I am aiming to write a short story or extract from some ongoing fiction project around once a month, and this month it’s a Christmas special. Readers of a nervous disposition may wish to finish reading before the epilogue. Merry Christmas
Little Timmy Taylor wasn’t much appreciated at school. Teachers would describe him as being very bullyable. Not in a mean way, just - he was someone a bully could really get their teeth into, or worse tempting enough to turn an innocent bystander into a bully. He wasn’t annoying, but he wasn’t fun to be around. He had this bounce to the way he walked, and a pathetic enthusiasm to teachers that even put them off him. And he had one of those faces you could just… anyway. Let’s just say, when he had a birthday, party invites were available on request and there weren’t many enquiries. More of a family do.
He hadn’t been set up much for success in life. His actual name, Little Timmy Weedy Worm Taylor, included a few family names, not least a resemblance to his more popular brother Bigger Timmy. The age gap between siblings didn’t help - a full 24 years his senior, meant that they didn’t have much time for each other, and ostensibly he was an only child, though due to a quirky expressive error when speaking as a child, he would still often refer to himself as a lonely child.
His mother and father were a bit eccentric. Very sociable people, they had a tendency to stifle their youngest, providing the games and conversation around him whether intentionally or otherwise, and found him to be, puzzling. He was not, it should be made clear, unloved. He was just a bit of a mystery for all concerned, a quiet enigma - but not enough to warrant medical intervention, or a police visit, or an exorcism, or a visit from a vet, or a manufactured surprise intervention from a friend dressed as his favourite cartoon character, or a two week stint with Mary Poppins, or Maria Von Trapp emergency singsong escape, or Julie Andrews no matter the hat she’s wearing. Just - what can you do when someone is annoying to their bones?
When she went to pick him up from school, one of the teachers gave Mother Mary one of those over-the-top theatrical whisper hisses to get her attention, and lured her into a darkened corner of a classroom in the labyrinthine primary school.
“They’ve all had a visit from Santa, sat on his knee and all that. Above board.” She quickly added.
“It was just the headmaster, real one was busy this close to the big day. We’ve kept a note of what they said they wanted. I’ve written down what Little Timmy wants in here… DON’T let them see,” and handed her a black envelope. Mother Mary thanked her, and hid the envelope in her pocket.
His class took Christmas very seriously. The teacher was always first to shut down any playground conversation from Santa Claus Truthers, who had read the wrong book or had older siblings who drew brutal images of Santa’s assassinated body or debunking the logistics of visiting several billion children in the course of 24 hours without being being seen once. He was real, he was magic, and there was no more to say on the matter.
Once she got home from the mad rush of school, and the boy had been fed, bathed and placed in his bed, and he’d been asleep for at least an hour, and she was quite sure he wasn’t going to wake up again, and she’d had a chance to pop a chilled glass out of the fridge, and had a good long swig, and refilled the glass, and finally gotten her shoes off, she took out the mysterious black envelope to read to herself in the kitchen. It contained a black lined piece of paper. There was nothing on it. She looked at the inside of the envelope liner and saw written in rather inconspicuous writing the word LEMON.
“This is a bit much” she thought to herself, knowing exactly what was intended.
She walked over to the fruit bowl, found the half a lemon that had been sat there since August, hoping for a use in a cocktail but finding it’s little butt being rubbed against some tinpot craft to reveal a secret message. Mother Mary looked confused by what she’d seen, while a cut in one of her fingertips stung from the juice.
Oh, the internet doesn’t exist btw. I don’t think it’s important but, this is a world where they haven’t got the internet. Not like, it hasn’t arrived at their home - the whole of civilisation has no notion of the internet. As I said, not important. It feels like Checkov’s internet now though. Sigh. Pretend I said nothing.
As you were.
They had breakfast for dinner. Over a greasy late night full-english and a glass of ice cold white wine, they ignored each other in a romantic way, staring at the table in front of them like it held the answers to everything, looking up occasionally to engage in conversation, before there eyes fell away from the love of their life to instead engage with literally anything else.
“What did it say?” Asked the dad, with as much curiosity that a pigeon expresses when deciding whether or not to eat something its found on the street.
“Um… he asked for content?” her voice went up at the end of the sentence, like she herself was unsure of what she’d just said.
“Cont-what? What’s that?”
“You know. Just like. Stuff. Filler. Could be anything I suppose”
“Okay. Leave it with me I guess” said the dad, who had already whipped out his pocket fax machine under the pretence of arranging Christmas gifts, but inevitably he was checking one he’d received with his fantasy football team (they were doing terribly though he didn’t care at all for football, but wanted to look more manly in front of his work colleagues). The printer motors were whirring up in anticipation as he stepped out of the room, up the stairs, and towards the bathroom.
Mother Mary grabbed her favourite VHS tape, put it in the video recorder, pressed “video” on the remote followed by “rewind”, and while the tape rewound repositioned the monitor on its stand so it was at a comfortable viewing distance, then sat down ready to press play on the soap operas she’d recorded for herself that day.
The advent calendar on the wall had been delicately pierced open revealing the date. December 1st.
Time elapsed.
It was Christmas day today, and all but one gift had been ripped from their patterned paper. A big, cube box sat in the middle of the room, one which Daddy Jesus had insisted Little Timmy open last.
A quick note about his name. Though odd sounding in isolation, out of isolation it made much more sense than what it was previously, especially now that he had in fact changed it to this legally after giving it a whirl for a few years informally. Baby Jesus just didn’t cut it for a partner in a legal firm (Tailor, Taylor and Taye Law), but unwilling to cut off his family roots entirely, compromises were made. Ultimately, everyone was satisfied with the decision.
“Can I open it now?” Little Timmy said longingly.
The dad wound up his camcorder, set all the buttons and lights he could think to press, and then aimed it towards the centre of the room, wielding it like one would an RPG in one of those wars you saw on the telly in the 90s, except he was dressed in Christmas pyjamas.
“Whenever you’re ready son” he said. The boy paused before approaching.
“ACTION!” his father shouted out like a deranged film director.
The boy flinched with shock, but he wasn’t perturbed and gave a quick look over his shoulder and an upthumb. That sort of thing happened a lot, but wasn’t enough to explain the boy’s general demeanour.
Little Timmy unwrapped the final gift. It wasn’t a comfortable watch. The way he sat down, a bit like a praying monk, just felt too formal given the situation. And his posture was definitely not good - gave you a crank in the neck just watching him. But it was the activity itself - the pace was just annoying; there would be flurries of activity but then no progress would be made, and then he’d turn the box round and round looking for a way in, like a flap of celotape or a baggy bit of paper to grab onto, for an e x c r u t i a t i n h l y - l o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o n g - t i m e. And then he’d make a tiny bit of forward momentum. Let’s just say, the camera sagged from time to time, taking more interest in Mother Mary’s excited, performative looks to camera than the performance center stage.
Eventually, present unwrapped, Little Timmy stood and took a step back to see what he was opening. He read aloud the markings on the alien object. “The content-o-matic 3000… woah!”
“Thank you Santa” he remembered to say, looking up at the sky like that he was God.
“Is it the right one?” Daddy Jesus asked
“I’ve no idea” said Little Timmy. The gaping hole on the side of the object was glowing invitingly.
“Well, stick a hand in and find out”
Tentatively, he looked inside. It was blindingly bright, in the sense that you couldn’t actually see what was inside. But equally, the light was so comforting, you could stare at it for hours. Little Timmy tiptoed a pair of fingers into the opening, and the colours changed. One of the little pipes on the side squeezed a little white gas which smelled like red candy - not quite strawberry flavoured, but a whiff of a fruit which you could imagine would be red.
His hand felt warm. Like a package holiday, where the Greecian sun falls lovingly on your body as you lay, the pretence of a holiday read draped on a sidetable beside you, the plastic struts of the sun lounger pushing against your back, while the dull heat of the sun slowly roasts your cells, you are being cooked alive but so comfortably that you would willingly let it. He wanted to leave his hand in that heat all day.
“What’s inside?” Daddy Jesus asked, his excitement unbearable.
“Nothing much… it’s just nice”. He started to stroke and flick all the nodes around the cube to see what else it could do. One spring made a warm inviting noise when you plucked it, while a switch turned a light on and off.
He rolled off his wife like a well-trained manatee rolling for his trainer’s fish. Satisfied with his act, he grabbed a newspaper and just started to read the news, see what was going on in the world. Huh, another war over territory in the middle east? Not now, for obvious reasons. He browsed for something else worth reading about. Obviously it was very dark but thankfully they had invented this special kind of glow in the dark newspaper that you could turn on and off, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to just read articles straight after boinking his wife in the middle of the night. She was still going, probably another half hour of pleasure with her insides still throbbing, like a manatee expelling the fish having rolled over too much while eating the fish. The moonlight graced their naked bodies with its soulful glare.
“So where did you get it?” She asked, her hand stiff after taking an extra 30 minutes for herself, but turning to get the inside scoop.
“Well”
It was a Thursday three weeks previous. The father, formerly known as Baby Jesus, had taken a trip down the Old Kent Lane. He browsed his A to Z for the right turn he had to take, then took a few more confident steps towards his destination. Eventually, he stumbled across an Aladdin’s cave of used goods that had been recommended to him by his pal’s drug dealer. His eyes bulged with wonder as he snaked his way between heaving aisles full of intriguing objects the likes of which he vaguely recalled from seeing Blade Runner once in the cinema when it had had its one and only cinematic release. Or maybe it was a scene in Star Wars. Come to think of it, it might have just been the news. Either way, he was reminded of the sort of market you might find in a far flung country like Japan, and the few foreign travellers reporting back what they found rubbed their hands together in glee as they explained in great detail the bargains and bits abandoned before them for an audience who had nothing better to do than just watch.
He turned a corner and found himself face to face with a wall stacked high with goods. He had to admit, he was overwhelmed, and so he did what most men would refuse to do, and found an assistant to assist in his search.
“My son has asked for content, I’ve heard you sell something that might be of use?” Daddy Jesus asked clearly.
Now I don’t know what you are imagining you’ll find here, but this is not a racist story. However, (‘however’ is just a fancy word for ‘but’) the guy who, we presume, owns the shop was not natively from the UK. That’s obviously fine, I just don’t want you to make a big deal about it. His cultural past is important for his character, as it is for all of us - it makes us who we are. But he was wearing something that would be a stereotype in many situations (but not a type of stereo). He’s not in the story for long, so just don’t make a big deal about it and we’ll all be fine. Unless I should make a big deal of him? You know for positive representation? I really don’t know. Either way, I won’t say specifically, but he does abide by the stereotype of the kind of nationality of person who, we would all dangerously presume, would run a shop of inter-dimensional used goods off the beaten track in a city center that you would only hear about by browsing the informal advertisements found in a phone box.
“How can I help?” said the assistant, but with quite a dodgy accent if I’ve heard one. Again, it’s not offensive because he’s genuinely doing it, it’s not being appropriated, it just feels inappropriate. But I can’t change his denomination for the sake of the story. And anyway, this isn’t real. None of it matches anyone’s actual life here. Fictional. Cover your ears if you are easily offended. But not like that for god’s sake.
“My son has asked for something curious… have you heard of content?”
“What do you take me for Mr Taylor” Daddy Jesus’s mouth dropped gape as he tried to enquire how he knew who he was “How did you…?”
“Embroidery on your lapel sir” Yeah that’s grating when you hear it back like this. Don’t linger, just know that we did our best to remove any offensive words or ideas before publishing.
Except he wasn’t wearing a shirt. He let the idea fester in his mind while he picked up his current task. “Do you have anything that fits the bill?”
“Follow me sir” Um… bordering on hate crime this accent, surprised it got through the sub-editor. I’m actually appalled on your behalf. Did you know you were reading something this obscene??
Daddy Jesus followed him through aisles, each tighter and more claustrophobic than the last, with curios and oddities getting more odd and more curious each step. One section, labelled “mysterious”, seemed replete with medieval torture devices; another aisle was just tamagotchis, unpacked and all bleeping at different rhythms with an old woman frantically going from one to the next trying to make sure they were all fed. Daddy Jesus couldn’t tell if she worked there or had been trapped trying to be polite.
Finally, they came to a room, labelled only with shapes. On one side, there was clearly the head of a robot made of stone. On the other, odd shaped kettle looking things with thick raw wires. In the middle, the shopkeeper removed a tarpaulin, and once the dust had settled, DJ (Daddy Jesus) could see a very curious object indeed.
“I think this is what you were looking for” Okay now, I’m wondering if actually it’s you, the reader, at fault. This text would have clearly picked up some notoriety by now, you didn’t just stumble onto this, you sought it out! You sicken me. Get out. No I’m not reading more until you get out.
Still here? Fine. Read on, sicko.
“Sorry, I couldn’t understand your accent, how much is it?”
Its the day after Christmas. 11:45am. They knew it was this time because their fm/am clock radio proudly displayed the time in a calculator green display. Mother Mary put a bowl of eggs in her brand new microwave, used the handy instruction book to work calculate how long she needed to program the device for, and clicked the big orange plastic button which was labelled “cook now!”. The machine started to slowly spin and groan.
“He’s still not down. It’s very unusual”
“Do you think we should check on him?” He still had his paper crown on from the crackers the day before.
“Maybe?”
“Okay”
No one did anything for about half an hour except each ate a bowl of hot steaming eggs.
“I’ll pop up and check”
Walking up the stairs, a gentle, ominous humming grew in intensity. “Love” said Little Timmy. A muffled voice replied. Pause. “Spanners”. The voice replied again, more coherent. Daddy Jesus opened the door. “Sunshine” he heard clearly and watched as Little Timmy had his mouth fully on the hole, speaking words into the cube. The cube spoke back at a volume suited to being heard only by one. “Solsken”
“What are you doing, son?”
“It’s teaching me Swedish!”
“What do you mean?”
“I just say something and it tells me how to say it in another language. Watch…” He turned back to his box.
“Daddy” The light of the box flashed dark magenta. It spoke back in a less inviting tone than before.
“dumskalle”
The light turned back to its joyful, inviting orange.
“Wow! That is very cool, you’ll be fluent in no time. We could have Abba round for dinner!”
Little Timmy half smiled back. He didn’t really like Abba, but didn’t have the heart to tell his dad the truth. Daddy Jesus didn’t notice.
“Do you fancy something for breakfast? Maybe some eggs?”
“Could you bring them up?”
A week went past. The boys ear was now attached to the box like a magnet - though thankfully his head was still attached to said ear. His hand held a loop protruding from one of the sides. He’d turned the cube onto one of its ends, and was now looking through a different hole, the cube projecting images directly to him, some of the haze diffused onto the bedroom walls he still resided in. From other cracks and crannies of the object, the strange orange light seeped out, changing slightly depending on the mood.
“Well, that gift has gone down very well” said to his wife, hoping for a blowjob.
“Yes, I suppose that’s exactly the sort of thing he wanted when he asked Santa”
“Last one in the shop” Daddy Jesus said, a tongue in one of his cheeks to emphasise the brag.
She did like it when he spent money they had earned together on things someone had asked for and then the thing they bought ended up being well liked. However, it didn’t sexually turn her on enough to take his member orally, as she could sense that was what he was hankering after with this particular conversation, but worse than that she did have an awful feeling of utter dread about the nature of the relationship her son now had with an inanimate object they neither of them could explain. They weren’t even sure, for example, if it was fire safe or compliant with government rules manufacturing standards as it didn’t have one of those labels on it.
“do you think it’s too much? Addictive even?” Mummy Mary asked her husband
“Naaah. He’s of that age. I’d much rather he spend his time staring into that old box than be outside causing havoc on the streets or worse, getting abducted by an unwelcome paedophile”
That was true, she thought to herself, questioning the necessity of the word “unwelcome”. But that didn’t reassure her maternal instincts.
“Dear Headmaster (Mr. F. Eggy), Apologies, but Little Timmy won’t be coming into school today” she’d typed.
A month. He hadn’t been to school, and it was nearing half term. She had written many notes to school, each more serious than the last, qualifying his absence with one affliction or another; some notes, his illnesses were suggested to be aggravating other issues, while other notes they were co-ordinating into maladies that seemed plausible but escalated his condition wildly. Notably, she had lied in each of them, failing to suggest the reason for his absence was that Little Timmy was physically entangled with an inanimate object he’d received for Christmas and was barely responding to any requests from his parents. But today she stopped giving a reason. She waited the 11 minutes for the printer to gently pass up a rip-pable sheet. It was one of those printers that had the little holes on either side. It finished printing and she ripped the sheet clean off.
Frankly the school had stopped expecting to see him anyway. The teachers, the class, everyone was quite happy not to have to deal with the tension that arose when Little Timmy was placed with other kids.
Mother Mary also noted that he hadn’t really eaten all that much in the last week. Or taken in any liquids. She knocked on his door occasionally, and peered inside to check on him, taking a pulse when she could. He was perfectly fine, just in a constant vegetative state, completely immersed in whatever activity he and the cube were engaged with that day. Today, he was watching recipes for bread.
His hands were now inside the cube, threaded through long rubber gloves, and she could tell he was rotating them in a kneading motion, presumably re-enacting what was being shown to him.
“are you learning to bake son?” she called in from the corridor.
“yes, just learning to bake, be with you in a second”
The second rarely finished long enough for him to be with her.
It was Christmas eve. Two years had passed. Little Timmy was becoming Bigger Timmy. But you wouldn’t know it. He was still, slumped and contorted around his box. A long tube had emerged from the cube and had weedled its way directly into his… well. Better to just say, it had entered him. Its job was to facilitate nutrition, or so it had been presumed. And hopefully remove things the other way too. He hadn’t left the room in many months, and there wasn’t much of a smell beyond an acceptable unacceptable stench of a young teen boy.
One thing that had changed, Mother Mary had learned to knock. Quite loudly. She had a system now. She’d knock a certain pattern, then pause. Then repeat that knocked pattern, and then wait. The hue beneath the door would change from a sordid neon pink to its milquetoast orange hue they’d become so accustomed to. Then she’d know it was safe to go in. Safe to pick up the small pellets that clanked out of the cube every couple of hours, and collect them in a bowl before they’d go into the rubbish. She’d also make a flap about making his own bed and opening the curtains, getting some fresh air in here, but he would correctly point out that should he want fresh air, the cube could manufacture the experience of it. He just didn’t want fresh air. He wanted a podcast about the best side hustles and where American politics was heading post Bush, or at least the smell of those things.
She didn’t know that of course, just knew innately that his need were being met. Frustratingly, he was maintaining fairly advanced communication. He was fluent in Japanese, or at least as best as they could surmise given that neither of them had even heard Japanese spoken out loud before. But he could make coherent arguments, talk about philosophy - the whiff of it at least, enough to get by in a conversation with his peers - and even expressed an interest in bird watching. He’d seen quite a few as it happens. Some as far as South Africa, even. Just all from the comfort of his bedroom floor.
His muscular tone remained remarkably normal considering the circumstances. Mother Mary imagined the box sent out some sort of complex electrical signal that stimulated his physical needs.
“It really was quite a gift, he loves it” Daddy Jesus would remark when he came home from a busy day commuting to the office to have meetings about meetings. “He can cook a mean curry too, will be well set for university”
“He claims he can cook a mean curry” Mother Mary remarked back. “We have no proof of these things.”
“Well let’s see shall we?” the dad suggested, and called up to Little Timmy “could you come downstairs and make us a curry”
“we haven’t got any ingredients for a curry. I don’t even have an indian cook book, I wouldn’t know what we’d need to have in”
The boy called back down from upstairs. The dad comprehended.
“Says he’s going to come down and cook us all a mean curry in a second.” He put down his newspaper and briefcase, hung his brown jacket on the same hook he’d hung it for a decade, and went to sit down with a good book. “You wouldn’t mind reading this book for me while I close my eyes for a few minutes love?”
The curry never came.
Epilogue
The abandoned house was covered in graffiti. Red paint on the door prescribed the inhabitants as “Pigs” while on the garage side of the house, a huge knob and testicles (which actually looked like they could be cancerous, get em checked lads) childishly adorned the brickwork. The crew of 6 or 7 delinquents, having grown tired of going two to a bike and pulling wheelies on roads which were legally not supposed to have bikes like theirs on, bashed down the door to look inside and see what they found.
A Christmas tree was still up, the lights long dead, the tinsel long moth eaten and the needles long dropped. Instead of the birth of the child of good, it looked like someone was celebrating the death of a tree. The wallpaper, beige and textured, had been ripped, with walls caked again in slogans and spray painted testers - the kind of tags that someone might do for a first go, full of spelling mistakes, some even crossed out and replaced with the correct spelling - while dust was think enough to be rolled up or, as the boys had discovered, balled up and chucked like snowballs. The most popular one shoved a ball into the mouth of the least popular one and 3/4 of the group laughed, while the remainder actually acknowledged how disgusting that was.
They wandered upstairs, to see what they could find. To their surprise, a light was still on. They creeped carefully to the door under which the hum of orange could still be seen. Behind the door, they could hear crying. And whispering. The voice kept repeating the same sentiments. Apologising. Wishing for relief. Pleading.
The boys were struck with a huge sense of fear, their masculinity immediately castrated until one brave soul slowly pushed open the door. If they hadn’t been intimated before, the sight of a grown naked man, wrapped in wires, his head fully engorged by a large metal box, was enough to put them all off their tea.
The light of the box turned from orange, to red. The man stopped pleading for, the eyes opened, his pupils bleached white, turned to stare at the aggressors. He frothed at the mouth, and twitched towards the boys at the door. While scrambling to get up and free himself from the wires to chase down his foes, the boys ran as fast as they could, into each other and into a mess. One rolled into another door which closed behind him and found himself in the master suite. Frantically, he grabbed a torch from his pocket and flashed it around the room, looking for a window or wayout.
He saw two skeletons lying silent on the bed, the bones of a hand holding the bones of the other. He heard the scraping of a large box being dragged along the floor from the room next door and screamed his little heart out.
