Black Snow On Christmas Morning [Wraith]
Black snow drifted down in slow-motion clumps, fat flakes the color of coal dust sticking to windows like fingerprints left at a crime,
while the neighborhood inflatable reindeer lay half-deflated and twisted, carcasses of cheap joy slumped over plastic graves, frozen in mime.
The whole block looked like a crime scene where someone murdered cheer and tried to cover it with discount lights and tangled wire,
and in the middle of it sat one crooked little house, breathing out gray smoke that smelled less like pinewood and more like funeral pyre.
Inside, the living room sagged under the weight of ghosts the landlord didn’t list in the lease,
and the tree—if you could call it that—was a cobbled tower of bone, wired joints and finger-bones hooked together piece by piece.
Someone had threaded cracked vertebrae where wooden beads should be,
and ornaments hung from eye sockets like glittering tumors on a body that never learned to flee.
Tinsel draped off rib cages and skulls with idiot grins,
glass balls rolling in hollow sockets, reflecting nothing but the sins.
The angel on top wasn’t an angel at all, just a porcelain doll with burned wings and stitched-shut eyes,
smiling that tiny porcelain smile that says, “Sure, it’s fine,” while everything underneath breaks and dies.
Stockings dangled from the mantelshelf like toe tags in an overcrowded morgue,
too long, too thin, too stained at the edges for anybody to pretend they came from Santa or some kindly demigod with a magic fork and a glittering horde.
They were patched from funeral clothes and hospital gowns,
names stitched on in thread that looked a lot like dried-up browns.
Each one sagged with weight that wasn’t fruit or toys or candy,
but bones wrapped in old newspaper, cigarette burns, faded photos of when life still pretended it was dandy.
The fire in the hearth didn’t crackle right; it hissed and whispered and sighed like something was alive inside the logs and not especially thrilled,
flames curled in strange directions, licking patterns on the soot that looked uncomfortably like tally marks for everybody this house had killed.
Every time another log fell inward with a choke and a gasp,
the temperature didn’t rise; it dropped, and the shadows clung closer like a tightening clasp.
Outside, somewhere far beyond the black snow and the list of forgotten addresses,
normal people were probably wrapping gifts and posting filtered photos of matching pajamas and success.
Here, the only music was the radiator coughing and the wind dragging its nails down the siding,
but then, just past midnight, the first knock came, soft but insistent, like something had been invited and was done hiding.
On the porch, three carolers waited, dressed in outfits that would’ve looked festive if they hadn’t been fifty years out of date,
soft coats turned to graveyard dust, lace cuffs rotted, shoes waterlogged, smiles fixed at a wrong angle, patient and late.
Their hymnbooks were sewn from old ledger pages and obituaries,
notes scrawled in ink that had once been red and still remembered how to carryaries.
They opened their mouths in perfect unison and let loose a “Silent Night” with half the notes missing and all the harmonies wrong,
words sliding out like teeth down a drain, each line stretched just a little too long.
It wasn’t a carol so much as a diagnosis sung from a grave,
about all the promises that never arrived, all the prayers God filed under “Maybe later” and quietly mislaid.
The family in the house—what was left of them—stared back from the warped couch,
Mother’s hands wrapped round a chipped mug of something hot enough to scald but not enough to help, Father hollowed out crouched.
A boy old enough to stop believing in any kind of Saint sat by the skeletal tree,
holding a broken ornament like a dropped glass heart, watching the visitors like he knew this song was partly written about him and partly about me.
“Is this… our carolers?” the mother asked, and even her sarcasm sounded exhausted,
but she still tugged her cardigan closer, like fabric could protect her from spirits she’d already hosted.
The father tried to speak, then thought better of it,
because what do you say when the dead show up to remind you you’re not done with them yet?
Every verse the demons sang rewound another Christmas they’d tried to forget:the year the electricity got cut off and they ate cold soup in the dark like a dare and a debt,
the year the ambulance lights replaced the string lights outside,
the year the phone rang at dawn with bad news that knocked the whole tree sideways, hope pancaked and fried.
The demons closed their songs with a strange little bow, as if expecting applause,
and the boy nearly clapped, because at least they were honest; regular carols always lied with polished claws.
He bolded his bones and stepped forward, shoes crunching on black slush tracked in from the world’s worst snow,
and he said, “If this is Christmas of the damned, who did the damning, just so I know?”
One of the carolers smiled, a crack rippling ear to ear as if the skull were made of old porcelain ready to drop,
and answered in a voice that sounded like broken church bells: “We’re just the echo, kid. The list is written at the top.”They pointed one glove toward the skeletal tree and another toward the sky,
and the boy followed the gesture up through the roof, through the clouds, all the way to a heaven that had learned to look away rather than reply.
Black snow spun heavier, clinging to power lines, burying satellites, erasing street names,
while the skeleton tree trembled, bone ornaments chiming in thin music that never once spoke of happy games.
Yet buried in the corner, under a pile of unpaid notices and liquor store bags,
sat a cardboard box of old ornaments that actually shone, cracked but stubborn, refusing to sag.
The boy dug them out with fingers numb and shaking,
tiny glass bells, clay stars his mother had made before life started breaking.
He hung them on the skeleton branches, fighting past sharp bone and cold air that smelled faintly of grave,
and every time he looped a string, something in the room flinched, like he’d just carved his name under “survive” instead of “behave.”
The demons watched, songbooks closed, eyes reflecting the mess like funhouse mirrors that remember when you were still whole,
and for a heartbeat, the black snow slowed, as if the sky had stumbled over the sight of defiance in a house that had nothing left but a stubborn soul.
Nobody delivered miracles; the rent didn’t vanish, the ghosts didn’t leave on cue,
but the fire flickered more like fire than like hungry teeth, and one stocking sagged with a weight that wasn’t doom but something new.
He reached inside and pulled out a single small object, wrapped in newspaper dated before everything went to hell,
inside, a cheap plastic whistle shaped like an angel, stupid and bright, the kind of thing stores throw in just to upsell.
The boy laughed—brief, sharp, like a match strike in a coal mine—and put it to his lips,
and the note that came out was so off-key even the dead winced and gripped their hips.
For one long, impossible second, the skeleton tree shook not with sorrow but with something like offended joy,
bone ornaments rattling, demon carolers clutching their ears, the house itself muttering, “Really? From this kid? This boy?”Outside, the snow still fell black as ash, but a single flake hit the boy’s cheek and melted clear,
like the night had conceded one tiny square inch of ground, not enough to fix it, just enough to interfere.
Christmas of the Damned didn’t fix, didn’t heal, didn’t pivot into some glowing scene of saved souls and redeemed pain,
but inside that crooked living room, among skulls and cobweb stockings and muttering flames,
a boy hung one more broken ornament and whistled one more awful note until the demons started humming along against their own intent,
and in that clumsy, haunted harmony, the house found room for something that wasn’t joy exactly, but wasn’t spent.
The black snow kept falling across the city like a bad habit heaven refused to quit,
but in that room, by that skeletal tree, one family sat among the wreckage and refused to split.
Not holy, not healed, not saved,
just alive in spite of the grave.
And somewhere between the ghosts and the dried-up tinsel and the cracked glass shine,
a new kind of carol scraped itself together, rough, crooked, and still somehow mine.