The Christmas Debt

Kemi C. Amusan

CHAPTER 4: PROTOCOL

 

Maya moved first.

Some animal part of her brain that didn’t care about elves or bass-heavy carols or the impossible dark stretching where her ceiling used to be. It only knew the kids were upstairs, or should have been upstairs, in a house that no longer seemed to have a discernible upstairs. At least not in the way she remembered.

“Ben,” she cried, and then louder, “Olivia.”

She got three steps toward the hallway before the nine-foot tree was in front of her. One second the path to the stairs was clear. The next, the flocked branches filled it wall to wall, close enough that a string of lights caught in her hair as she recoiled. She reached for a branch and shoved. It resisted. It seemed rooted into the floor. Her hands were already shaking, and she couldn’t tell anymore whether it was the cold coming through the broken windows or something worse.

“Jason. The tree. Move it.”

“Trying.” He was behind her, both hands braced against the console table wedged across the kitchen doorway, the espresso machine rattling on top, its little green light glowing steady and stupid and domestic. “It won’t. It’s bolted or something.” His breath came out in short, visible bursts, and despite the cold Maya could see sweat at his hairline, dark patches already spreading under the arms of his sweater.

She turned toward the couch, thinking she might climb over it to reach the hallway another way, and stopped.

An elf was already lying across it.

Small, still, one arm draped off the edge, taking up the exact stretch of cushion she needed. It didn’t look like it had any intention of looking up at anyone, ever, about anything.

“Move.” Maya grabbed the elf’s arm.

The skin was coarse and loose beneath her fingers, warm and sticky, faintly slimy. The elf reached after her, its long fingers stretching toward her with slow, boneless persistence.

Maya jerked her hand away, revolted and suddenly afraid.

She watched it settle back into its nap while the other elves busied themselves behind her. Time seemed to stretch. Then its head began to turn toward her.

So slowly that Maya found herself holding her breath, waiting for it to finish.

“Move,” she barked, louder this time.

It began, eventually, to sit up. The house was full of screaming and breaking glass, yet, somehow the thing that unsettled her most in the moment was watching something take four times longer than it should to lift itself off a couch.

She went around it, and behind her heard it flopped back down with what might have been a sigh.

Another elf appeared on the other side of the console. Maya saw the tiny hands first, then the face, restless eyes already moving past Jason, taking in the room beyond him. It reached past the espresso machine for the decorative bowl beside it, the two-hundred-dollar one, turned it once in its small hands, almost admiring it, then let it drop.

It shattered across the floor.

“Envy,” Santa said, from somewhere behind them, unhurried, as if introducing a guest at a party. “She does so love the nice ones.”

Jason was still trapped behind the console, one hand gripping its edge. Maya glanced at the broken bowl. The elf was already searching the room for something else to take.

“Go around it,” Maya snapped, returning her attention to her mission. She twisted toward the narrow gap by the wall and pointed. Her voice came out thinner than she wanted it to. “There.”

Jason followed her finger. His face went flat, the color draining out of it fast enough that Maya could see it happen. “There’s no space.”

There wasn’t. The garland she’d threaded through the banister had thickened, grown, wound itself lower and denser until the staircase was a solid wall of gold ribbon and pine and ornaments packed in like teeth. The vase from the coffee table was wedged into the gap between the console and the wall, too large to have gotten there on its own. She threw her shoulder into it and it didn’t give an inch. Her heart was slamming hard enough that she could feel it in her throat, and when she tried to speak again nothing came out the first time.

Five hundred dollars, she thought, stupidly, uselessly, even now.

She remembered the store, remembered turning it in her hands while the saleswoman explained where it had been made, remembered Jason’s face when he saw the price. She’d bought it because it made the room look… finished.

Now it was blocking the only way to her children, and Envy was already crouched beside it, running one small finger along the glaze, testing the surface.

Maya lunged forward.

Envy looked up at her, delighted, and shoved.

The vase toppled and cracked against the console leg. Maya’s whole body flinched at the sound.

Somewhere behind her, near the kitchen, she registered a wet, indelicate sound she didn’t have time to investigate. The elf with the big round shape had found the plate of cookies she’d left out for the kids, and the tin of holiday popcorn, and was working through both with a speed and a mess that seemed to defeat the whole purpose of eating. It knocked over the eggnog. Then it reached the bowl of potpourri on the side table, dried orange slices and cinnamon sticks arranged to look festive rather than edible, and ate a fistful of that too, without apparently noticing the difference.

“Glut,” Santa said, not even glancing over. “He’ll be sick later. He’s always sick later.”

Meanwhile Jason had gone for the garland himself, hauling at it with both hands, and another elf hit him from the side hard enough to take his legs out from under him. He went down onto one knee with a grunt, and when he tried to get back up, it was already on him again, fists closed, mouth open too wide around teeth that never sat right, a wet hissing breath right against his ear. It shoved him back down, quick and furious and disproportionately strong.

“Get off.” He swung an arm and connected with nothing. “Get off me.”

“Wrath,” Santa said, almost fondly, as though the name pleased him. “He was hoping you’d try that.”

They fought the room like that for what felt like a long time, the two of them slick with sweat despite the cold pouring through the broken window frames, breath ragged, hands shaking too hard to be much use, Envy delighting in every beautiful thing it could reach and ruin, Wrath meeting Jason blow for blow with a small furious body that never seemed to tire, Glut still working through the snack table behind them with wet, contented noises.

Maya lunged for the gap by the wall, already looking past it toward the hallway. She didn’t see another elf slip up beside her and reach into the little dish by the door.

The earrings Jason had given her the Christmas before Ben was born.

She didn’t notice the tiny hand closing around them. She didn’t even look back. She was already searching for the next opening, the next way through, the next place the stairs might still be.

But she caught something moving at the edge of her vision, unhurried and pleased with itself, disappearing toward the darker part of the room.

She was three feet from the garland wall, close enough now that she could see gaps in it if she could just get the vase out of the way, when the receipts started.

Dozens of them, then hundreds, fluttering up into the amber light and drifting back down like confetti. The thin elf stood near the fireplace, wiry, long fingers curling and uncurling around fistful after fistful of them, eyes bulging with the effort of tracking every single one as it fell, and the moment one hand came up empty he snatched at the air itself, briefly, frantic, before another fistful found its way into his grip. He was breathless with it, gleeful, throwing them higher each time.

“Olivia,” Maya shouted, over it, still hauling at the vase. “Ben, wake up. Wake up, we have to leave the house. Do you hear me? Something’s gone wrong.”

The first few receipts landed soft, harmless, sliding off her shoulder, her sleeve, the back of her hand, and she kept pulling, kept moving toward the gap, still shouting, “The house is raided, do you hear me, we have to leave, get up,” until one caught against her cheek and stuck there. She clawed it off with one hand, still gripping the vase with the other, and another landed directly over her eye, then a second over the other, and neither would come loose.

“Ben. Olivia. Jason, we’ve got to go, we’ve got to get them and go.”

She clawed at the receipts anyway, still trying to move forward blind, felt paper cutting thin lines into her fingers, and underneath her nails. She could see numbers printed too large to be real, $1,000, $1,500, the ink somehow sharp enough to sting where it touched skin, worse the higher the figure climbed. She reached out for the vase again, missed it, and her leg caught hard against the corner of the center table. She went down half onto it, catching herself, still calling the kids’ names into the dark, the sound of it muffled now behind her own hands.

“Jason, get it off, get it off me, I have to get to them. The kids. The kids.” She pointed blindly upward toward what she believed should be the direction of the stairs.

“Hold still, hold on.” His hands were at her face, pulling, and one came away, the receipt curling in his fist, $1,200 stamped across it in furious black type, but two more had already replaced it, sealed flat against her eyelids like they’d been printed there.

The thin elf watched the biggest ones land on her, always her, and let out a wet, delighted guffaw each time one stuck. He threw the next fistful higher, aiming for her face on purpose now.

“Greed,” Santa said. “Do you see how he loves to count.”

Maya caught one against her arm. A receipt. Target, November 27th, $487.32. Another landed on Jason’s shoulder. It was Best Buy, the soundbar, $612. And as each one touched them, Maya felt it, like a name being called that she’d hoped nobody remembered.

Maya braced for Jason’s voice to rise the way it always did when a number surprised him. The Louboutins she’d never told him about, $1,200, stared up at both of them in black ink, the same as everything else.

She turned to face it, but then she noticed the couch was glowing.

Even in that moment, she felt a slight relief at the averted interpersonal crisis. Surely he must just be as alarmed by the thin gold outline, faint as static, that now ran along the seams of the cushions, the arm where Jason always sat. She stopped moving. She blinked and it was still there.

The TV had it too, and the console. She looked down at herself. The sleeve of her own sweater had a soft amber seam tracing the cuff, like something had been stitched into it with light.

Near the mantel, standing very straight, chin lifted, shoulders raised in a way that made him look taller than he was, was the crip walking elf, gold catching at his collar and his cuffs. The small ceremonial saber was in his hand, thin and bright, and its blade seemed to hold the same strange amber light.

Maya looked from the saber to the couch.

It was the saber causing the glow, she registered.

For one blessed second, Jason wasn’t looking at the Louboutin receipt.

Good.

Maybe he wouldn’t say anything. And hopefully he would not remember.

She turned to face him, and saw him lunging at the thin elf, snatching two receipts clean out of the air before they could land on him, stuffing them fast into his own fist. Then he was moving on to the elf with the saber, determined to stop the glow.

“Now, big fella, don’t do that to Pride,” Santa remarked, half-heartedly. “You know he is your kindred soul.”

But Jason wasn’t having it. He kept wrenching at the saber like it mattered more than anything else happening in the room.

“Give me that,” he said, low, urgent. His voice didn’t seem to have anything to do with the children.

But Pride held it just beyond his reach.

Jason lunged again.

He missed.

He stumbled back a full step and caught himself against Maya, breathing hard, and gave up on the saber. His eyes went instead to Greed, whose fistfuls of receipts were coming down now like confetti, settling thick across Jason’s shoulders. He caught at them fast, gathering what he could, and hid them in his pocket.

Maya stared at him.

“What’s on it?”

“Nothing.”

“Jason.”

“It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter. We need to go.”

He wasn’t looking at her.

The relief she’d felt a second ago began to change shape. He wasn’t distracted. He was hiding something.

Maya looked back at the glowing furniture. The couch. The TV. The console. Her sweater. All of it held that same warm white light, the shade already stitched faintly at her own cuff.

Then she looked toward the window.

The truck outside was lined in a different glow entirely, cooler, a thin fluorescent blue-white against the dark. Jason’s.

The color belonged to whoever had signed for the thing.

Furniture-store financing, her name on the account, that warm white. The soundbar, her card too. The truck, blue, meant it was his.

She looked back at Jason, who was still trying to get at the receipt, but didn’t have time to figure out what that meant.

There was a gap now, a narrow one past the fallen console where the garland hadn’t quite closed all the way. She threw herself toward it, already looking past it toward the hallway.

Her foot went out from under her almost immediately and she went down hard, palms first, into something wet and thick that had pooled across the floor, and the smell of it hit her a half second after the fall did, cream and sugar and something sourer underneath.

Nearby, Glut was still working through it.

Cookies. The good ones. The ones she’d stayed up piping icing onto after the kids went to bed.

The popcorn tin was on its side and emptying. Eggnog ran in a slow pale river toward her hands.

“That’s theirs,” she said, and her voice cracked wide open on it, no longer shouting so much as breaking, especially after seeing she had just stepped on what looked like Glut’s vomit. “That’s Ben’s, that’s… those were for the kids, those were for…”

She tried to get up and only slid further and did a split, the liquid spreading faster than she could find purchase on it.

“Ben. Olivia,” she shouted again, voice raw now.

“What good parents.” Santa said.  He was at their bar, or what seemed to be an appearance of it.

“Wanting to entertain the children so badly you are willing to bring them down to witness this chaos, so my wonderful entourage here could traumatize them for laughs.”

He surveyed the cabinetry that now stretched upward into dark lacquered wood. Its shelves rising nearly to the ceiling and curving slightly inward, as if the room had grown around it. Wine glasses hung upside down from a rack that hadn’t existed an hour ago, catching the light like little pieces of ice. Bottles filled the shelves end to end, arranged with the same care Maya had once taken deciding what belonged where.

“How wonderful.” He tilted his head. “Would you like to get your phone out too? Put it up. Get your two million laughs on Instagram.”

Maya stared at him. Her throat felt parched.

“What could be more Christmassy than that?” Santa ran a finger along the necks of the bottles as he passed, reading the labels. “So… Maya.” Santa spread one hand. “Hm? What says you?”

Maya, blind, bleeding thin lines across her own fingers, still could not stop calling her kids’ names through her now very hoarse voice. “Ben. Olivia.”

Jason joined her, and there was more anger in it than she’d heard from him all night, something furious just woken, like a wounded dog.

“Daddy has to leave. Come down now. Kids. Can you hear me?”

His clothes hung torn where Wrath had gotten at them. He turned towards Santa and in a very high pitched voice that sounded like a helpless Olivia he commanded Santa to leave the bar and leave the house.

That sent ripples of elves’ laughter through the house.

“Now that’s rich,” Santa said, mildly, unbothered, as he stopped at one bottle and pulled it free. He turned the bottle in his hand, to read the label.

“This should cost you about three months of labor,” he said, with only the flat satisfaction of stating a fact.

“Do you hear me?” Jason shouted at him. “I’m talking to you.”

Jason moved. No plan in it. No strategy. He lunged at Santa. He didn’t get there. Not quite.

He clipped the vase with his hip, the garland caught his ankle, and he went down hard, his shoulder taking the brunt of it against the edge of the coffee table, a grunt punched out of him on impact.

He tried to get up. He wouldn’t manage it quickly.

Santa poured a glass without turning around.

” “Your wife’s over there trying to reach your children,” he observed, watching the wine climb the bowl of the glass, dark at its center. “You’re worried about some wine bottles. Not exactly husband of the year, are you.”

He took a small sip, eyes moving over the room, unmoved. Glut had gotten sick again, and this time right on Maya’s legs.

“All those mornings getting up.” Santa continued, “All those evenings coming home. All that time spent making the money that pays for this.” He tipped the glass slightly toward the shelves. “And now, with your house invaded, your wife on the floor, your children God knows where, this bar is still what’s got your attention. It should be funny, a man so devoted to his liquor cabinet.” He managed a dry laugh. “Except it isn’t.” And with that he brought the wine glass to his lips again. “You’ve got good taste, though. I’d give you that.”

Jason barely heard the last of it. He turned to find Maya doing another split and yowling in agony even as she continued to call the children’s names. Her voice, barely a whisper.

He tried to fight back toward her and the stairs, but an elf spun a bar stool into his path and he had to sidestep or go down.

“This is all your fault,” he fumed at Maya. “We have a showroom for a house.”

“If you’d helped get things out of the car it wouldn’t be so crowded in here,” Maya shot back.

“If you weren’t insistent on buying every single thing you saw, we would not be in this mess.” Jason was even more irritated now, as one of the smaller elves seemed to be giving him a wedgie. “I warned you, Maya,” he managed, between frustrated shuffles and swiping at it. “I warned you, and now look what you’ve done. Look what, let go of me.” He swiped hard at it and hit the wall instead. “Look what is happening to us…”

“I don’t know what you want from me, Jason Harvey Sunburst. I am trying to reach my children.” Maya said, still fighting the floor, the spill, all of it. “And apparently I’m the only one who cares enough to try.”

“They wouldn’t be stuck upstairs or wherever if you weren’t so goddamn obsessed with the mafia Santa and his demonic spawns. But you had to go DEI this Christmas didn’t you? You just had to make a statement. Now guess who is going DEI on our butts.”

Behind them, Santa and the elves laughed.

Jason attempted another powerless lunge at Santa, but skidded off on fallen ornaments. He cursed heavily at the laughing elves, Santa and even Maya.

But Maya could not respond this time. She had slid on Glut’s vomit and landed on her back, while trying to get a grip on the console for balance. She had risen in determination but all she had to show for her effort was a helpless pinwheeling through Glut’s vomit which seemed to grow by the seconds as he stood bent over beside her. Meanwhile, Envy and the kleptomaniac elf whom Santa had referred to as Lust were mocking Maya, dancing exaggerated little splits and turns while Pride, Greed, and even the slow Sloth laughed along.

“They put on quite a show, don’t they,” Santa said, settling in like a man front row at a theatre.

Jason’s fingers curled into a fist and Wrath eyed him, ready to go into action.

“Oh, come on. This is fun.” Santa said, with a smile, raising his wine glass at Jason.

“Too bad you can’t get pictures to show the beautiful Laura and your other colleagues at work.” Santa watched Jason.

Jason began walking farther away from him.

“I am talking to you, Jason.” Santa took another sip. “Or have I said too much? Oops. My bad.”

Then Santa’s baritone rolled through the room, rich and impossibly low, almost absurdly beautiful.

“He sees you when you’re sleeping, He knows when you’re awake, He knows if you’ve been bad or good, So be good for goodness sake.”

Jason stopped midstep and turned back to look.

Then the elves joined in. “You better watch out…”

Their voices rose around Santa’s impossibly deep bass, suddenly transforming the room into a polished Christmas performance. Envy and Lust broke into graceful, synchronized turns and exaggerated little splits. Pride swept into the choreography with theatrical elegance. Greed and Wrath joined the melody, their voices surprisingly harmonious.

Only Sloth remained on the floor, slowly writhing through Glut’s vomit in what appeared to be his own agonizingly slow interpretation of the dance.

Jason could only stare.

While the music and dance by the elves went on, Maya found a grip on the console. She pulled herself forward. Her palms slipped. She tried again. And this time she succeeded, although she looked like the heroine at the end of an apocalyptic movie.

Her legs were shaking so badly she had to plant one foot, then the other, and drag herself upright by inches.

The stairs. She could see them. Or what was left of them.

She was already making her way up when Sloth decided he needed to move slowly in that same direction but somehow ended up tumbling down and draping himself half across her legs.

When she tried to pull free it didn’t move, dead weight and clinging warmth and a smell like something left out too long, and her legs wouldn’t come loose no matter how she twisted.

“Get off. Get off me.” She was crying now in earnest, no longer the tight, contained tears from before but something bigger, her whole chest heaving with it. “I can’t get up. Somebody get it off me. Ben. Olivia,” she called, voiceless with it now, barely more than breath.

From the corner of her eyes, she saw Jason walking towards her, in slow exasperated motion. Almost as slow as Sloth. But in another moment, he was once again being tackled by the fierce Wrath, and Maya watched as his legs went up in the air.

“I just want my babies.” Maya cried. Her knees found the floor entirely, hands pressed flat against her thighs.

The elves quieted.

“You can have the house,” she continued, her voice breaking apart word by word. “You can have all of it. The tree, the jewelleries. All the expensive vases and light fixtures. Hell, take yourselves back to the store. I don’t care. Take everything. Just give me my kids, please, just let me go fetch them from wherever, and leave, please.”

“Well.” Santa’s voice, unhurried as ever, cut cleanly through the last of the laughter. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” “Em. If you would just keep quiet.” He continued, without looking at her, “we can begin.”

Begin what? She wanted to ask. Instead, she just nodded, mucus and tears mixed on her face.

“And will the fella please rise?” he said to Jason, who was whimpering on the floor.

Jason stood, slumped.

“Now that’s a good boy,” Santa said. Then, glancing at the elves, he added, “Protocol.”

All the elves straightened at once, all but one. Envy smoothed her coat as though nothing had happened. Wrath stood perfectly still, tiny fists at his sides. Glut wiped his mouth a final time and folded his hands, almost prim. Greed let the last of the receipts fall from his fingers and closed them instead around nothing, out of habit. Lust drifted into the line unhurried, something small and gold catching the light where she’d tucked it into her sleeve. Pride arranged himself at the end nearest Santa, adjusted his stance twice, then a third time, checking, it seemed, whether he’d found the most flattering place to stand.

Sloth was still draped across Maya’s legs, exactly where he’d landed, showing no more inclination to join the line than he’d shown to do anything else that evening.

Nobody moved to hurry him. Even the room itself seemed to settle into the pause, the amber light going still, the receipts finally coming to rest on the floor, as though everything had learned, over whatever span of time it had known him, that Sloth arrived when Sloth arrived and not before.

He got up eventually, in stages, first an arm, then a shoulder, then the long unhurried process of a body deciding to be vertical, peeling himself off Maya’s legs at last with no particular urgency, and made his way to the end of the line at something less than a walk, arriving beside the others with the placid, unbothered look of someone who had never once in his life felt late for anything.

Santa looked at the line of them with an air of satisfaction then lifted his glass toward all of them, toward the glowing room, toward Maya on her knees.

The seven bowed together, one motion, and spoke as one voice. “Owned, and pledged, to Lord Santa.”

“Your turn,” Santa said to Maya and Jason.

“What?” Jason managed. “We are not…”

“Do you ever want to see your kids?”

Maya went down on her knees and said the words. “Owned and pledged to Lord…”

“No, no,” Santa said. “Say it standing. Your hand on your chest. Like your little friends just did.”

This time, Jason joined her. “Owned and pledged to Lord Santa.”

The words moved through the room like something taking up residence, and this time Maya understood they weren’t only talking about themselves.

“Now,” Santa smiled, the same unhurried, closed-mouth smile from the store, from the beginning of the night, from what felt now like a different lifetime entirely, and inclined his head just slightly, like a host might toward guests who had finally, finally arrived on time. “Shall we begin.”