A Christmas Wish

The laughter started softly at first, toying somewhere between joy and restlessness, but by midnight, he thought his parents’ faces would split in two. Echoes of their cheer filled the empty house, relentless and jagged, bleeding with a disturbing insincerity. Deep smile lines pressed into his dad’s cheeks as though calved from fingernails. His eyes, glassy and unmoving, fixated somewhere on the bookcase. Mum clutched her sides, splayed on the couch seat like a marionette with loose strings, gasping as she howled and laughed without pause. 

“Mum?” Elliot heard himself say, his voice cracking like the Christmas brittle.

Laini peeked out from behind the stairwell, wide eyes reflecting the flickering Christmas tree lights. “They’re happy,” she whispered hesitantly, a stuffed rabbit clutched against her stomach.

Elliot lingered in the doorway and the black television screen, aware of the press of the floor against his bare feet. His parents’ faces–wide, pale circles–turned to look at him, hot laughter rumbling up their throats and from their cracked lips. Mouths stretched wide, skin taut and close to splitting.

“Dad?” he murmured when they made no response. 

The air was tighter here, pushing into the skin beneath his reindeer pajamas with a heaviness that hadn’t been there before. Christmas tree lights flickered in and out, casting green shadows across his parents’ faces. It was like being underwater, somewhere the light didn’t reach and bubbles of his breath tumbled out from his nostrils. 

Elliot didn’t sleep that night. He lay unmoving in bed, blankets pulled to his chin, the faint glow of the Christmas tree spilling into the hallway outside his room. The laughter continued, oscillating through the walls, punctured only by sharp, gasping breaths. Both sides of his pillow burned hot against his cheeks as if fibres from the cotton sheets had reached out from their cloth to grasp at his skin, dragging him slowly closer into the bed. He turned onto his side, feeling the remnants of dinner slosh in his stomach with the movement. A globe sat still on the bedside table, its snow settled at the bottom. Inside, a miniature family stood frozen in cheer, the small flecks of their features tugged happily.

The man had promised him a Christmas like the ones before. A time when he was small and waited up for Santa with a flashlight. It had begun slowly, the change, until one year Christmas didn’t feel the way it should. There was no excitement, no slumbering thrill in his stomach at the thought of presents or festive baking or seeing family again. The twenty-fifth day of December slipped by each year, indistinguishable from the one before.

“Just one Christmas,” Elliot had said. “I want us to be happy again.”

The man at the shopping centre had looked at him, dressed in his red coat with white fur lining. He was one of those people paid to dress up as Santa and take photos with little kids who’d whisper their Christmas wishes in his ear.

Elliot was thirteen. He didn’t believe in those things anymore–hadn’t for a long time. He had only gone for Lainie. It would be her sixth Christmas and maybe he resented her for being too young to remember when their parents loved each other.

The house awoke slowly after that, alive and warm, the dust on the shelves disturbed. Quickly, however, the laughter didn’t stop. It grew louder, twisting into the echoes of his own trembling voice, layering guttural chuckling into a grotesque cacophony.

“Elliot,” his mother called shrilly. “We have cookies!”

He wrapped his hands around the edge of the duvet, the texture slick between his fingers, and listened to the channels of her speech ricochet through the hollows of the house. 

“Long lay the world,” she lilted from the kitchen, “in sin and error pining.”

A second voice joined her. “'Til He appeared and the soul felt its worth.”

The carol continued softly, but their laughter swam around Elliot in litany, growing louder as he swung his legs out of bed and approached the hallway again. Light from the kitchen peered around the corner, exposing the contours of his face. 

The living room was just as he’d left it, but now his parents stood by the tree, their backs to him. Trays of cookies awaited neatly, their edges dark.

“Mum?”

His parents turned together, their movements stiff, to reveal their faces. The tightness in his chest grew as he saw the skin around their mouths stretched. Torn. Blood seeped into the gaps between their teeth. Eyes, glassy but blinking, gleaned with the tree lights’ reflection. 

“Sit with us,” Dad welcomed, holding out the gingerbread cookies. 

Elliot reached for the tray then withdrew his hand immediately, hissing at the heat burned into his fingers. Dad kept smiling, splitting the skin around his lips further, and it was then that Elliot noticed the blisters around his father’s hand. His skin melted into the tray like plastic, even as he held the cookies steady in front of him.

“I–” Elliot reeled backwards. “Lainie, don’t!”

His smaller sister clapped her hands and took a cookie from the tray unharmed. She looked up at him, crumbs on her lips. “Why not?”

Dad peered at him curiously as blood began to drool down the front of his shirt. His face, so close to Elliot’s, melted hollow, the fat fading from around his eyes and leaving them sunken and prominent beneath his brow bones. His lips thinned until Elliot blinked at the familiarity of the stranger’s face.

“Santa?” What else was there to call him, this man from the shopping centre?

“This was what you wanted,” the man chimed warmly. “A happy Christmas.” His beard hung thin and pale, clinging in wisps to his chin. 

“Not like this,” Elliot implored, keeping his distance from the others. “Please, I take it back.”

Fall on your knees; O hear the Angel voices.

“Take it back, I don’t want it anymore!”

In all our trials born to be our friend

He knows our need, to our weakness is no stranger

The Santa man drew closer. “Careful what you wish for, boy.”

“Mum?” His feet stuck to the timber floorboards as he walked. “What’s wrong with you?”

Her eyes, alit with green Christmas lights, landed on him and her smile deepened. “We are happy, son,” she assured him. White and yellow teeth peeled away from her lips, splitting the skin raw. “We are very happy,” she repeated, and it was like a switch had been flipped that he could not undo; over and over, the same phrase, same smile and echoic laughter.

Lainie tugged at his sleeve, giggling. “Santa’s here.” She reached up and touched her mother’s face, small fingers tracing a blood streaked smile.

His parents grinned widely but their eyes remained still as though the strings of the lower half of their faces had been pulled taut. Elliot stepped back from those stretched, unnatural mouths that opened and closed with a puppeteer’s laughter, feet hitting the edge of the rug and stumbling. 

He reached back quickly but was met with a pair of bare, thin arms, the skin wrinkled and painted with contorting veins. Santa looked down at him before Elliot scrambled away, nails scratching the hot floor, grasping at nothing. 

“Are you happy, Elliot?” his mother asked suddenly, her voice high. Cheerful. 

His power and glory evermore proclaim.

Elliot stepped backwards again and blinked against their bloodied eagerness. The laughter seeped into his skin and the bones sheathed beneath. It clenched around his chest. His throat.

In the black TV screen he found a reflection, pale and wide with glassy eyes and a smile stretched too tight. Blood burst at the corners of his lips.

“Yes,” he gasped, glancing between his parents and the man who called himself Santa. His grin widened. “I am very happy.”

Santa’s eyes gleamed. “You are very happy.”