Big News for Me, Inc.

I have big, and good, news: As of Feb. 21, I am employed.

Assuming it works out, it’s fantastic. It means an obvious means of self-support, and stability, and blah blah blah. You know what a job means.

This post really isn’t about that. I’m hoping for this to serve as a promise to myself to do what else I need to do.

As good as having a job is—and it is, I think—it’s not everything. I want to make sure that I’m not in as powerless a situation as I have been for a while.

The last full-time job I had really did a number on me. I knew it was a dead end, for some fairly frustrating reasons. It wasn’t paying enough to let me build much in the way of financial reserves, and it frankly sucked so much life out of me that it was hurting my efforts to get much of anything else going.

I finally did take the leap and get out, which was scary but wise. I’ve built a couple of good things since then: The citizen science book is a big one (and hey, how about that link to subtly point out that I’m on Amazon!), and I’ve also finished a first draft of another book, Dad’s Little Book of Rage. (I have several things to figure out on that one, including illustrations and publication options.) A few other things are in the hopper as well.

When I start my new job, I’ll be giving it my all. But I also want to make sure that I’ve got other things going so that if it doesn’t work out, I have options.

This site will be part of that. Soon, I’ll begin posting some of the citizen science information that I collected for the book here. Until then, though here’s a teaser from Rage. It’s an illustration that I did to accompany the first chapter. They childish crayon style is intentional. I have no idea if this is the direction that I’m going to go, but it’s certainly under consideration.

Watch for more!

 

The Naked Flagpole

My first prose fiction in a while — I’ve been spending my time on scripts and music (and preparing for After, Life) lately. And while it’s time to get cracking back on Exile Issues, this isn’t from it. Instead, it’s a completely hypothetical unnamed young adult novel. We’ll see how that goes. But it has Terry Pratchettian footnotes, so that’s something.

The feel of the wind was the first thing I noticed when I woke up. It’s weird, looking back, that that would be the case. The wind wasn’t really all that important in the grand scheme of things. It was just a symptom of the real issue, as my mom would say. She’s a doctor and probably the reason I’m such a nerd, but you’ll meet her later. Back to the important things.

Well, not really. The next thing I noticed was the sound of the wind. It wasn’t loud, really. More concave. Like something that isn’t really there was pushing out the static quiet that should have been. That’s not a great explanation, is it? Try walking sideways with a glass over your ear and you’ll get what I mean.

Of course, that’s just another symptom too. The real issue only hit me in third place: That I was falling.

“Fjord,” I muttered inwardly.*

I technically felt the softness of the grass next, but since the grass was only about an inch above the hardness of the ground, that’s what wound up dominating my senses.

I looked up and saw the flagpole from which I’d been hanging, and felt that the wind had died down (or, more accurately, that I had stopped moving through the air–thanks, Mom). The eerie lack of sound disappeared too, as cheering wooshed in to replace it.

It was only then that I discovered my complete nudity**.

*1 Let me make something clear. I didn’t say “Fjord.” I screamed something, and it was the kind of thing that makes old southern ladies fan themselves. But I’m also entirely willing to sacrifice factualness in the pursuit of fame and wealth. You see, I want this book in every school, library, and day care center in the known universe. But there are parents out there whose hobbies include going through the books in schools, libraries, and day care centers looking for so-called naughty words, and making a big fuss about how they have to protect the children by removing them. I don’t want that to happen, so whenever there’s some cursing, I’ll use a whimsical, understated alternative. It’ll be our secret, eh?

**Okay, we’ll have to give up on the day care centers.

My Sister’s Exes

The name that appeared on Kyle’s phone didn’t belong to someone he wanted to talk to. So he ignored the call, and the ghastly tone that alerted him to a new voice mail. All simple enough.

His phone rang again twenty minutes later. Then, fifteen minutes after that, and ten minutes after that, and five after—

“Hi, Michelle,” he grumbled.

“Hi-hi,” she bubbled back. Michelle always bubbled. It drove Kyle crazy. “Howya doin’?”

“I’m great. What’s up?” No extraneous words, no extraneous emotion.

“Oh, nothing. Just wanted to chat.”

Kyle hadn’t expected that, but when the words came out he knew he should have. It was just the kind of thing that Michelle would do. Most people in her situation would have only redialed so insistently if, say, Lisa had been in a horrible accident, or needed a blood transfusion, or maybe if she wanted to create some convoluted scenario in which they’d get back together. That last one, incidentally, dwelled far beyond the realm of fantasy. Lisa only made decisions after thorough consideration so she had no need to ever change her mind, and she had decided to dump him.

“Oh,” Kyle said.

“So I was at the mall today and I saw—“

“I don’t actually want to talk to you, Michelle,” Kyle interjected through her yammering. “I mean, not because of anything you did. Just that, you know, I’m not with your sister anymore so… There’s kind of a break, okay?”

Michelle giggled, high-pitched and delicate. “No there isn’t. I maintain really good relationships with all of Lisa’s ex-boyfriends.”

“You maybe shouldn’t, kid.”

“Well, I can’t have any boyfriends of my own yet, so I have to live vi-… vih-… what’s the word?”

“Vicariously.”

“Yeah, vicariously.” Michelle continued with the exuberance of someone even younger than she. “See, you knew exactly what I was thinking. It’s like we’re soul-mates, but for in-laws. What’s the word for that?”

“I hope there isn’t one, Michelle. We’re not soul-mates, or in-laws, and we never were.”

“You’re just saying that because you never got married, but everyone thought you should have, so—“

In that moment, Kyle realized that if he had to suffer the indignity of being dumped, he might as well take some benefit from it. He pulled the phone away from his ear.

In the muffled distance to the end of his arm, Lisa’s wails of “Kyle? Kyle?” grew more frantic.

He stretched his other arm, and with a ceremoniously deliberate pace extended his pointer to the hang-up button.

Naturally, Kyle broke down twenty minutes later, frantically calling Lisa to apologize and beg her not to tell Michelle any of what happened and maybe casually hint what an amazing person he was and that she could do a lot worse and all that, but for the first eight minutes or so of radio silence he felt absolutely righteous.

*****

No commentary on this one, except to say that I have no specific plans for this one, but it could wind up lots of places.

Public Bathrooms

Public bathrooms are a surprisingly dangerous thing. You could ask Letitia Baling, except that she sadly is no longer with us, because parts of her drowned in a shiny toilet bowl. She was not, at the time, large enough to successfully use a toilet seat.

The automatic hand dryer must be blamed for this particular unfortunate circumstance. Even the simplest of such devices have quite a large number of moving parts, and this one was a spectacularly deluxe model. While normally these parts would be safely covered by a metal shield, there are many ways for this protection to be breached. Rust, for example. Hungry mice gnawing through the bolts. Clever sabotage, or even terrorism. Or, as in this case, an explosion, caused by water that made its way into the dryer’s electrics, which caused the wires to short out and spark a fire that ignited a pocket of pure oxygen trapped in the blower by a serious manufacturing flaw.

The explosion caused all of these unusually sharp parts to shoot out at a truly stunning speed, sadly just as poor Letitia was walking in for a pee. They chopped through her like a warm Minnesota spoon through a lime Jell-o mold.

How did all of this debris hit her? Letitia was known as a woman of exceptional grace and nimbleness. She had once drawn a hail of more than 12,000 rocks catapulted from a castle outside of Lyon when its master, a thoroughly insane older man, ordered the action when he became convinced that Letitia was a horde of invading Mongols. (Needless to say, the old man’s belief regarding Letitia was incorrect on a large number of levels.) In this attack, Letitia managed to position herself in the one spot in a 60-foot radius not to be struck by a single stone.

So how was she hit now? It wasn’t the smoke, of which copious amounts filled the room. Letitia had spectacular hearing, and had even learned a rudimentary but effective form of echolocation. She could dodge in the darkest night, and have enough energy left over to dodge the night itself.

It wasn’t even precisely the water on the floor, which was enough to slip up most mortals, although that came closer.

The true culprit was Letitia’s weakness for shows. She owned hundreds of pairs of gloriously dubious quality. The hot pink high heels she wore today were so shoddy that they leached oils when they got wet. This was enough to make Letitia lose the flawless body control to which she was so accustomed.

As she felt her body open up to receive any kind of incoming missile, it occurred to Letitia to wonder where all the water came from. Because her sonar was otherwise occupied, she failed to notice the garden hose connected to one of the faucets. This hose was delivering copious quantities of liquid into the tube that directs the air. A brand-new janitor, in her enthusiasm to make everything perfectly clean inside and out, had put it there and turned the water on to its maximum level.

This custodian was also responsible for Letitia making her way to her final resting place. She came into the bathroom to find Letitia lying in pieces on the floor, and considered it a great tragedy that such an obviously great woman should be struck down so close to her goal. So this worthy custodian took the initiative to move what once was Letitia, bit by bit, to the throne where she obviously deserved to meet her reward.

Many of these bits were small enough to slide into the bowl, and when the custodian left the stall, the toilet’s sensors flushed them into the sewers and ultimately the Earth herself. Perhaps owing to the diligence with which the custodian maintained the plumbing, at no point did Letitia create any sort of a clog.

There have, in the days since Letitia’s passing, been some rumors claiming that it was the force of impact that delivered Letitia’s limbs to their final resting place. This is patently untrue; our heroic if unnamed custodian is solely responsible for Letitia’s peaceful repose. Upon my honor as a storyteller, to claim anything else would be absurd.

*****

This lunchtime post is just a bit of absurdity inspired by some overzealous warning sign that I saw on my holiday travels. Have no real plans for it—might be adaptable as a 3LR sketch, but maybe not—but I enjoyed writing it.

Baru’s New Home

The journey lasted just an instant. It felt like it involved a flip. Baru was well-schooled enough to know that was illusory, just a function of switching from four spatial dimensions to three. He knew the fact, but not well enough not to feel it.

Before he could see it, the new world collapsed around him. One, two, three seconds, and just as suddenly he adapted. Again, merely a mental side effect that Baru already knew about, caused by the sudden lack of sensory information. He frankly expected worse. Rumor had it that some interdimensional travelers felt the constriction for hours, and had paralyzing nightmares about the experience in perpetuity.

He peered out the window at the planet bobbing below. It would be Earth, naturally. There were other planets in this dimension, some with intelligent life and some with the same blandly generic greenery, but this was the one most nearly hospitable to Tivolian physiology. While not exactly comfortable, it was the only planet close enough that the political notion of conquering and colonizing it periodically arose. The idea never gained serious traction, not out of any moral or military reason but simply because nobody wanted to live there. At best it would be a prison colony.

Baru idly wondered if he would set foot on Earth’s surface. Maybe he should take advantage of the opportunity, just to say he’d done it, but he wasn’t one of those people who grew up dreaming about setting foot on strange new worlds. In fact, he might avoid it just to enjoy the reactions that other people would have.

“You went all the way to another dimension and didn’t even get off your ship?” they’d shriek in horror. He would arch his eyebrows; and make a small, superior smile; and airily note that “It is impossible to understand the motivations of an artist without being an artist oneself.”

Of course, he might have to, should whatever food and water supplies on there were on board run out. Baru resolved not to let that happen. He was confident he had all the information he needed to find his way home, so it was just a matter of working his way through it. He saw no reason to delay.

*****

Something from Exile Issues, which genuinely is my main project, although so much of what I post here is from other things that are still in the future. It comes from early-on in the book; Nathan (known as Baru on his home planet) has just officially been kicked out. I’m still doing my first edit of the book, which is taking longer than anticipated. Partly it was tough to get enthusiasm for the project—it’s awfully intimidating to have a whole book filled with things that I didn’t do right and have to make them right—and partly because I’ve been splitting my efforts. The latter is dangerous, although I think I’m still on the safe side of the line; I’ve gotten back into the habit of working on Exile Issues, while having other things in the works has nice side effects like feeding this blog and preventing burnout and giving me a head start on projects when I finish this one.

Speaking of burnout: December 29 would technically be the blog’s 6-month anniversary. Really, though, October is when I got serious about it, and even then there were hiccups until Mid-November. Since then, though, nearly daily posts, and everything’s still going good. So I’m going to call this an accomplishment.

Soda Fountain Abuse

“And would you be a love and give me a cup? Not for tea, mind, just some water. Water is good for these old bones, ya know?”

“Right,” said Mickey, the son of Jenny Hailer and therefore the one who got stuck working the after-school shift at her deli. He didn’t mind it much—it was always quiet, so he could get a decent chunk of his homework done—but he did mind Friday afternoons when Declan Potts rolled in for his pre-weekend munch. He knew perfectly well that Declan was going to fill the paper cup with tea as soon as he thought Mickey’s attention was elsewhere. If his mother found out…

Jenny was absolutely convinced that the single greatest threat to her livelihood, her son’s future, and society itself was the abuse of her deli’s soda fountain.

She knew that she had to partially blame herself. She bought the model that dispenses water out of one of the same spigots as the pay drinks, after all. Still, that didn’t give people the right to drink expensive beverages when they only asked for a free water cup. All of those ninety-five cents add up. Particularly when they steal free refills.

She had posted signs warning that this practice amounted to theft and would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Some people obeyed, but others took advantage of her good nature and distracting atmosphere to snatch drinks anyhow.

The hippies who came into town were the worst, thinking that all soft drinks should be held communally throughout the universe and therefore that they could imbibe with impunity. And Declan Potts was the worst of them all. One time Jenny had happened to be in the deli on Friday afternoon, showing her accountant some records, and she watched as her son specifically warned Declan that he couldn’t have any beverages that he didn’t pay for. The scoundrel took a cup of iced tea and a refill of lemonade anyway.

“Be sure to watch that Declan today,” Jenny invariably warned Mickey on Friday mornings before school, but they both understood what a charade it was. Mickey didn’t even bother to admonish the man about it today, accepting that the way his insides were turning into an angry sea cucumber was just a regular business hazard. True to form, Declan poured himself some tropical punch today and raised his glass in a silent toast toward the counterboy.

In doing so, Declan became aware for the first time of something written on the cup. “Darkwood Gulchians We Love,” he read. “Oy! Wuzzat, then?”

Mickey thought it was pretty self-explanatory, but he had enough concern for customer service not to let it show. “My mom had some cups made up,” he explained.

“I know that, ye git. What’s on ‘em?”

“Oh. They’re just people around town, you know? People who are interesting, or that she’s pleased to know.”

Declan smiled broadly. “Well, then, miladdo. I’m bettin’ that she’s gonna want one of these before long.” A business card seemed to jump out of Declan’s sleeve and spin its way across the counter.

Mickey picked up the card and regarded it with disdain, for it glittered. He then slid it back to Declan. “I think she’s going to keep it to people she likes,” he said, as kindly as possible, which wasn’t terribly.

Declan’s smile never faded. “She will,” he declared, as he slid the card back across the counter and strutted away.

*****

Lunchtime post time! This scene will show up in The Clean Hippie Murders, which I’m really enjoying writing, even though I haven’t actually started writing it yet. This is another act of so-called hippie rebellion; it’s only recently that I’ve started coming up with scenes involving any of the hippies, but discovering their personalities and what distinguishes them from each other has been a lot of fun.

The scene itself was inspired by Chipotle and their “People we’re Pleased to Know” cups. They should totally put me on one.

Emergency Exits

Two glass doors, labeled “for emergency use only,” taunted Wayne.

This was the weekend. Wayne time. Not rule time. Those glass doors were symbols of oppression that he wanted to bust down.

The doors led nowhere. They jutted into the interior of the Earth Mother Craftworks store, attached only to one wall so anyone could walk around them to get to the other side. They were an inconvenience, not a barrier, and therefore a clear symbol of the Man that must be constantly struggled against.

Wayne had been coming to Darkwood Gulch for six years, but he’d never been to this fluorescent store that claimed to be operated by a member of the Cherokee but probably wasn’t. He preferred to buy all of his beading supplies at a fantastic little boutique near his home in Columbus, but he’d been in a rush to get out on Friday and he tried to extend his supplies just a bit further than they were willing to stretch.

Wayne examined the doors more closely. They were unnaturally clean—completely smudgeless. Someone had spent a lot of effort to make and keep them that way.

He pressed a finger against the glass, willing his fingerprint to despoil this virgin territory.

Nothing.

An elderly woman with a basket full of brown scratchy yarns toddled her way toward him and prodded his shoulder with surprising force. “I don’t think you should be doing that, sonny,” she insisted. “That sign says ‘emergency use only.’”

“This is an emergency,” Wayne retorted. “An emergency of your complacent little mind.”

“I was taunting my elders when you were in diapers, little man. And I know an emergency when I see it.” She held up one of her skeins. “This sweater is for my ungrateful bitch granddaughter, but when I make it, I’ll be thinking of you.” The woman spun and left more nimbly than she arrived.

Wayne turned back to the doors. He couldn’t identify any alarm system. There were no funny wires or anything.

This was his chance to strike a blow for freedom.

Wayne reached out. His heart beat a little bit faster as his fingers grasped the handle. In his mind, he began composing the speech that he would deliver before the judge. It would be powerful, and moving, and it might singlehandedly save society.

“May I help you, sir?” came an oppressively friendly chirp from behind.

Operating on pure instinct, Wayne realized that he really didn’t need a criminal record. There was one thing that he could do: He dropped his bucket, scattering plastic and wooden disks across the cement floor, and bolted.

As he squealed out of the parking lot, there was a throbbing in his shoulder. He must have hit something on way out. He imagined that there was a whole rack of generic knitting patterns splayed across the floor, revealing their secrets of cartoonish old bearded men to anyone sad enough to look. That was the story that would emerge from this day. He would write an epic poem to deliver around the campfire. Maybe even folk songs.

Wayne felt righteous.

*****

Here’s another bit of character anecdote that should make its way into The Clean Hippie Murders that was inspired by Midway Airport. It has, all through the terminals, these glass doors that stick out into the walkway that are labeled “Emergency Use Only.” It confuses me.

Perhaps noting that will get me put on a terrorist watch list. I hope not, although I really don’t travel enough for it to matter much.

In the workings of fiction, the experience morphs into a mighty rebellion, at least in the mind of one of the hippies of Darkwood Gulch. Really, I should put “hippie” in quotation marks; the Darkwood Gulch variety is intended to resemble the actual species in about the same way that McDonalds food resembles real food.

The Tour, Part II

From there, Jonas could do no wrong. The tour group loved to hear about peace and love and harmony, and how the area had mystical healing properties, and how Darkwood Gulch provided the only truly authentic hippie experience in the nation, and how the hippies here were leading the movement into amazing new areas. (He separated the last two points, as always, but with this crowd he probably didn’t need to.)

Forty-eight minutes later, everything was ruined, because the guests had to witness the one thing that horrified them beyond all others.

Breasts.

Bare and wrinkly, they made their appearance as the tour visited the hippie camp itself. Jonas didn’t even see them himself. He just heard a shriek coming from one of the guests, a scrawny single man in his fifties. The man wore long beige pants and a plaid button-down shirt and claimed he hailed from Iowa, which Jonas marked as dull enough not bother catching any other information about him, except one obvious piece: He wore a pair of binoculars for birdwatching.

The man’s ludicrous squeal meant only one thing: The hippies were naked again. Jonas knew that some of them had a naturist bent, and was fine with it in general. But he’d given them his tour schedule for the week, and asked them to either cover up or stay nude in the back of the camp, while subtly reminding them of how he’d gotten the city to grant them use of this land and the sharply minimized law enforcement for certain minor infractions thereupon.

So someone was mad about something, and they’d decided that protest was a more effective means of telling him about it than telling him about it would be. Asses.

Jonas silently cursed them as he checked his mental tally. He kept a spreadsheet of who got which favors that he’d have to consult when he got back to the office, but if he remembered right, it was the hippies’ turn to win one. He whipped the tram around, silently damning the hippies from whom he derived his livelihood for doing so much to stand in the way of him making it.

“Sorry folks, it looks like the hippies are in a private mood today,” he spoke calmly into his microphone, but he knew that the tourists would have none of it.

“I saw hooters,” Iowa Birdwatcher Man said. “I’ve never seen anything so horrifying in my life.”

This set his cohorts off. Over the general din Jonas could hear words like “immorality” and “unsuitable for children,” being bandied about. There wasn’t even the usual perverted old guy turning around desperate for a peep.

“I do apologize for that, folks. As you know, hippies are fantastically independent and free-spirited, so we cannot control incidents like that.” Jonas checked his mirror to see about twenty pairs of eyes looking back at him with Biblical rage. He decided that gift shop sales would be unlikely and might lead to arson, so he decided to protect what revenue he could.

Jonas turned back to his microphone and whispered: “No refunds.”

The Tour, Part I

“The field on your left hosted the great Peace Concert of July 12, 1969. With acts like Arlo Guthrie, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix, many people consider this to be the Woodstock of the South.”

“I didn’t know there was a Woodstock of the South!” declared one woman, a sweet, older Midwestern thing. The camera that hung from a strap around her neck seemed to jump into her hands, and she managed at least a dozen pictures of the field even though the tram passed it at full speed. They’d be blurry, but she would show them off anyway.

The Woodstock line was always dangerous, but Jonas prided himself on his ability to size up his groups. This one skewed older, and pulsed with kindly passionlessness that would accept every word he said, and probably repeat them back home over Olive Garden dinners to all of their similarly post-striving friends.

“Coming up on your right is the childhood home of a man named Jacob Marleigh.”

“Like A Christmas Carol?” the man sitting next to photographer woman offered enthusiastically.

“Very good, my man,” Jonas announced, and there was a bit of hubbub at the back of the tram as news of such an amazing coincidence traveled backward. (While the speed of sound is more than 700 miles per hour, Jonas estimated the speed of information through a tour group at only one and a half meters per second.) “Although the family name is spelled differently, ‘M-A-R-L-E-I-G-H,’ they did name him after the book.”

“Did you hear that, Ronny? The family name is spelled differently,” over-enunciated a woman in the middle of the bus to her husband. Jonas checked his mirror, aimed at the passengers rather than the road, and took mercantile pleasure at noting her attire: a bright red T-shirt with “I’m a tourist–ENTERTAIN ME!” in big loopy script. If she would purchase that, Jonas imagined, with proper prodding she could be persuaded to drop a massive wad of cash in his gift shop after the ride. He mentally set five hundred as a goal.

Jonas didn’t dwell on his forthcoming riches. Some breaks in narration could be passed off as paying due attention to the operation of a motor vehicle, but long ones were just shoddy showmanship. “The parents gave Jacob his name knowing that it might be an obstacle for him to overcome, and thinking that if he learned to do so it would help him to achieve other things in his life. I think you’ll agree that it worked, because as a young man Jacob was the first to observe the amazing metaphysical properties of the unique electromagnetic fields that you will find at twelve points in and around Darkwood Gulch. In fact…” Jonas paused for dramatic effect here. “I think Jacob Marleigh deserves a round of applause.”

The tour gave Jacob his due and more. Some cheered, and at least one man gave a absurd little trilling whoop.

Yes, this trip was going to pull in some coin.

*****

Today, my family took a boat tour of the Peace River. Fun and interesting, but heavily local-history focused. So I wondered… how do we really know if the operator is telling the truth in everything he says?

In the world of The Clean Hippie Murders, the tour operator (who, as you may note, is also mayor, which I just learned today) clearly won’t be. He founded the tourist trade of his town on magnificent fictions, but he is clever enough to make them stick.

Jolly, the Guilty Elf

“I always get so nervous about this,” whispered Jolly the elf to Jangle, who stood immediately to his left, precisely one elf-width away. With the year’s work finished, the weather control around Santa’s workshop had been shut down that morning, so the temperature was dropping and the snow turning from powder to ice.

Jangle said, “Don’t worry. If he thinks you’re worried, he might get suspicious.”

It didn’t help.

One of the reindeer, probably Vixen, snorted. Jolly could swear that her breath was curling in ways most unnatural. To be precise, it was curling like smoke from the fires of hell, and Jolly wouldn’t have been surprised if it formed a rudimentary arm and reached out to punch him in the gut.

Santa emerged from his sleigh. He walked heavily down the line of reindeer. Halfway through, he turned with military precision and stepped forward to address his elves. This was it.

“Another year completed,” he barked. “Another Christmas… in the record books. Am I pleased?”

None of the assembled elves responded, so he repeated his question, louder. This too was greeted with silence, so he answered his own question.

“For the most part, I am,” he declared. Jolly exhaled, but only slightly, for Santa began marching up the rows of elves in a quite menacing manner.

“For the most part… for the most part… I am delighted by the year’s festivities. There were a record number of toys built this year, and we have added three new classifications of squeals of delight to our register. ARE YOU PROUD OF THAT, ELF?” he suddenly screamed, directly into Jolly’s ear.

“Sir, yes, sir!” Jolly reflexively squeaked, high-pitched but loud enough to carry across the tundra.

“Sir, yes, sir,” Santa repeated, with a chuckle chillier than the air. “Sir, yes, sir. Then tell me, elf, why is it that I feel like perhaps some of my elves aren’t pulling their weight?”

“I-I-I… I don’t know, sir.”

“You know what happens to elves that don’t pull their weight, don’t you?” This question was clearly rhetorical, because as Santa asked it, he pulled a reasonably high-powered laser pistol from the folds of his red velvet suit.

“No!” shrieked Jolly, abandoning all sense of elfish decorum to lock his eyes shut and pull his green winter cap down over his ears so he couldn’t hear his demise coming.

Santa raised his arm and fired the laser into the air. It bounced off the NORAD satellite dedicated to tracking his movements, and burned through the skull of an elf some dozen or so rows over.

After some few seconds of not losing consciousness, Jolly finally dared to open his eyes. Santa had bent over to stare directly into his face. As Jolly trembled his way back to full height, his master gave him a menacing wink.

Then Santa addressed the full elf regiment again. “Young Jubles was caught on no less than six occasions sleeping on the job. You all know that this will not be tolerated.” He had reached the front again, and now stared down the line, slowly turning his head to make a full inspection, watching for any signs of naughtiness as he is wont to do. Jolly felt himself trembling, but desperately hoped it didn’t show.

After a thousand heartbeats, each louder than the last, Santa spoke again. “Merry Christmas!” he bellowed, and he concealed his weapon once more. “Dismissed!” he cried, as he walked away from the elves and toward his comfortable little home.

Jolly wasn’t the only elf to collapse in terror. Jangle extended a hand to help him stand, and kindly ignored the fact that Jolly had wet his little elf tights.

“Santa’s a real bastard,” Jolly concluded.

*****

Merry Christmas!