Shane ed. - A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre - Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous

Eric called it a swing set. When she’d heard that he’d ordered such a thing for their daughter, Sally had expected one of the metal tube and rubber seated constructions of her youth. She should have known better. Eric did nothing cheaply. It had taken a fourteen-foot truck to haul the thing to Sally’s house. Two men who looked like extras from a Mafia movie had hauled the pieces and parts to the backyard and had spent two days building the thing, which was part tree house, part jungle gym and yes, part swing set. A stainless steel slide twisted from the second story to the patch of sand below. Mary had been thrilled by the structure. She’d jumped up and down, clapping her hands, squealing and racing toward the edifice with such joy, Sally had felt guilty for trying to talk her husband out of buying it.

Of course the set was too extravagant—ridiculously so—for a four-year-old. Not only was it enormous, it cost more than Sally’s first car had. Further, she just didn’t see the point. At her daughter’s age, Sally’d had only a rusted bicycle, handed down from her older brother, Mitchell, and random toys—a few dolls, a couple of puzzles, an incomplete set of Lincoln Logs and another of Tinker Toys—and they’d kept her occupied well enough. Granted, she would never wish her childhood on Mary; she wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

All beautiful plants start buried in crap , Eric had told her.

Her husband, a font of bumpersticker wisdom and Hallmark sentiment, was, nonetheless, wonderful. She just wished he could forgo this one tradition: the eggs; the hunt. She found Easter and its trappings distasteful, but she’d kept such feelings to herself, choosing instead to pretend disinterest in the springtime festival.

Sally turned off the tap. Water covered the eggs. Ripples ran over the surface, and she stared into the pasta pot, unnerved by the sudden idea that each egg would have eventually become a chick, a living creature if only it had remained untouched. But did it matter? Either way—whether hard-boiled or allowed to gestate and hatch and sprout feathers—the things were still low rungs on the food chain. At least this way they weren’t forced to push toward maturity through suffering and perplexity.

None of that for these little guys. Just some water. A bit of flame. A pool of scald. Oblivion before sentience.

She carried the pot to the stove and set it on the front burner, and then ratcheted on the gas flame.

SALLY IS TEN YEARS old. It is nighttime and she peers through her bedroom window. A man stands in the yard below—a shadow with just a smudge of pale where his face should be. He lights a match, revealing coarse, familiar features, and lifts it towards the cigarette in his mouth and the fire catches in his eyes and they burn like a rat’s eyes, and she sees his lips spread away from the cigarette butt, rising at the edges into a horrible smile. He clamps onto the cigarette with his prominent front teeth and the cherry of the smoke burns the same color as his eyes and Sally feels dread like streams of ice on her back. She leaps away from the window and races to her bed. With the covers over her head like a shield, she squeezes her eyes closed and breathes heavily and curls into the smallest ball she can manage.

THE WATER BOILED. SALLY checked the digital timer on the range. She pinched the phone between her shoulder and ear, listening to her mother babble on about the holiday, and Sally mumbled and grunted, agreeing with her mother while forcing herself to hear nothing the woman said. A big family event. Everyone will be there. The whole Carter clan. Mitchell and his family. Cousins whose names she couldn’t keep straight—was Kelly the one with epilepsy? Or was that Karen? Had Jim just returned from Germany or was that Jimmy, Jim’s second cousin? Her aunts. Their husbands. And Henry.

Sally had asked her mother to rescind Uncle Henry’s invitation, but her mother had wanted a reason for excluding the man, and Sally couldn’t give a reason.

To make matters worse, her appeal to keep Henry out of the holiday had caused an inquisition, which she was in no condition to face. So, Sally had decided to keep her branch of the family tree—her Eric, her Mary—at home. Naturally her mother had refused to let it rest. She’d gone through Eric, had played her guilt games and the bullshit family-is-everything card, and Eric too had wanted an excuse from Sally, and she hadn’t provided one. No reason. Nothing she could verbalize.

The eggs boiled. Sally looked through the bubbles at them. One of the shells had cracked. A thin white tail grew from the slit, tried to rise on the scalding tide.

Sally suddenly felt ill, and she covered her mouth with a palm. She looked away from the pot.

Her mother prattled on like an adult in a Peanuts cartoon, all warble and distortion. Sally grunted and said, “I really have to get back to the eggs,” noting another three minutes on the timer. There was no rush to finish the eggs; she wanted off of the phone. She couldn’t bear her mother’s shiny, happy voice and her exhilaration of reunion with the various spawn of the Carter family. Sally believed the only thing to celebrate regarding her family was distance.

“Happy Easter, honey,” her mother said. “We’ll see you soon.”

Happy Easter . Now there was an oxymoron. A grotesque joke. An impossibility.

Did her mother even know what she was celebrating? Really? The woman thought it was a grand celebration of Christ’s rebirth, but Easter had been celebrated long before the Christians had co-opted its lunar date. Tammuz. Semiramis. Ishtar. Ester. Those were the first deities recognized with springtime bacchanals.

But the Christians had invaded pagan lands. Strategy and weaponry had given them victory, but they wanted more than compliance; they demanded converts. Faith had to follow flesh into submission. Like all good molesters, they presented the pagans gifts to make them compliant. They offered to allow, even encourage, the pagans’ festivals of spring, but over time added their own philosophy to the goings on, and eventually the church absorbed the power of these events.

And so Easter was born, with its bunnies and its bonnets and its marshmallow candies and its eggs.

The egg.

A symbol of fertility. Of actual birth, not rebirth.

And what did the fucking misguided children of Christ do with that symbol? They took the egg, and…

—Here is your innocence. Here is your unblemished whiteness. Let’s harden it with scalding water and then make it up with dyes and paints and bits of glitter and then we’ll break it open and peel away its alluring costume before we devour it whole.

YOU DON’T WANT TO stain your pretty white dress. Take it off.

ONE EGG DROWNED IN the blue dye and another soaked up green pigment like toxic waste. These were the last two. The once-white shells were now stained sickly pastels. After they dried, Sally would attack them with the glue stick and the glitter. She’d use the pre-printed decals and the paint pens to finish them off.

Normally, decorating and hiding the eggs was Eric’s job. Sally had made it clear that she would have none of it, but this year Eric had pleaded with her. He’d been called into the hospital three days running and he hadn’t had the chance to decorate eggs for their daughter. Sally had insisted that the ritual was unnecessary, but the misery in Eric’s eyes and the sadness in his voice when he asked her to “please reconsider,” had clearly indicated how important the ritual was to him, so Sally had relented.

Her eggs would never look as nice as the ones her husband made. He used crayons to create relief in the dyed color and expertly stenciled intricate designs. Eric made genuinely beautiful holiday eggs—a feat well beyond her capabilities. But she had to try. Despite her disgust with the holiday, she still wanted everything to be perfect for her daughter. Sally was just happy she’d remembered to use the wire egg ladle, paper towels and some latex gloves (a benefit of having a doctor in the house) so her fingers didn’t get decorated as well.