Betty was a woman

who could get anything

she wanted when drunk—

those blue eyes, deep blue—

but she never stopped

The phone rings and the woman swirls her glass, watches wine the color of ruby coat the sides of the crystal. Wine is the only red she allows in her apartment; everything else is black: carpets, sofa, even the tall sculptures she makes, stark and granite-colored. Red, of course, and green, and even white – these are the soft, bright colors of Christmas. The colors of her charmed childhood in Who-ville.

He won every time, which was part of the game. Because John McClane does not lose. Nor would we want him to. In the end, Uncle John always found my egg timer bomb in time to deactivate it by turning the dial counterclockwise until it went ding.

Dearest Father,

Last year I stowed away on a mining vessel to this desert, the same sand planet in the outer rim where you and your smuggler buddies used to hide out.

The fight had left Betty with a cut on her hand and a speck of metal oxidizing in her cornea. It all started when Bob was rehearsing for a Christmas special on NBC. He was supposed to kiss an elf. She wasn’t a real elf, of course, or even an actress – just some buxom crumpet from Minnesota with wax-tip ears and oogly, doped-up eyes.

I’ve been sick

for two weeks

but America

has been sick

its whole life.

Della and Jimmy fought all the time. People often told them, “You fight like a married couple!” This joke was usually told by a mutual friend to diffuse tension, as Della and Jimmy’s fights public fights were personal and awkward.

For Hermey, those snowy, lamp-lit evenings had lost their luster. Once, as a younger man, he would frequent the queen bars in the Village: bottomless glasses of bourbon and crushed up Klonopins. But he was six years sober and Karim could sense when he had been in the proximity of liquor.

The snowy December recess at Warren G. Harding Elementary School was only the beginning.

Flick’s mother had re-bandaged his tongue after dinner without comment. But when he’d gone into the parlor to say good night later, she’d thwacked him across the head. “Did you have to let those boys get to you? Mr. Schwartz is a garbage man, for Christ’s sake!”

Charles Brown: I think it was called like the “Coca Cola Northfield Christmas Special” or something like that? And then the next year -- after, you know, all the publicity -- they switched to “Charlie Brown Christmas.” Which, I mean, obviously that’s why I go by Charles now. I didn’t exactly come off super awesome, am I right?

Thirty years after the incident in the greenhouse, Karen would relate it to her second husband as a turning point in her life—an ostensible adventure that would become the focus of countless therapy sessions, that would lead to investigations and the incarceration of a fumbling magician