We hold the death of our writing in our hands – especially at this gaudily sentimental (and highly profitable for some) time of the year. We cook and shop and wrap and clean and click our way through a universe of sparkly demands. Especially if we are women.
Early this week, I read at a holiday reading with other Flagstaff writers. My piece was titled: The Most Totally Epic X-miss Present Ever. (Remember that I spent the last few years copy editing millennial travel writing submissions for a website that persisted in believing that rad, stoked and epic were hip modifiers.)
The Most Totally Epic X-miss Present Ever
It is 12:01 a.m. on December 25 in America. Q-factor leans back from the three computer screens and hits the last key. The screens go acid green, shudder and go black. Q-factor wishes he could stick around to find out what happens, but it is time. He fishes in his shirt pocket for the capsule.
Twelve other women and men in twelve other unknown locations hold their pills in their fingers. They too, wish they could witness the weeks that will follow. But, their knowledge could condemn thousands of their companions to saboteur’s deaths. And, it is time.
Q-factor and his companions place the capsules on their tongues and swallow. In seconds, they convulse. In seconds, they are gone.
The screaming doesn’t start for a few days. First, it is the Facebook junkies. Then the bloggers, with their inept grammar, tortured syntax, failures of verbal restraint, inability to write an active sentence – and desperation to go viral. The Instagrammers would flood tech departments with calls, but their phones lie as useless in their sweaty hands as a junkie’s dick. The CEO’s of social media empires leap from analog widows, fall through analog space, and splatter on analog concrete forty analog stories below. Website editors, branding experts, college professors, influencers – all of whom look like late-for-it surfers or third-rate rock stars – gaze sadly into the blank screens of their phones and murmur, “Buh bye.”
Weeks later, somewhere in America, a woman, a guy, a she/he, a he/she, a who-cares walks out into perfect silence. They pat the hood of their car – which hasn’t run since new year’s. The walker settles the pack more firmly on their shoulders and sets out for the long hike into town. They walk past shells of burned-out chain cafes and hipster restaurants, hospitals and clinics with Closed signs on their doors. The university is empty and all the construction sites are quiet. There are children playing at the forest edge and in the empty streets. Grown women and men, bundled up against the cold, sit in camp chairs in their front yards and on street corners. They smoke cigarettes, tend to little fires or camp stoves, drink coffee, and talk.
The walker waves at people who wave back. He/she, she/he looks up at the mountain, which in the cold crystalline sunlight, seems to hang over the town. There is a rumor that the ski resort has been forced to close down. The walker grins and thinks of the last message that made it out on the internet before every glowing screen on the planet went dead: “Merry christmas, suckers. Cheery Chanukah. May you all have the holidays you’ve signed on for – and so richly deserve.”
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Please send us your holiday thoughts – up to 400 words. I’ll need them by next week if you want them published. Looking forward, Ms. Scrooge p.s. I love the holidays like Solstice – created by no humans and profiting none of us.
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