see all that in my mind, as clear as day. Feels like
one of the happiest and purest moments of my life. Falling asleep on the
credits, gently dreaming of what it might be like to have my own dragon
to fly over school. I think that was it, the last time I
was just a child. I think most of us have memories like that,
don't we, The moment in time when we stopped being kids. Next thing
I remember, I was coming too, bathed in a cold gray light,
eyes heavy, head woozy. Something was wrong and I could feel it.
It was quiet, cold, with the draft, and my sister was nowhere
to be seen. It took me a moment to realize that the lights were
off along with the TV, and I was seeing the basement only by the
glow of the upstairs hallway. That was unusual. Mom and Dad always locked
the basement door and barred it from the other side. Tonight, who was
wide open, and something about the world up there seemed sinister to my childish
eyes. I don't know how to describe it exactly. I'd woken up and
something was wrong. I sat upright and slinked out of bed, in the
hope that any moment i'd see a better, happier world coming down those stairs.
Mom and Dad sister in arms, telling me Christmas was here. They'd
just let me sleep in. Maybe and it even snowed. Maybe that was
why the light seemed so odd, pale and diffused. God, I wanted
a white Christmas so badly. It was all over the telly in movies and
magazines, But all it ever seemed to do around us at that time of
year was rain in a fine, wet drizzle. Black windows come night,
heavy winds, cuddles that reflected street lamps. My only memory of my grandmother
was her singing, Rain, Rain, go away, come back another day.
Nothing else, not a face, just the sound of her singing that
old nursery rhyme Like Alex. She was another person I knew, largely through
the grief she left behind in others. I climbed the basement stairs my hands
and feet, following some hidden instinct to be quiet. Years of sneaking around
to listen to Mom and Dad's fevered arguments had taught me to always put my
weight on the edge of my steps. Whenever I spied them mid fight.
Mum would be standing somewhere, looking thin and sad, arms crossed, with
the smell of cigarette strung in the air. I thought of this as I
reached the top, pausing to sniff the air, wondering if I might smell
smoke coming from somewhere further in the house. Instead, I picked out a
gentle whiff of something burned, not dissimilar to the smell of party poppers or
old fireworks, certainly nothing like old cigarettes. And there was something else in
there too, something behind that black and sooty odor, something metallic, almost
sweet. Eventually I looked, lifting my head over the final step and peering
left and right down the hallway that stretched either side. For a long time,
there was nothing, and I stayed in place, frozen by indecision.
But then, somewhere to my right, near the kitchen doorway, the cold
morning light that filtered through seemed to shift and move. Someone was in there,
surely moving around and casting shadows. Of course, it could be Mum
or Dad, I told myself, but I still did not move. Whoever
it was, they were silent, deathly. So when I finally got the
courage to move, who was to go in the opposite direction? Not yet
ten years old, but even a child as an animal's instincts and mine were
telling me to avoid anyone who was that quiet. So I crawled towards the
living room, letting the old carpet absorb the sound of my movement. When
I looked inside, I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing.
It was like a bomb had gone off. The sofa was torn to shreds,
the coffee table lay in pieces. All of our Christmas decorations lay crushed
beneath broken floorboards and ripped up carpet. The bear traps stood upright, their
teeth locked, their jaws snapped shut. Dad's piston was in two bits,
the oxygen canister embedded in one wall, the barrel bent and lying on the
floor. The sight of our traps destroyed set something off in me. I
hadn't thought of it until that moment, but they had always been an integral
part of our Christmas decorations, a little different to the usual fare, sure,
but every bit as important to us as anyone else's homemade decorations. Everywhere
I looked, there was another little bit of our history lying in a broken
heap, and it broke my little heart because I so desperately wanted to fix
them, to return the living room to the pristine state it had been in
the night before, when we'd been a happy family. I wondered if maybe
Dad's little invention had gone wrong somehow one year he nearly burned the house down.
So it wasn't strange to think that dangerous looking piston was responsible for all
that destruction or that pressure building up. Still no sign of my family,
though, didn't look like they'd been caught in anything either. No blood back
in the hallway, I looked at the light cast by the kitchen door.
There was no further movement, but I didn't trust the stillness in the air.
Wrong, all wrong. Best chance now was the try upstairs, saying
goes as before. Really, it involved making my way to the front door,
where the stairs leading up or near, and then slowly and carefully climbing
them on all fours. I knew these steps very well and disappeared up them
as stealthily as anyone could hope to. My bedroom was empty, so was
my sister's. She had a big window, so I got a good look
at the world outside and saw the sun was well on its way to rising.
Early morning light and heavy fog made everything look washed out and faded,
eerie too, like the world was holding his breath in a way it was.
My parents' bedroom looked empty too at a glance, and I almost moved
on without notice the strange and heavy shadow beneath their bed. I'm glad I
didn't. I lingered and looked a little harder. Something about the light down
there convinced me it wasn't empty, not like normal, And before I had
any time for my imagination to start conjuring up nightmares, my sister's face appeared
from the gloom. I nearly yelped from joy, but the expression she wore
was as serious as they come. Not just afraid or concerned, but almost
sick. Pale with wide eyes, it was like she couldn't quite register my
presence. So I slinked forward and reached out, touching her hand. She
flinched and receded further into the darkness. Something was wrong, so I crawled
in beside her and checked her for injuries, do my best not to alarm
her father. She looked fine, so all I could do was take her
in my arms and try my best to coax her out of a shock.
When I finally whispered a question, it felt far too loud, even though
the only real sound was the smacking of my lips. She recalled a little
when I spoke, making me feel like I'd broken the most precious silence of
our lives. But I had to ask. I had to know where his
mom and dad. She merely shook her head, So I asked again,
this time, try my best to stay even quieter, but it seemed like
any sound was going to alarm her. Where are they? In the end,
she replied only so that I would stop asking. She pulled away as
she did so. She loved me, but well she was an animal with
a hiding place, and I was at risk of ruining it. He took
them up. There was the only thing she'd said, all pointing at the
roof. Those five words chilled me to the core. They carried some subtle
implication that our parents were dead. I didn't like this thought. It made
my skinitch, made the space we'd crawled into feel too small and uncomfortable.
A hot sensation began to well up in my throat, threatening tears. Was
she really saying we were alone? I didn't want that. I didn't want
to be alone. I wanted them to come back and sweep us up in
their arms. Without really knowing why, I refused the believer. I shook
my head and crawled out from under the bed, hoping to go off and
find them. I looked back briefly to see if she followed, but she
remained, seeming all too ready to leave me to go off to my fate.
She disappeared into the shadows, and I was left with only the slim
comfort that she might at least be safe there, out of sight, out
of mind, crawling out of her parents bedroom, I realized I had very
few options left. There was the phone on the downstairs landing by the front
door. It was that, or maybe I could run down the lane and
out to the nearest house, which was maybe a quarter mile away, not
far under normal circumstances. But did I really want to go sprinting out the
front door, hoping to God that whatever it marched through all those traps like
nothing wouldn't see me running out in the open. Better to get help to
come to us, Better to reach the phone. I thought of Grandpa,
Mom's dad, a hulking man who generally terrified us all, A cantankerous old
widower who had a bad habit of telling us things Mom said we shouldn't know,
like how it was our grandmother's fault we had to be scared of the
chimney at Christmas. I didn't like him. He smelt of mildew and soil,
A hulking giant who told us awful stories of growing up with a part
time job in a slaughterhouse that made me want to cry. But right then
I couldn't think of a better man to ask for help. I made it
down the stairs as quietly as I descended them. I lifted the phone gingerly
from the receiver, like it was ready to explode. I didn't know what
might make a noise, if anything. Didn't know if the table would rock
from a wobbly leg, if the plastic would click from hitting something, or
the dull tone would be a little too loud. When you're trying to be
quiet, everything feels dangerous every moment, every object. It's all just another
way to get caught out. One of the reasons I thought of Grandpa was
he was on speed dial. I pressed the three and listened to the ring
tone. I was tense at the sound, muted as it was, and
waited eagerly for this part to be over. The whole time, I couldn't
take my eyes off the hallway that turned towards the basement and the kitchen.
Occasionally a muffled creak or groan would emanate from somewhere inside, and my skin
would crawl. I'd never known a longer, more unsettling weight in my entire
life. When it was finally over, there came no relief. Grandpa didn't
answer the phone with the tact old men usually don't. I hadn't expected the
sound of his voice to be so damn loud. Hullo, Alice, is
that you? It was probably just the atmosphere, but it sounded like the
old bugger was bellowing the words in the very room. I was in terrified
of how that noise might carry. I slug the phone down and the receiver
and cringed at the sound of the internal bell ringing with the force. If
there really was some one in that house, they must have heard that.
I wasted no time in waiting. I ran, not crawled, up the
stairs, still trying to be as quiet as I could, but putting a
good emphasis on speed. As I climbed, I wondered if maybe I was
overreacting. But no. From the kitchen came the sound of breaking glass and
clattering metal, like some one had torn a cutlery drawer right out of the
cupboard and hurled it against the wall. Whatever had been in there was moving
faster than it had any right to. Every footfalls closed the unseen distance,
turning the corner and reaching the front door and stairs, just in time for
me to disappear over the top step and drop to the floor. The fear
that gripped me was electric all the paranoia I'd been feeling up until this point
felt thin and plastic in comparison the way that as a kid you might run
back from the bathroom convinced that something evil lurked in the shadows, when really,
deep down you knew there was nothing. But this was a deep and
grueling fear. I could hear something smashing the phone and little table to smithereens,
and I had just been standing there. A visceral fear coursed through my
body as I crawled on my stomach as fast as I could towards the nearest
door, which happened to be my own bedroom. It made my vision pulsate
and my stomach twist and churn, urging me to crawl on my belly faster
and faster like a soldier dodging gunfire. Once inside, I briefly considered hiding
under the bed like my sister, but something about that didn't feel safe enough.
I wanted something a door, a wall, anything that I could put
between me and whatever had made that noise. The clauset I decided that made
sense. It was full of old chunk I could squeeze between, and a
small hatch that led into the attic. All of this flashed through my mind
in a split second, and I veered towards the closet door, just in
time to hear the first step coming up the stairs. God, whatever it
was, it was heavy. I could hear the wood creek and the banister
crack and splinter as it forced its way up. I was breathing so hard
now, I was nearly whimpering with each movement coming down, close to losing
control over my muscles and my bladder. I felt like the finest piece of
twine was holding me all together, my body, my mind, my sanity,
all of it, waiting for that final thread to break, and for
it all to come undone at once, collapsing into a heap as I messed
myself, choking on desperate sobs and tears. I don't quite know how I
made it to the closet in such silence. I managed to open the door
and crawl inside without making a noise, and then watched in terror through the
slits in the door as I waited for God knows what to happen. Whatever
it was it was out there in the hallway, landing, sniffing the air.
I expected some sort of animal by this point a twisted reindeer. For
some reason, probably the season and the sound of its hefty snorts reinforced that.
But when it finally poked its head through the open doorway to look for
me, I saw something that was perplexingly human, or at least had been
hard to say as a family. Even now, we don't talk about it,
Not before that day, not after, not any of the extended family
reunions where all the branches of my line come together and discuss tactics for dealing
with the curse. It, whatever it is, seems to deliberately play on
our expectations. Talking about it makes you sound mad, even if it is
with other members of the family. I don't know how else to put it.
You feel silly, make the problem feel silly by extension, like you
don't need to take it as seriously. Of course, the curse is not
some random force. It has a sense of humor, I want to say,
taunting, cruel. Certainly it hurts to admit this, but everything it
does. All of the dead, and there are plenty of them, For
my grandmother had a lot of children, and they all went off and had
children too, so much so there were eleven households at the last reunion,
giving it plenty of victims to choose from. But all of it, all
the pain and misery on the roof, climbing down the chimney, leaving safely
if it was hit by a single one of our traps. It was a
damn game. They were tricks. It was playing tricks on us, and
it always had been. And these tricks were part of a game that had
rules. And why we had to have the chimney because if we didn't it
would behave unpredictably And that's why the thing poked his head through my door,
wearing a Santa hat and a white beard. I hate this, by the
way, hate going over how the worst night of my life was some kind
of joke to it, but yeah, that's what it was. It wore
a Santa hat and a beard, and in truth it made for a pretty
terrifying image, especially to a ten year old. Lord wasn't human. Was
an animal either. Looked like a rotten corpse, something you'd find withered and
preserved out in the Alaskan tundra, only for some scientists to say some caveman
from the pleistin scene it may have been some kind of dead thing. Actually
it was leaking a foul, gray fluid from its lipless mouth, crowned by
yellow teeth, and its cheap nylon beard was matted with the stuff. God,
I can almost smell it just talking about it. This school came and
went in seconds. It didn't know which room I'd gone in, so it
made only a brief sweep of mine before leaving to go take a proper look
elsewhere. A part of me considered shouting out to help my sister, but
well, I couldn't have moved my arms to do that if I wanted to.
Instead, I thought of it was almost definitely going to take a closer
look at this room once it didn't find me elsewhere. Maybe it'd found my
sister first, but I didn't really want to think about that. Instead,
I kept imagining it returning to this place and stomping around, opening drawers,
looking under the bed, and surely it would turn its head at one point
towards my closet, see the slatted door and realize exactly where I'd been hiding
all along. I had to move on from this place, and looking up,
I remembered the entry to the attic accessible from the very top shelf.
This was my best chance, my only chance, really. I began to
climb. Only this wasn't the graceful and quiet sneaking I'd been relying on so
far. Unlike the stairs, I hadn't made a habit of going this way
silently. I made it two shelves before I knocked an all transformer toy off,
where it hit the ground with a plastic clack. Another time, another
place, the noise would have barely registered, but to me and that thing
outside, it might as well have been a gunshot. As quickly as the
head had disappeared, that monster came roaring into my room, and I began
to climb with quivering arms. I came close to flailing out of control.
I didn't look back. I reached the top, pushed the hatch open,
and pulled myself through, just in time to hear the closet door torn off
its hinges. Once through, I couldn't stop myself turning around briefly, and
that thing was right there, grinning at me. It saw me, It
knew where I was. There was no hiding now, only running. This
time I really did lose control of my bladder when one of its clawed hands
wrapped around the hatch, I realized I had to keep going, keep running,
keep moving. I didn't know my way around the attic, but that
didn't matter right now. I had to keep going, keep putting distance,
any distance between me and it. Unfortunately, the way wasn't very clear.
My family, like most, had jammed a lot of old junk into the
attic, and first when I turned and saw the piles of old boxes,
I nearly panicked at the claustrophobic maze that faced me. But when I had
to get my hands and niece to crawl through the only way forward, I
came to hope that maybe it meant that that thing wouldn't be able to follow.
This hope spurned me on. But I was only halfway through the tunnel
of old plastic and cardboard when there came the overpowering stench of rotten meat,
letting me know that that thing was closer than I dared to imagine. Then
what little light there was went away and something grabbed my ankle. I screamed,
this was the moment where I was meant to wake up. This was
the moment when something was meant to happen to stop the terror. I pulled
at the boxes around me, and they came tumbling down, spilling old furniture
and photos, and I grabbed at them too, hoping for some kind of
leverage. But this thing was big, and it hauled me out like a
plucking a rabbit out of its warren. Briefly, it held me upside down
and surveyed me, and I stared into black, sunken eyes and a gaunt
face covered in lesions and pocks. With a smirk, he grabbed something from
over its shoulder, put it on the floor, and before I even realized
what was happening, it had stuffed me into a sack and thrown me over
its shoulder. The world became a blur. I felt my mind close in
on itself, and the world narrowed to a point as I thought to stop,
my thoughts racing with images of what might happen to me, Of being
dragged into its home, with that wretched mouth would open wide to swallow me
whole, Of being killed or budgered or tortured. I don't know if you
can really imagine what it was like for me as a kid to curl up
in that dark space and contemplate my own mortality to come face to face with
my own death or worse. But it broke me irreparably and completely. To
this day, I am broken because of it, because of that moment,
so much so that when it dropped me down with a heavy thump on the
fireplace mantle, I did not even move or try to escape. I already
knew where it was taking me, of course, up the chimney, where
else, And it was too late. The fight was lost. If anything,
At this point, I wanted it to be over with. I wanted
to be with Mom and Dad. Instead, the moment stretched on and on.
Seconds turned to minutes, and I waited with held breath for this nightmare
to move on, But it didn't. It must have been making preparations for
something, but what and how long? Eventually I opened my eyes. Thin
light made its way through the coarse fabric of the sack enough for me to
make out a vague outline of the destroyed living room. But the opening of
the sack had also fallen slightly, and a small aperture was visible with a
cord that bound it wasn't quite pulled tight enough, And there, like some
strange reminder, was a broken HB pencil, A tiny, little piece of
my trap. One night, one sleep, that was all that had separated
me from this nightmare. Just the day before, we'd been happy, or
something close to it, and I remembered that not only had this thing taken
me away, it had also taken my mother, my father, and even
Alex, who I knew only through ancient memories, and a room my mother
didn't like letting me into. And there was a damn good chance it was
going to get my sister to all of it gone, leaving behind an empty
house with broken things that no one else would care about. Not the tree,
not the presence, not any of it. I felt something wash up
from within me, an anger, a petulant, childish tantrum. I was
screwed anyway, right, I had lost everything, So why not? I
reached out, grabbed a pencil, and, poking my head out of the
sack, saw that thing enter the room, with my sister held by her
ankle in one of his misshapen fists. She was bawling hysterically, and I
hoped that with this final action I might somehow save her. I crawled out
of the bag, launched myself at it, and jammed the broken pencil into
its booted foot. Immediately it dropped my sister and I stayed where I was
on the floor, sobbing, head bowed, waiting for the rest to come.
Only nothing did. Instead, that thing had sighed a bone deep,
weary sigh the kind apparent let out when they realize that toddler has been quiet
for too long. With a voice like gravel. It spoke in a harsh
Germanic accent, spitting some of the words from Queen its broken teeth, so
close this year, good trap, little one, but I will not fall
for this one. Twice, with one of its clawed hands, it pulled
the pencil out of his foot and stumped away, and I passed out before
I had the chance to hear the rest. It was our grandfather who eventually
found us, both huddled together on the living room floor. The next month
or so was a blur. A lot changed. We were taken into my
grandfather's care and we had to bury our parents, not to mention moving out
sorting the home. Our contribution to this wasn't much, of course, we
were kids, but we still had to go back and get some of our
things. I don't remember much of it, to be honest. My grandfather
years later, would sit me down and give me an account of the night
as best he could. My father's piston trap had gone wrong and blown half
the living room to smithereens bad luck on any day for this time. It
had happened the year that that thing came to visit us, and with no
traps left, it had a clean run into the house where it wrought its
havoc. Only has to be a nick, my grandfather said, with a
stoic shrug, or gesturing a cut on his palm. Your father over complicated
things. I told him this after the time he caused the fire too much.
Trap has to work in principle, not practical. No need for compressors
or pistons. That is why your piston. Yeah, sent it away.
You may trap, trap, hurt it, it go away. Those rules
we follow rules. Give it chimney to come down. Play it a game.
We win or it wins. Either way, it has it's fun,
he spiked the last words. Can't blame him. No part of that was
fun for us, But at least Grandpa was honest with us. He explained
the curse as best he knew it. The rules the traps introduced us to
our extended family from Germany, and we learned that the game is played with
at least one household from the family every year, and it helps the stay
in touch and talk about what did or God forbid did not work. As
for its origin, well, our grandmother took that to a grave. Unfortunately
Grandpa didn't know it, nor did anyone else. Might have been something from
a childhood, maybe a deal with something she found in the woods. Who
knows, it doesn't matter. He was a miserable man who raised us as
best he could. But I could at least understand why he was so cantankerous
and difficult. He'd fallen in love with a woman and gotten a pregnant before
the first Christmas, having no idea what lay in wait, and then when
he found out the bizarre truth, he stuck it out year after year,
one painful loss after another. I admire him for it, admired the way
he didn't let anything get to him, at least not in front of us,
because I do remember some things about waking up that day, about him
finding us. I remember that the monster, having lost its game, had
returned up parents to us, only it was a little too late for them.
I remember wet sacks beneath the chimney, blood leaking from the fabric.
My parents were cremated for good reason. Whatever it had done to them,
well, that thing is a sick and twisted creature, that's for sure.
I can only assume that's why. After returning the sacks, it had taken
little tags and tied them around the top, gifting our parents back to us,
even after it had budgeted them, until only ribbons remained. Merry Christmas,
little ones, the tag read, and so many more to come.