Greet your host enthusiastically. Rather than flick your eyebrows —they are not antenna—extend one of your hands and gently shake the hand of your host. Offer a small gift, preferably something you have bought or made, rather than foraged from the Burger King dumpster. Put on the reindeer ears that she gives you  the little bells and flashing lights will remind you that you are now a mammal.

If there is a buffet, do not whirl your head around constantly for fear that anyone behind you is going to squash you or steal food from your plate. It is okay to silently curse the loss of your compound eye, but don’t obsess about it. No zigzagging through the room. You now have only two legs and you must master the bipedal gait while holding a plate of food. Practice at home beforehand.

If there are poinsettias at your table, fight the urge to hold them up to your nose and taste them. Ingesting the blossoms might make you sick. And you are too big to bury yourself inside the petals and gather nectar. Unfold your napkin, put it on your lap, and use it to wipe your mouth during the meal, rather than continually licking your lips with your tongue.

If someone waves to you from across the room, do not assume they are from your former colony with a special message and start shaking your body. Just smile and ask: “How is the family?”

While eating, chew slowly and do not gorge. In your new life, there is no need to eat as if you might not ever see food again. And it’s best to avoid the eggnog. A tipsy former insect could be unpredictable. Instead, turn your attention to getting to know the others at your table through polite conversation. Safe subjects: Books. Warning! Try not to talk only of Kafka and how he got it wrong in The Metamorphosis. Movies: Ant-Man or The Fly would be acceptable films to discuss, but do not express a secret desire for a remake of Killer Bees where the bees actually win. Music: Great choice! Everyone loves music. If the subject turns to opera, however, don’t denounce Madame Butterfly for not featuring a real butterfly.

If talk at your table turns to New Year’s Resolutions, don’t share the goals you set during your support group about remembering that you can’t really fly or trying to wean yourself from your addiction to carrion. Instead, it’s better to just repeat what others say, such as “I hope to lose a few pounds next year,” or “Spend less time at the office.”

If, on your way back to the buffet for seconds, someone corners you by the mistletoe and tries to kiss you, turn your head to the side demurely, as if you are shy. Your instinct to bite is still too powerful to engage in kissing. Maybe next year.

Congratulations! If you make it to the Yule Log cake, you have survived your first holiday party as a human! Before you leave, be sure and thank your host. You might even offer to stay and help with the dishes. If nothing else, ask if you may take out the trash. You could stash it in your car, drive home, and just for old time’s sake, rifle through it later for a delicious midnight snack.

 

Ashley Memory is a former blue orchard bee living in the ancient Uwharrie mountains of Randolph County, N.C. She has finally accepted that she can no longer fly, but she confesses to gathering nectar wherever she can. Her poetry and prose have recently appeared in The Birds We Piled Loosely, Gyroscope Review, The Ginger Collect, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she is a two-time recipient of the Doris Betts Fiction Prize sponsored by the N.C. Writers’ Network. She is currently over the moon that in January 2019, Coffin Bell will publish “Orchard #9,” her narrative poem about a haunted cherry orchard.

Down the street comes a trio of carolers, hymns swirling with snow. They leave each twinkling house and tip-toe up the next set of steps to wait. One song. Two songs. However long it takes. The door opens and out wafts the tang of chestnuts and rude bursts of log fire. Apologizing, the carolers push into the foyer where they stomp away slush. None remove their gloves. Eyelashes glitter with white as they smile at the daughter.

A caroler waggles her thermos at the girl. Go get some mugs, hon.

Her parents laugh nervously and protest, but the carolers say, No, no we insist.

Could there be a safer night to accept the generosity of strangers? Polite, the family take the mugs and sip eggnog spiced with cardamom and something more difficult to place. In divine sopranos and one transcendent tenor, the carolers’ mouthparts pull back and the trio begins to sing.

The eggnog is blissful; the music, serene. The family teeters on their heels. Won’t you come into the living room?

The carolers each take a hand. Well, yes, it has been a long journey, but one more song won’t hurt. They lead the family to the couch. Gloves gripping gloves, the carolers stand while the family sits in matching ugly sweaters, listening. Drinking.

Heads nod. Droop. Empty mugs tumble between the cushions. The logs are minor, popping volcanoes when the carolers refresh the chorus of We Three Kings, their favorite. Discreetly, they scratch the chapped scales under their gloves.

Lulled by the gravity of their bodies, the parents stretch out on the floor. The husband’s sweater rides up and the hair on his stomach mashes into the carpet. The wife slips off her heels, no longer self-conscious about the rich funk that leaks from the sweaty soles of her stockings. The daughter, meanwhile, sinks down and, even though she is not a baby, she crawls, making it as far as the Christmas tree where she grasps a green and silver box with her name on the tag.

In the warm room, the carolers’ eyelashes are still caked with white. They blink and clumps of roe drip to the floor. For a moment, nothing stirs. Melting, the eggs sacs glisten, and under the Christmas lights, the larvae shine blue and orange, pink and gold. Then, between pine needles and runaway tinsel, feelers rise from the carpet. They sense the heartbeats of larger bodies. With a hungry whine, their tiny jaws inch closer, closer towards a stomach, a leg, a small fist.

The carolers watch, proud, their cheeks ruddy with the success of the births. Satisfied, but quashing a sniffle or two, they shut the door behind them. As they select a hymn and tramp towards the next house, their eyebuds already trickle new yolk-jelly that crystallizes in the cold.

Hovering above, other eyes watch. Human. Venison. Boots and hooves test-tap the roof to make sure that none will fall through. The boot-wearer, a man roly-poly in red, squeezes down the chimney, and with a grunt and black puff of dust, he hops over the flames. From his sack, he extracts a bottle and spritzes the larvae with a potion of reindeer musk mingled with orange and clove. In death throes, the small, hungry bodies jingle like bells.

The girl rolls over and snuffles. Both parents sigh, and the one who would be most embarrassed to, farts. The man-in-red parkours up the chimney, chuckling at how very much like an orifice it is.

The family sleeps off the eggnog, and in the morning, the daughter wakes first. She winces as something pierces her sock. A pine needle? She pinches it. Maybe not. Stiff, it is old and dead. She flings it away, shouting for her parents to wake up, it’s Christmas! They groan and pull each other upright. Vacuum as they will, they’ll complain how the pine needles linger for weeks, how they should’ve bought a fake tree, how isn’t it a good thing Christmas comes only once a year?

 

Kathryn McMahon is an American writer living abroad with her British wife and dog. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, Passages North, The Cincinnati Review, Jellyfish Review, Split Lip, FLAPPERHOUSE, Third Point Press, Atticus Review, and others. Her work has received nominations for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net and the Pushcart, and has been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She was recently a finalist for the first-ever SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. On Twitter, she is @katoscope. Find more of her writing at http://www.darkandsparklystories.com.

We smoke out back on breaks because Mr. B. says it doesn’t look nice for a flock of angels to be smoking too close to the live creche or the people who line up to pay a buck to witness the miracle of Christmas. We smoke within whiffing distance of three sheep, two donkeys and the one spavined camel Mr. B bought for cheap off a him-and-her circus act that was divorcing. Everyone but Lydia, that is, who sits a ways from the rest of us and swats at the bad air. She’s barely two weeks late but claims she’s already sick as a dog, morning, noon and night. Today she actually pulls the pee stick from her purse for a little show and tell. Says she might tie a blue ribbon around it and present it to her boyfriend, Brett, but what do we all think.

“I had to pee in a jar, take it with me to the doctor’s,” Cherise says.

“You pissed in a jar?” Samantha says. “Jesus.”

Cherise blows a perfect smoke ring. “Peanut butter jar.”

“So, ribbon or no ribbon?” Lydia says.

We all look at each other. Personally I think it’s a bad idea to dress up a mistake and pass it off like it’s something you’re proud of, especially when you’re dealing with a here today/gone tomorrow kind of guy. Take it from me, I know the type.

“Seriously,” Jill says. “You really going to have the kid?”

We all look at her. In three weeks, Jill hasn’t said much beyond hello or nice day. Mostly she humps up her shoulders, slouches over to cover up how big she is.

“I cannot believe you said that,” Samantha says. “Seriously.”

“Why? We’re 21st century women,” Jill says. “We got options. Choices. You know.”

“It’s a baby,” Samantha says. “Not a menu item from the drive-up.”

Jill flicks the ash off her cigarette. “It’s a blob of cells. The size of a sweet pea.”

Lydia’s caged her hands over her stomach like she’s afraid Jill’s going to break and enter at any moment. “I swear I felt it move. Like the flutter of butterfly wings.”

Cherise laughs. “That’s probably gas, honey.”

Samantha tosses her cigarette on the ground and stomps it. “It’s a baby,” she says.

I have seen faces like Samantha’s on a sidewalk, crazy-eyed men and women with twisted mouths out of which fell the ugliest stuff: Murderer. God will judge you. Burn in hell.

The abortion was the easy part.

Some folks would say being single at forty with nothing but a couple of cats for company is a judgment of sort, but then I look around me. At women with wrung-out faces, the occasional black eye. At their men in the bars downtown flirting with girls just out of high school.

I got a life, though not the one I planned. Still, it’s a life. A twenty-first century life.

I check my watch. “Break’s over, kids.”

We stand and shoulder our wings, arrange ourselves in a wedge of angels, tallest to shortest. I reach out with an aim to straighten Jill’s wings, but she’s standing shoulders-back tall for once.

Only then do we fold our hands. Like we’re praying. Like we’re angels. Like we really might believe in miracles.

 

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Sun Magazine, Hotel Amerika, BOAAT Journal, diode, SmokeLong Quarterly and in the anthology New Microfiction: Exceptionally Short Stories (W.W. Norton, 2018). Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006.

My mother used to tell me about a ghost that haunted the house across the street from where she grew up. The ghost was a little boy, who, according to legend, was shot by his stepfather. It was the kind of story that was difficult to determine the truth of, but the kind of story that would sneak into my consciousness, just as I was preparing for bed.

The story felt like one of those tales spun to scare kids around campfires or during sleepovers. It probably wasn’t real at all, but that didn’t stop me from imagining a kid of no more than ten, standing face-to-face with his stepfather, a twelve gauge pressed against his forehead.

I had no explanation for why my mother would tell me a story like that, except that maybe it had something to do with my father choosing to leave us after his girlfriend became pregnant. My mother never talked about him, and because I didn’t want to upset her, I never brought him up either.

Maybe the ghost was supposed to represent my father, although I couldn’t see how. Or maybe this bit of the macabre was my mother’s way of exorcizing some other demon. Then again, knowing my mother, she could very well have been talking about an actual ghost.

When she grew particularly melancholy, I would ask her to tell me about the ghost. For some strange reason, she enjoyed recounting the story, as if it provided some relief to her keeping the darkness bottled up inside.

One day, I built up the courage to press her more about the ghost, wondering if there was any greater specificity to her usual anecdote.

“Did you ever see it with your own eyes?”

“Yes. Twice.”

“What did it look like?”

“Everything above his chin had been blown completely apart. His entire head kind of folded in on itself. It was the kind of thing you kept looking at just to see if you could make sense of it.”

I hadn’t expected that level of detail from her, and my stomach tightened. My mother was carrying this around in her head like loose change in her pocketbook. She had told the story so nonchalantly that I wondered if she even knew what she was saying to her sixteen-year-old son. My imagination had never constructed so graphic an image of the ghost and now I found myself unable to think of anything else.

After that revelation, whenever I prepared for bed, I found myself unable to lie down without the aid of a nightlight. I was afraid the ghost might appear in my bedroom, the nearly headless figure creeping closer to me with each child-like step.

One night my fear-induced insomnia led me to seek protection in my mother’s bedroom. I found her asleep, upright against several pillows in her bed, a cocked twelve gauge resting in the corner, not even a full arms length away.

I backed away slowly, careful not to make a sound. Until that moment, I was not aware my mother even owned a shotgun, especially one identical to the gun in her story.

As I tiptoed back into my bedroom, I locked the door behind myself. I didn’t know who or what my mother feared, but I immediately feared it, too.

With darkness encroaching on my nightlight, I buried my head beneath the covers. It was all I could think to do to repel the ghosts.

 

Ran Walker is the author of sixteen books. He currently serves on the creative writing faculty for Hampton University in Virginia. He can be reached via his website, http://www.ranwalker.com.