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In This Issue

• The Sex Strike: Year Three
• Your Neighbors’ Christmas Lights & Personalities
• Excerpts from “A Jigsaw Christmas Carol”
• Festivalia 2006-2007 (Part Two of a Two-Part Series)
• Things to do with THE FED (besides reading it)
• An Erotic Channukah For The Hot Maccabee In You
• In A Land Of “Wonderful Christmastime,” The Seeds Of Discontent Form In A Chinese Drug
• Columbionics
• Inability to work v. Lateness
• Santa Outsources to China
• They Watch
• The Staff of 23.4

Michael Bredin

Detective Marley was dead: to begin with.  There can be no doubt whatever about that.  He had been disemboweled by a remote-control-operated chainsaw that the fiend with the white-faced, ever smiling puppet had rigged to the detective’s office door.  His remains were identified by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.  His partner Scrooge identified him and Scrooge’s name was good enough.

* * *

“Hear me!” cried the Ghost of Marley, his hands yet bound with bits of intestinal rope.  “I am here tonight to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate.”  The Ghost smiled and continued, “This night, you have been exposed to a weaponized form of the Ebola Virus.  You shall pass dark stools, blackened with blood, and suffer most monstrous hemorrhages from orifices you didn’t even know you had.  Finally, after days of unendurable pain, merciful death will claim your long-suffering soul with the collective failure of all your vital organs.”

Scrooge’s countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost’s had done.

“Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?” he demanded in a faltering voice.

“It is.”

* * *

When Scrooge awoke, the hour bell sounded with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy One.  Lights flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn aside.  Scrooge found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them.  It was a strange fellow—like a pig, its hair, which hung about the neck and down its back, was black as if beset by burning coals.

“Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to me?”

“No,” the voice said, soft and gentle, “I want to play a game.”

* * *

There was never such a goose and, Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded this Christmas feast as the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage.

The man with the pig’s head turned to Scrooge and said, “The pudding contains a layer of industrial corrosive and the goose is stuffed with mercury.”

Then Bob proposed: “A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears.  God bless us!”  Which all the family re-echoed.

Jigsaw continued, “Those whose faces do not dissolve and melt into a stew of bone and blood will have their nervous systems destroyed over several years by heavy metal poisoning.”

“Jigsaw,” said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Tim will live.”

“Tiny Tim will wake up on Christmas morning with his wrists shackled to an explosive device in an abandoned mannequin factory twenty miles outside of town.  His body will lie suspended over a room full of antifreeze canisters, one of which contains the key to his manacles.  He’ll have to use his crippled feet to unlock the canisters one by one.  And if he does not find the one with the key in time, the coolant will devour him in a jubilee of pain and frost.”

And inside the house, Tiny Tim’s soft voice cried out, “God bless us everyone!”

Tim Reuter, a young man of dubious character, suggested the idea for this article.