But bad luck wasn't done with me yet.

Literally, not more than five minutes later-it seemed at the time-my mom pulled into the gravel driveway. I stayed on the porch, in the shadows.

As she made her way up onto the porch, she said, "Whaddya doing?"

"Locked myself out," I said.

"How long have you been out here?"

"I dunno."

"Jesus, are you okay? You look cold."

"I'm...I'm fine," I said, holding Missy against my chest for warmth.

With her car keys still in her hand she said, "Didn't I tell you that there was an extra key up on the porch light?"

The porch light was next to the door. Cylindrical with a flat top. High enough for people not to see the key-including me of course.

She pushed the door open.

"No," I said.

I hurried past her, releasing Missy onto the living room floor, and rushing up the creaky stairs to my room to change into dry clothes. I buried my wet clothes into the bottom of the hamper, which turned out not to be a wise move for obvious reasons.

A few minutes later my mom scolded Missy for p.o.o.ping on the floor. Seriously.

Two or three days later I got yelled at for not picking up Missy's p.o.o.p out in the yard. My mom gave me a sandwich baggy and pointed out the small piece in the gra.s.s by the porch...

About the size of a marble.

-Sheldon Higdon.

www.sheldonhigdon.com.

CHRISTMAS WISH.

by Sarah Gomes.

'Twas the night before Christmas, and Billy was as miserable as a kid could be.

It was approaching midnight, and he held the phone to his ear, only half-listening as Mark prattled on about the "epic party" Billy had missed.

Like pouring salt into the wound, Mark said again, "You should have been there, man."

"Yeah," Billy said, "I should have been there. But I also should have kept my mouth shut." Arguing with his father was never a wise decision, but doing so while the man was p.i.s.s-drunk was a guaranteed a.s.s-whoopin'.

And not only had Billy picked a fight with his drunk father, in a rare moment of defiance he had gotten in his face and shouted, "I hate you! I wish I'd left with Mom!" That had gotten him ten whacks to the backside as well as an express pa.s.s to his bedroom and the promise of a Christmas morning without a single gift.

"Well, your father's a d.i.c.k," Mark said, launching Billy back to the present. "You missed an awesome time. The chicks-they were hot, man. Really hot. Heather was there. She was asking about you..."

Billy could have cried.

"...she had this short skirt on, and when she bent over you could totally see her a.s.s. And that could have been ALL YOURS-if only you'd been there, bro."

Billy sighed. "Yeah, I know. My father's work hours, you know." He hated to lie, especially to his best friend, but revealing the truth would make everything worse. "And I always have to babysit the brat." Which was indeed part of the problem.

Ever since his mother disappeared two years ago, Billy had been in charge of watching his little sister when their father worked. The problem was, he worked all the time, and when he wasn't working he was pickling his liver down at Lou's Tavern. It was no wonder Billy's mother had left them.

"Yo, I gotta go," Mark said. "My mother's yelling at me about something. I'll call you tomorrow."

After he hung up, Billy knew sleep would elude him for at least a few hours. He was too wired, and the backs of his thighs throbbed painfully. His pride didn't feel much better.

There was nothing on TV except infomercials and lame-a.s.s Christmas shows featuring perfect families living in houses full of love and laughter. It made him want to puke. And he sure as h.e.l.l didn't want to go on the computer because it would be full of status updates about how awesome the party had been. So he decided to read.

From the nightstand, he s.n.a.t.c.hed up the latest issue of Shock Totem, unlucky number 13. The dark tales within promised to match his mood. With a bag of Doritos and a couple cans of Mountain Dew by his bedside, he settled down, got as comfy as possible given his injuries, and started reading.

He was about halfway through Andy Cairns's "The Head That Tried to Strangle Itself"-which was either extremely pee-your-pants scary or Billy had drank too much Mountain Dew-when he heard the strange noise coming from the down the hall. You have got to be s.h.i.tting me! he thought.

Maybe he could ignore it. Yeah, he'd ignore it. He wasn't in the right frame of mind to go investigating in the dark. And the more he listened, the more he realized it wasn't truly coming from down the hall, it was coming from below and only echoing from down the hall. The hollow thunk-drag-thud was coming up from the bas.e.m.e.nt.

Billy had never liked going down there, day or night, let alone after he'd been reading horror stories. But the sound came again, and again, and again. Curiosity mixed with dread. Goose b.u.mps sprouted along his arms, but Billy found himself out of bed and moving cat-like across the room as if he were sleepwalking, with no clear memory of leaving the bed.

From his closet, he pulled out his old Louisville Slugger. "Nothing to be afraid of," he whispered. Of course, the baseball bat revealed just how little he believed it.

He crept down the hallway and paused by the open bas.e.m.e.nt door, a sliver of light slicing through the dark. His heart pounded. The sound coming from below had ceased, but he knew someone was down there. It occurred to him that he should call the cops, that he was making one of the most common-and not to mention stupid-horror-movie mistakes: the Don't f.u.c.king Go Down There mistake. But he slowly opened the door anyway. Musty bas.e.m.e.nt air wafted over him. He peeked inside, but saw nothing but cobwebbed rafters and the cold gray concrete walls and floor.

The stairs were old and every other one creaked when he placed his weight on it. With each step down he felt more and more confident that he'd heard nothing but the old furnace rattling away. Still, he braced the bat on his shoulder, both hands holding it tightly, as if he were at home plate, waiting for a pitch to come sailing in from the mound.

As he got closer to the bottom, he heard movement from around the corner. He stopped dead, immense fear planting him firmly in place while also firing off warnings to run, run, run! He began to tremble as the thunk-drag-thud noise resumed, louder now, more distinct. It sounded like...someone was digging. Could someone have broken in? No. Why would a burglar be digging in the cellar?

Only one way to find out, Billy-boy.

Billy descended the final steps, and braced himself before turning the corner that would take him into the open area of the cellar. He hefted the bat. "One...two...three," he whispered before stepping around the corner.

Horror seized him, his mind unable compute what his eyes were seeing, but still knowing it was every shade of wrong. Again fear screamed for him to flee yet held him tight within its clutches. Billy could almost hear it laughing.

"Evening, son." His father stood by a large hole in the bas.e.m.e.nt's dirt floor, his T-shirt and pants stained with dust and sweat. He held a shovel in his right hand.

"What are you doing?" Billy asked.

"Well," his father said, "you told me that you wanted to be with your mother-" he bent down, scooped up another shovelful of dirt "-so I have to unbury her first."

"Unbury her?" Billy asked stupidly, the bat falling to the ground.

"Yeah, unbury her." His father stopped digging, just long enough to reach back and pull a gun from the waistband of his pants. "I had a change of heart. It being Christmas and all, I figured the least I could do is grant you your Christmas wish. And since you here now-"

Billy didn't even have a chance to blink before his father aimed and pulled the trigger-twice. The bullets ripped through Billy's chest, the pain so horrendous he instantly prayed for unconsciousness, even death.

Only one prayer was answered.

He was still awake when the first scoop of dirt landed on his chest.

"I must be a bad shot," his father said, staring down at him. "Your mother was still alive when I buried her, too."

Sarah Gomes works as an IT professional by day. In her free time, she reads, crochets and makes jewelry. She hails from Ma.s.sachusetts.

What is your best, funniest, or darkest holiday-season memory?

AT THE (CHRISTMAS) MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS.

A year before Close Encounters of The Third Kind landed in holiday cinemas and Richard Dreyfuss's character compulsively modeled Devil's Tower in mashed potatoes and landscaping until Teri Garr and his kids fled in their gas-guzzling station wagon, my father decided we needed to construct a mountain in our living room.

When you gaze at him in pictures from that year he looks years older, exhausted and wiped out.

Jim McCaffery and Dreyfuss's "Roy Neary" had a lot in common: both were dreamers, and both waged a relentless, fanatical battle against 1970s consumerism and a television-addicted popular culture they felt was subverting the innocence and magic of childhood. Both were looking for something wondrous to take their minds off of tight household budgets, ever-present bills, the Energy Crisis and a sagging economy.

At dinner one night Dad described to my mother, younger brother and sister his vision of a holiday mountain complete with soaring peaks, jagged cliffs, a hillside scale-model town with tiny railroad layout folk, and spiraling tracks carved into the side to accommodate a vintage coal-black locomotive that would huff and whistle up and down its elevations and fly through a stone tunnel. Looming over everything from behind this magical mountain would be a colossus of a Christmas tree, dripping with Spanish moss layers of tinsel and the ragtag gla.s.s b.a.l.l.s and ornaments we had lugged from one end of the country to the other during the frequent moves of my childhood, all of it crisscrossed with strings of those warm, fat vintage '60s colored bulbs and modern winking lights.

He had us hooked with the image of that mountainside complete with a Ray Bradbury village, Brothers Grimm forest and wailing night train. And he felt sure we could erect all of this inside the cramped living room of our tiny Ozark foothills farmhouse in the remaining two weeks before Christmas. None of us bothered arguing-Dad's enthusiasm was unstoppable once he got rolling. We had temporarily escaped the cities where everything was going to h.e.l.l in a handbasket and it was only a matter of time before Dad would be rolling his own menthol cigarettes in paper strips torn from Mother Earth News magazine.

In the corrugated metal shop where we normally built picture frames for his French Quarter art trade, we constructed a large wood-framed skeleton with steep angled sides, plateaus for the town, a train tunnel and a base that included an armature to grasp the evergreen tree. We hauled it through the front door and positioned it at the front of the shotgun living room by the front windows. The skeleton was covered in a wrinkled canvas skin. Next we mixed huge bowls of papier-mache and sculpted the mountain. Dad created a lot of the rock texture using Liquitex modeling paste and a palate knife. Then we painted the forest floors, rutted dirt roads and mountain pa.s.ses in acrylic paint. All of my brother's scale railroad layout houses and main street buildings were loaned to build the town. Styrene model tank commanders and plastic soldiers were relocated (even if they weren't HO scale). We fashioned additional buildings and a train station from cardboard and Masonite panel sc.r.a.ps. We planted thick green forests of evergreen sprigs and added colored bits of kitchen sponge for shrubbery. We were out of school on break and after ch.o.r.es we worked on the mountain. We all wore outdoor play clothes and were often covered from head to toe with dried zombie-gray and -green paint and flecks of paper paste.

Our mother watched all of this from across the room with amus.e.m.e.nt and encouragement.

Dad managed to position my brother's Lionel train tracks around the completed mountain and through the tunnel, and hooked up the transformer. After a lot of adjusting and cursing he got it running.

When all was dry and the glue set, we roamed the hillside of our twelve-acre farm searching for a tree grand enough to adorn the side of our indoor mountain. We ended up cutting down three average sized evergreens and lashing them together using wire.

- On Christmas Eve, my brother and I drove our toy cars through the town and took turns piloting the locomotive up and down the mountain, its tiny electric headlamp emerging from the papier-mache tunnel as it made endless circuits. My old Aurora King Kong scaled its way to the top, hoping for an encounter with a pterodactyl. Our little sister sat near the base, huddled in her robe, until she nodded off.

The odd pickup truck or family sedan that drove by our little farmhouse set back in a the hollow off of rural Star Route that night probably wondered if a baby UFO had crash-landed through the roof.

- By Christmas 1977 our mother was gone after a final year battling the cancer that had come roaring back the previous spring, and there were no more magic mountains. Only ordinary trees strapped into ordinary metal stands with just enough water to keep them from catching fire. My sister asked that next year if Dad planned to build another magic mountain, but none of us felt like it. It was better to remember the one, he said, to let it grow into family myth and lore, and he was right; better to keep that mad, twinkling memory tucked away safe than try to recreate it. It wouldn't have been the same.

It occurred to me years later that it was the one Christmas Eve that we didn't circle and stamp around our parent's feet like little Maurice Sendak monsters, begging them to let us open all of our gifts before dawn. Dad's crazy mountain had been the perfect distraction and gift that we needed.

-Simon McCaffery.

www.simonmccafferyfiction.blogspot.com.

'TWAS THE NIGHT by Nick Contor.

She wanted-no, she needed-to find the perfect one. With no one to help her, decorating for the holidays was going to be tough enough this year. Had she been completely alone, she wouldn't have bothered at all. But with two little ones at home, she dared not give in to the creeping lethargy, the desire to stay curled up in a ball every morning and snuggle deeper into her bed. The desire was strong, but her maternal instincts trumped it. For now, at least.

Which was also why she was out tramping around the forest on a frosty December evening. Since her husband died, it was important to her that the holiday season be as normal as possible. She had told him how dangerous it was to be out there during hunting season, but he never listened. Anger at him flared briefly, then settled back into the dull ache of loneliness and pain that was her constant companion now.

She brushed past pine and fir trees, scrub oak and juniper, shivering as the wind crept through her coat. The daylight was rapidly fading. Night would have its way in a short while. She had to get back soon to prepare dinner for herself and her children.

A light snow began to fall, dotting the trees here and there. She briefly thought of giving up, going back, but then she spotted it, standing out from among the trees like it was lit up. She could already imagine it adorning their home. It was perfect.

A clatter as the miniature bow-saw dropped from frozen fingers. This was her chance.

As the man bent over to retrieve the saw, she raced from the underbrush. He turned and raised an arm; her muzzle brushed past it easily. Only one small mewling cry escaped his lips before she ripped out his throat. She stood for a moment as silence descended once more, panting from the exertion, ashamed. She was getting older, but once the pups were grown, they could take on some of these hunting duties.

She grabbed a hold of a jacket sleeve and tugged, leaving behind the saw and the small tree the man had been dragging behind him.

Nick Contor lives in southwest New Mexico with his wife and two children. In his spare time, he writes lyrics, plays drums, and sings in a local band.

What is your best, funniest, or darkest holiday-season memory?

I was about 15 years old, and on Christmas Eve night the room I usually shared with my brother had a guest: my grandmother, sleeping on a camp bed.

At about one in the morning, I was awoken by the sound of a gunshot downstairs. I heard my dad jump out of bed and dash down there, and for a moment, I nearly went with him...but then figured I'd wait in bed and see what happened. If I heard a struggle of course I'd rush to his aid...but if not, why get out of my comfy warm coc.o.o.n?

There was no sound of Dad trying to overpower a pack of holiday ninja burglars, so I went back to sleep.

The next disturbance was half an hour later. The air stank of this weird sickly sweet stench. It smelled like the inside of an old lady's handbag from h.e.l.l. Unable to sleep in such an odour (I figured my grandmother had put on some bizarre face lotion before bed, which she was known to do) and went downstairs. There, awake and watching TV at half one in the morning, were my parents.

See, we had two greyhounds and one had decided to investigate the presents early. He had knocked the tree over and ripped into a gift for my grandmother. It was a beauty gift pack thing, and he'd nosed out a can of apple and peach scented deodorant and bit the d.a.m.n thing.

High-pressure cans tend to explode when punctured (the big bang) and the contents then disperse (the stink).

The dog seemed fine, except that he'd licked up the liquid from the can, and the instructions said "fatal if ingested."

Happy Christmas. Your dog is going to die.

We stayed up, trying to get the dog to drink, waiting for him to kick it...but he was fine. He lived for another 10 years in fact and never showed any side effects.

Except one.

All Christmas Day, whenever the dog farted (and he did-a lot) the overpowering sweet stink of apple and peach flavoured deodorant saturated the house. Imagine the scene: it's Christmas Day, and we're all playing a board game. Nothing weird about that, right? Yeah, just ignore the fact we had all the doors and windows open, sat in our coats with scarves wrapped around our mouths and noses and even wore swimming goggles because the fumes were making our eyes water.

Ever since, perfumed women always puts me in the holiday mood!

-Daniel I. Russell.