It seemed like a good idea at the time.
The “Elf on the Shelf” game is pretty simple: you lie to your kids, convince them that they’re being watched, undo years of “stranger danger” instincts, undermine their basic trust of science, use fear as a weapon, and keep the charade up for a month. The goal is behavior manipulation designed to make life a little easier on us.
And if you’re judging me right now, you’ve never had kids.
**
“Do you know when the elf gets back and forth between here and the North Pole?” Madison asked me in wide-eyed wonder.
“Of course,” I answered seriously. “The Elf on the Shelf is a tradition that’s lasted thousands of years. That’s how Santa knows you like to wake up before you’re supposed to and open up your presents even though we tell you it isn’t time yet. When I was a little boy, I broke a lamp and thought about lying to my parents to stay out of trouble. Right when the thought left my head, I heard a woooosh from the other room, and the elf was gone. You can never see them move, but if you do something really bad, you can hear them.”
She stared up at me in wonder as I marveled at how easy it is to convince five-year-olds of anything.
**
“Iblis, you sack of manatee spunk! Get your fucking ass out of that house and into my driveway!” My hands were shaking. I’ll be the first to admit that I have a temper, but a man can only be pushed so far.
He slammed his front door open and slowly plodded into the front yard. “Do you kiss that pretty wife and daughter with that dirty mouth?” He drawled slowly.
I was looking for a reason not to punch his teeth out, and that reason strolled down the road in the form of elderly Mrs. Sehen. She was staring at every neighbor, as she was wont to do on her daily ogle-walks, and I couldn’t have her witnessing me beating the horns off the biggest dickhole I’d ever met.
With effort, I lowered my heart rate.
“Besides, it looks like your car is in my driveway, Apati.”
And the heart rate went right back up again. “It’s a shared driveway, asshole, and my tires might go two inches into shared space!”
He looked down at my car and shot a glob of mucus onto the ground through his left nostril. “Well, it looks like there are only two inches of slashed tires, which should be a relief if you think it’s such a small distance.” He grinned, showing crooked, yellow teeth. “Does your wife think that two inches is a lot?”
I closed the distance on him in less than a second.
“CAREFUL, Apati, don’t you dare lay a finger on me!”
Breath heaving, I swiveled around to look at Mrs. Sehen.
Yep, she was staring.
I turned back to face Mr. Iblis. “Or what? You’ll slash me like you slashed my tires, old man?”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “No one saw who slashed those tires. Could have been anybody. But if you lay a finger on me, I’ll make sure you spend Christmas in a jail cell, learning how big two inches really is.”
I weighed my options.
Iblis was one of those turd stains who had spent a life getting good at being horrible. I could either take the bait, or turn and walk away as though he’d gotten the best of me.
I slowly looked up at my house. Madison was in the living room window, gawking at the scene, with that damn elf peeking over her shoulder in the spot we’d left it the night before. Rage swelled up inside me again, and I couldn’t let him have the victory. I pivoted back and smiled.
Then I lifted my index finger and wiped it across his nose.
I instantly regretted it; his schnoz was covered in oil and soft hair. But I wouldn’t back down.
“The finger’s been laid. I’ve got a tire to fix, and you have to spend the holidays masturbating alone, so we’ll finish this some other time.”
Mrs. Sehen gawked as I kicked over his rotting lawn ornament before returning to my property.
**
Vanessa shut off the alarm and reached over to kiss me awake. “You got the coffee, Hun? Go make me that perfect cup that gets me going, sexy.”
I opened my bleary eyes.
The damn elf was on the foot of the bed.
“Shitfuck,” I gasped, trying to stand but getting caught in the blankets. “Vanessa, did you bring that thing into bed with us?”
“Sure, Hun,” she responded sleepily.
I reached out and slowly picked it up. “And weren’t its eyes pointing the other direction? They’re painted, on it’s impossible to move them.”
“He knows when I’m sleeping, he knows that you’re awake, and he knows that you should get that coffee going soon,” she droned.
I dropped it to the floor, and it rolled under the bed.
I didn’t pick it up.
“How did it get there?” I whispered. “You know, I never liked it. Let’s toss the damn thing.”
Reluctantly, Vanessa sat up and took my hand. “Hun, it’s working wonders with Madison. I haven’t heard her complain about bedtime in three weeks-”
“-because I’ve been putting her to bed every night for a month-”
“-and she’s picking up the messes she makes nearly half the time.” She smiled sleepily. “Sometimes, lies are good. They get the job done, and people usually prefer to avoid hearing the truth. Like when I say that you make coffee better than everyone, even though it’s just pushing a button that pours hot water.” She kissed me. “It lets me sleep a few extra minutes, and you like being manipulated.”
With that, she flopped back down onto the bed.
That irritated me. But as I made Vanessa’s coffee, I decided to forgive the fact that she was mistaken about being able to manipulate me, and resolved not to bring it up again.
**
The breathing woke me up.
I was about to kick the dog out from under the bed when my sleep-addled brain remembered that we didn’t have one.
Heart racing, I glanced at the clock. It was 12:19, thirteen minutes after I’d crawled into bed behind Vanessa.
Slowly, I sat up, gently placing one foot softly on the floor.
Then I got tangled in the sheets and fell to the ground.
Pain shot through my shoulder as it collided with the wood, but I was too busy fighting the blanket to care. I came to a stop facing directly underneath the bed.
Nothing was there.
Except the elf.
I didn’t realize how badly my hands were shaking until I reached out to lift it.
“You little shit,” I whispered. “I know your eyes were facing the other way this morning.”
**
“I want to get rid that damn elf,” I said authoritatively as I gently handed Vanessa her coffee.
She took it from me without looking up. “You’ve got a funny way of showing it,” she responded in a voice that told me she was pretending not to be irritated. “I did not enjoy waking up with its face on my lips.”
I decided not to tell her that I’d put it in the trash the night before.
The last of the warm, soapy water swirled around the sink and poured into the drain. I shook my hand dry, reached out my finger, and flipped on the garbage grinder.
It screamed.
It sounded human.
I quickly flipped it off. For a moment, I hesitated. I hate hunting for things in the garbage grinder. It’s a completely blind search through half-chewed, soapy food and sharp blades that are designed to shred flesh into pulp. The warmth of the spit-covered food contrasts with the chill of metal blades to form the most unsettling kind of sensation.
Finding the mass didn’t feel good.
What was that thing? It felt warm, nearly hot, and was distinctly fleshy. I wrapped my hands around the object, then slowly pulled it out of the sink.
It was the damn elf, covered in soggy bread and chicken skin.
Right as my hand emerged from the drain, the garbage grinder spun to life.
No one had touched the switch.
**
“But Daddy, you can’t throw it out!” Madison screamed as I told her that Santa would have to find another way to fulfill his need of watching little children.
“It’s fine, Madison, I talked to Santa-”
“You can’t talk to Santa, you just write letters-”
“I wrote him, and he told me-”
“Santa can’t write back on the same day-”
“He wrote to me last year and said that I could trash the damn thing if it annoyed me and that you shouldn’t tell your mom-”
“Daddy, DON’T TOUCH IT! I heard it move, IT’S DANGEROUS!”
I stared at her, exasperated.
Then I snatched the elf off his shelf.
Madison screamed.
**
“It took forty minutes for Madison to stop crying and go to sleep,” Vanessa said as she flopped into bed. “Even with promises that Santa wouldn’t come tonight if she’s awake. She’s terrified because you touched her elf.” Vanessa rolled away from me and clicked off her lamp. “You know what this means, right? You have to take all of my turns putting her to bed for a month.”
**
6:00 a. m. on Christmas morning is not a nice time to bang on someone’s front door.
Banging louder is not a nice way to react when a sleeping person refuses to answer said door.
So I had left behind all of my holiday cheer once I’d stumbled through the dark house to find out who I was going to punch on Christmas. Fortunately, Vanessa and Madison were undisturbed by the racket, and the presents remained untouched.
The knob was bizarrely slippery as I turned it, but I didn’t have time to ponder the situation.
I was too distracted by Mr. Iblis’s mangled corpse.
His neck had been pulled back far enough to shred his vertebrae; bone splinters had ripped his throat wide open in an oozing, gaping maw. His legs had been pulled around in a curve, leaving his feet to dangle over his head like the zested peel of a curly lemon. All of this was presented in a standing pool of blood that covered my front porch, my shoes, my doorknob, and – comprehension dawning on me – all over my hands.
A bright white bow, radiant despite tiny splotches of blood, sat atop his head.
And sitting right in the center of his shattered back was the damn elf.
I looked up to see a horrified Mrs. Sehen attempting to make a phone call with shaking hands.
“Don’t call 911!” I screamed before realizing there’s nothing I could have done to sound more guilty.
This was quite bad.
My world froze from the inside, the chill radiating outward and paralyzing my limbs, as I realized what I hadn’t seen.
Nothing could keep Madison from tearing open the presents too early. The tree should have been torn apart.
Upstairs, Vanessa screamed.
---
Credits
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