Unwrapped
By Cheryl M.
Looking for: Family on Christmas.
It was a simple header that made Eleanor look twice. She stood in front of the bulletin board in the shabby supermarket, watching the flimsy flyer flap about in the chilly December wind. The surrounding flyers all had grainy photos of missing dogs and desperate pleas printed by their owners in a heavy Arial black, but this particular one was handwritten with a few lines of barely legible scrawl and no picture. She squinted to read the rest.
Roles wanted are one daughter, one son, a husband and a wife. Cat optional but preferable. Just show up on Christmas Day, 6pm at 1008 Elmer Street. Festive dinner provided.
It sounded like a casting call. Eleanor had once been an actress, so she knew all about casting calls. Just not very much about what happened after them. It had been a good twenty years since her last proper gig—starring in a tacky karaoke stock video, the kind that was only shown in shady basement bars—and since then she had waned from aspiring actress to a has-been working the till at the only supermarket in town.
She pulled the flyer off the board and stuffed it into the pocket of her blue polyester uniform. After returning to her shift Eleanor continued thinking about it as she checked out items on auto-pilot.
Looking for: Family on Christmas.
This flyer seemed to be looking for people in a typical family Christmas. Eleanor had never celebrated with Christmas with family once in her life. The one she came from didn’t believe in gift-giving or festivities or holidays or commercial entities that earned more money than them. They didn’t believe in a lot of things, like their daughter who was so asinine as to think she could become an actress. Even after leaving the nest, Eleanor never had her own family. That was perfectly fine.
She only ever got wistful around this obnoxiously festive time of the year. Everyone around her was soaking in familial bliss and she was choking on their fumes. The town was deep into December and every day she was at the supermarket from morning to night, checking out log cakes and plastic wreaths and last-minute gifts for parents and their excited children.
Eleanor would have liked every one of these holiday stereotypes bundled into a sack and emptied over her head.
She would imagine these families going home with their shopping to a big house draped in Christmas lights and a snowman in the backyard. Probably with a scarf wrapped around its neck and a certified organic carrot stuffed into its face. The parents and their two children would shake the snow off their padded jackets and hustle into the warm living room. There would be a freshly cut pine tree standing sprinkled liberally with shiny baubles, presents tied with shiny ribbon stacked below. Perhaps the family pet dog would be sleeping by it. The log cake would be placed on standby inside the kitchen, dressed with a spring of holly. Next to it was a hot plate of cookies would be cooling on a rack, right above the turkey roasting in the oven. Or was the turkey Thanksgiving? Maybe they did the same meat back to back. Either way it would be a ridiculously large body of animal flesh, waiting to be sliced down its belly.
Eleanor would then imagine herself plunging a carving knife into the turkey. She’d drag it across the meat in violent zig-zags before giving up to simply claw hunks of meat right off the bone and stuff those crispy morsels into her mouth. She’d pick up the log cake with her bare heads and devour it, feeling the soft sponge and chocolate cream ooze across her skin. She’d go into the living room and kick the tree down to the ground and rip the presents apart. A doll, a box of cufflinks and jewelry all came flying out. She kicked those away too. She’d run out into the lawn and yank the carrot out of the snowman. Finally she’d yank those bright neon lights off the walls, stripping the house of its holiday glow one bulb at a time.
As soon as the lights had all gone out she would find herself back at the till with the last item checked out. The customers would be clicking their tongues, impatient to get back to their holiday preparations. This happened frequently during the season. Eleanor was not a fast cashier. She felt bad about destroying their homes so she would reassemble everything back together and restore the perfect Christmas in her imagination. Everything was ready for the perfect nuclear family to deck the halls.
One daughter, one son, a husband and a wife.
Come Christmas evening Eleanor drove herself to Elmer Street. It was in a quiet suburban neighbourhood not far from her own quiet suburban neighbourhood. Usually it would be considered dull, but today the houses were bedazzled strongly enough to send beams of light all the way out to space. Thick snow covered the ground like icing on a cake, but she could see the orange warmth ebbing out the windows from inside each house. As Eleanor passed each house she heard different combinations of Christmas songs and chatter and the soft clinking of glasses. It was like tuning into a radio station.
The house at 1008 Elmer Street was the quietest of them all. It was significantly shabbier with just a single row of lights stringed along the roof. There was no music, only the barely-there hum of barely-there life. But the porch was lit up with a sign on the door that said Merry Christmas. As Eleanor reversed her car into the driveway, she felt a dull thump on its rear. Had she run over something?
She quickly got out. The cold immediately sunk its teeth into her shoulders. When she peered behind the car, she realised that she had run over a snowman. It now lay crumbled on the snow, its carrot nose falling off its face. Eleanor felt bad, but there was no saving it now. For now she would just go up and ring the doorbell.
An old man opened the door. He looked like a giant wrinkled date, dressed in a red knit sweater and a full white beard that shrouded the speckled creases on his face. He could have almost been Santa Claus, except there was a cigarette between his shrivelled lips and a bottle of vodka in his hand. His beady eyes were a murky green that barely surfaced from below his eyelids. It felt like there was a deep pool of secrets below.
The old man’s eyes crinkled up, swallowed into a smile as he ushered Eleanor through the door way. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “You must be the mother. Welcome to my home.”
Eleanor returned the greeting: “Merry Christmas, sir.” It sounded exactly the same as when she greeted customers at the supermarket. “I’m so sorry but I’ve run over your snowman.”
“That’s all right. I wasn’t particularly attached to it. Why don’t you come in? You’re only the second one to arrive.”
The house was decently spacious and just a little bit chilly. In the corner of the living room was a Christmas tree. On closer look though, Eleanor saw that it was just a coat rack swathed in metallic green tinsel with raggedy tennis balls hanging off the hooks. Underneath was a pile of shoe boxes tied with old shoelaces. She hung her coat on the the tree and followed the old man into the dining room.
This was the most beautiful part of the house. The walls were a deep wine red colour that seemed to spill their richness into the room, set aglow by flickering candles. Wreaths hung from the ceiling, floating above an elaborate dinner setup of wine glasses and fruit displays. Bowls of mashed potatoes and plates roast vegetables were tucked in around each other. The fireplace roared silently at the front of the room, its flaming tendrils barely licking at the sprig of holly that dangled above it. It was like someone had squeezed Christmas through a juicer and poured the concentrate into this room.
The long dining table had two chairs on each side, and one chair at its head. Only was chair was occupied.
“This is Kenny,” the old man introduced. “Kenny the kleptomaniac. He thought he could come and run off with something good tonight, but there’s nothing worth stealing in this house. Funny boy. He’s your son for the night.”
The skinny teenager with a buzz cut and a stripy knitted sweater unfolded his gangly frame and stood up to shake Eleanor’s hand.
“Got anything good?” he said by way of greeting. “Eighteen dollars, three expired supermarket coupons and my reading glasses,” Eleanor offered.
Kenny grunted his dissatisfaction and sat back down.
The door bell rang. The old man shuffled out again to fetch his newest visitors. Eleanor decided to take her own seat. Just as she was about to pull out a chair, she stopped. There was a person under the table.
The person’s remarkably lithe body was crouched down low and his fists curled inward like paws. He crawled out of the shadows and revealed a head of silvery grey hair that fluffed out in two tufts at the sides. His face was young, with soft cheeks and a sharp chin. He wore a fur jumper the exact same color of his hair. A tail extended from his rear.
“I’m the cat,” he said. He bared his dainty fangs.
Eleanor remembered the text on the flyer.
Cat optional but preferable.
That made sense. So this was the family pet. She petted its soft, grey head and pulled out her chair slowly this time, careful not to step on its paws. She sat down and the cat curled up at her feet. Across her Kenny the Kleptomaniac fidgeted in his seat. His eyes were constantly moving across the dining room, as if contemplating what he could fit into his pockets.
Footsteps cluttered back into the dining room. This time the old man had brought two people with him. One was a dishevelled middle-aged man. His face was red and grimy and so was the rest of him, dressed in layers of tatters. He looked like he had been picked up straight off the streets. Next to him was a young Asian girl who didn’t look a day above twelve, holding a crate of oranges that she proffered to the old man.
“They’re mandarin oranges,” she said. “It’s not Chinese New Year yet but we get them wholesale all year round so I thought I might as well.”
And so the whole family had assembled on Christmas. The Asian daughter, the kleptomaniac son, the homeless father, the lonely mother and the cat. All were gathered at the old man’s home, and none quite knew why. Most likely they had nowhere to be, and this was somewhere. The homeless man hunched over in his place next to kleptomaniac Kenny, who didn’t even bother looking for things to steal. Instead he eyed the oranges from the Asian girl. She sat across the table with her back pin-straight, her long black hair pinned back to her scalp so tightly the veins protruded across her temples. No one was talking so she began reciting timetables under her breath. Eleanor sat at her own chair and tried not to react when the cat began licking her ankles. They were a motley crew of questionable people, but the old man seemed happy to host them. He’d looked for them, after all.
“I wanted a family to spend Christmas with,” he explained. “I’m lonely and dying, you see.”
No one was sure whether he meant it in a critical sense or as an inevitable outcome of old age, but either way they accepted it. His withered appearance warranted some pity and they were getting free dinner. Eleanor was happy to finally have a proper Christmas at home, even if the scene before her didn’t quite match up to the mise-en-scène in her head. The old man tried his best. He attempted to get a conversation going, but it was difficult when none of the family members knew each other. So he talked about himself instead.
He had lived a life long enough to produce a highlight reel that lasted all of dinner. It seemed like he had done it all from finding fame to multiple wives to a lucrative business in questionable substances.
“Back then there were no answers,” he said. “Just lots of attempts. You tried anything and everything to get what you wanted.”
Those attempts landed him in prison multiple times and lost him a wife or two, but the old man was as merry as could be. He had squeezed out every drop of life and peacefully settled down as a nobody in a town full of nobodies. But every once in a while he liked to regain a sense of tradition. The stages of his life were useless without an audience. He was a human book in need of readers to check him out. It didn’t matter who they were.
Eleanor listened with mild envy. She hardly had a story of her own even by this age. She still felt like a rough draft, only she didn’t think she would ever be completed.
quite clearly not finished
or even started, really