Green Teeth in the Garland [Wraith]
There’s a corner of the house the bulbs never quite reach, where the old plaster sweats under winter and the outlets look tired and afraid,
Someone dragged in a crate of holly and ivy from the big-box store lot, plastic twine cutting their gloves while fake carols leaked from the ceiling speakers like sugar gone stale,“Deck the halls,” the group text ordered, so the family lined up along the walls with thumbtacks and that thin, scratchy ribbon that always frays,
They wrapped every doorframe in glossy leaves that shine under weak light, hiding nail holes and cracks and the stain nobody talks about near the baseboard where something once spilled and never fully trailed.
Holly goes up first, little red berries like warning lights on a dashboard you pretend not to see,
Spiny leaves sharp enough to draw blood if you shove them in too hard, which is exactly how Uncle “It’ll be fine” jams them into the old picture rail while swearing at the cheap string that refuses to agree,
Every time the leaf-tips bite his fingers, he laughs a little too loud, says the house wants a taste of us this year, like it hasn’t already taken plenty quietly,
You watch tiny dots of red appear on his knuckles, match the berries, and you imagine the plant grinning, teeth green and glossy, finally getting fed properly.
Ivy slithers in next, a vine that never learned boundaries,
It loops around banisters and picture frames, creeping over old family photos, fingers of green curling at the edges like it’s trying to haul the smiling faces right out of their cardboard memories,
It doesn’t cling like a decoration; it grips, wraps tight around every rail and spindle, turns the staircase into a throat lined with living jewelry,
Someone calls it “festive,” someone calls it “classic,” and nobody mentions how it looks like the house is growing new veins in anticipation of fresh stories.
At first glance, the place actually looks decent.
All that green draws the eye away from the peeling paint, the buckled paneling, the hairline fracture across the ceiling that spreads a little more every year,
You almost believe the hall has always been this lush, this full, this carefully draped in nature’s cheap costume jewelry, shimmering with an invitation to forget you live in a building that sighs when it thinks you cannot hear,
You almost buy the lie that hanging plants on your walls can fix the conversations that never finish, the old arguments that hang heavier than any wreath, the subtle tilt of every picture frame that marks each year.
But this house remembers.
Behind the holly’s glossy grin, behind the ivy’s eager climb, the plaster bulges where damp and time eat slow,
You see little damp crescents spreading around the nail holes, dark halos where the stems pierce the wall like syringes, injecting their own brand of winter show,
Late at night when the party has wound down and the dishwasher groans under the weight of every fork that stirred up tension as well as gravy, the leaves faintly rustle without a breeze,
You swear the garlands tighten their grip on the doorframes, like the house is bracing itself for the next year’s worth of secrets, pulling the green closer so it doesn’t miss a single wheeze.
Someone jokes that if you listen close, you can hear the ivy gossiping.
You lean near the banister and there it is, that soft dry hiss of leaf against leaf as people climb the stairs and mutter things they don’t say in the kitchen,
Snatches of regret, resentment, desperate hopes about new jobs, new loves, new starts, get snagged on the vines like bits of tinsel and hairpins and glittered ribbon,
Holly picks up the sharper comments, tucks them between its spines, saves each barb for later nights when the house grows too quiet and needs something bitter to mix with the smell of cinnamon,
By New Year’s, every strand of green is heavy with unspoken lines and half-truth confessions, sagging under the weight of what was never meant for decoration.
The kids don’t see any of that.
To them it’s just a jungle they can run under, grabbing at berries they’re not supposed to eat, daring each other to touch the sharpest leaf and not flinch at the sting,
They stick construction paper stars into the wreaths, tape candy canes onto the ivy like an offering to some hungry jungle king,
They lie on their backs on the hallway rug and squint up at the twisting green, calling out shapes in the vines like cloud-watching in miniature,“I see a dragon,” one says, “I see a crown,” another replies, and you choke on how easy it is for them to see monsters and royalty where you see a noose and a scar and a creeping future.
By the third week of the month, the holly berries have darkened, some gone soft and sunken,
The ivy grows brittle at the tips where the heat from the vents dries it out; a few leaves curl in on themselves like they heard too much and want to shut down before they’re fully broken,
Nobody waters these things; nature is expected to perform without maintenance while everyone fights over who forgot the dessert or the batteries or the thing they swore they’d bring and then conveniently never spoken,
Still, the green hangs on, fueled by whatever it’s stealing from the walls, from the air, from every heavy breath that leaves a trace of sorrow, anger, or distant hope unspoken.
On the longest night of the year, somebody gets drunk enough to notice.
They lean against the wall and swear the holly moved, leaves trembling in the stale heat, berries pulsing once like a heartbeat synced to the song on the stereo,
They laugh it off, of course they do, blame it on the punch and the exhaustion and the way the light from the tree makes everything shimmer,
But when they stagger toward the bathroom, the ivy around the doorway brushes their cheek just a bit too insistently, a cool whisper of stem and shadow tracing the soft skin near the throat like it’s measuring the circumference for later,
And you catch the way they shiver, not from cold, not from draft, but from the heavy sense that the decorations are tired of just watching this family drama rerun and want a more active role in the show.
Midnight creeps in with its usual bag of broken promises and new resolutions,
The group gathers under those same wreaths to take photos, faces pressed together, garland framing them like laurel on champions who survived each other once again,
Holly shadows lay thin lines across jawlines like war paint, ivy loops behind heads like green thoughts coiling, quiet and patient as next year spreads out ahead,
Someone shouts “Smile,” someone else yells “Three, two, one,” and every flash burns the decorations into the background of the moment like witnesses at a trial no one will ever officially begin,
Later, flipping through the pictures, you will notice how the vines always seem a little closer around the edges, how the berries gleam too brightly where the light doesn’t reach, how the leaves look like they’re leaning in.
When the season finally dies and the boxes come back down, the removal begins.
You peel holly from the walls and find faint outlines where it lay, pale bands of untouched paint framed by grime, the ghosts of this month’s disguise,
Some leaves cling stubbornly, spines catching in the plaster like fingernails, refusing to surrender the little patch of wall they conquered until you twist harder and hear a sigh,
Ivy comes off in long strips, trailing dried bits and dust and one or two tiny harmless spiders that witnessed every whispered fight and reconciled lie,
You bundle the green into plastic bags that crinkle like embarrassed laughter, drag them to the curb, and for one second you swear the vines twitch, reaching back toward the house, unwilling to break their tie.
But the outline stays behind.
Bare wall looks naked, smaller, as if the house got stripped of something that wasn’t just ornamental, as if the veins were ripped out and now it has to learn how to pump its own blood again,
You see scuffs and cracks you had forgotten or refused to acknowledge, water marks creeping down like old tears dried in place but never really cleaned,
And you realize why the holly and ivy felt so right even in their sinister way: they gave the house something to hide behind, and in exchange it fed them with your breath, your secrets, your sharp little jokes and your quiet, gnawing dread,
Next year, you’ll hang them up again anyway, because nothing frames a family’s winter theater like green teeth on the wallpaper and vines that never forget what was said.