Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (32 page)

"It's the position I gave you."

"Sure, okay sure, I pretended to kowtow to you back then. But I never lost myself. I never forgot who I was. An ash nymph I was from the beginning—proud sister to the Furies, born from the blood spilled when Kronos castrated Ouranos—and an ash nymph I remain. That gives me an integrity that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and you, you big blowhard, lost long ago."

"Let's not stray from the point. You've engaged in practices which—"

"And what makes you so high and mighty? Where do you get off sitting in judgment? You trying to come on like some
deus ex machina
and bring me to heel, you holier-than-thou son of a bitch?"

"I warn you. Don't provoke Me."

Something flared about His head. The sharp sting of ozone filled her nostrils. "You remember who you used to be, don't you?" she taunted. "When your mother Rhea gave birth to you and spirited you away from your child-eating father, your care fell to me and my sister Io and the goat-nymph Amaltheia, whose milk you shared with baby Pan and from whose horn you fashioned Cornucopia, the horn of plenty. Don't you recall how I pressed your infant lips to these nipples and let the maddening suck of your gums moisten me below?"

"You will cease this idle—"

"How I toyed with your baby penis, how I licked you down there and made you break out in a smile provoked by something other than gas? And when you matured beyond boyhood, how all three of us taught you lust? Look here, little fellow, long before you violated your mother and went on your libidinous rampage through the likes of Leda and Io and Europa, I was your first lover as well as the nurse of your babyhood. But when the old ways died and the Christers came in, you caved in with the rest of them, took on the Grand Persona they demanded of you, and forgot your true godhood, your triumph over Kronos, forgot, by God, that you were none other than almighty Zeus!"

"Enough!" He said. His fingers fastened upon her throat, though He remained where He was. "If Zeus you crave, foolish nymph, then Zeus you shall have!"

As He rose to His feet, the Tooth Fairy felt His other hand pin her to the gritty sand and splay her legs wide. The placidity of God's visage split apart and out peered the face of old: Zeus's face, with its full salt-and-pepper beard, its wild corona of curly hair, and its ruddy-cheeked rage.

His white robe he tore asunder. Beneath it lay the old armor it thrilled her to see. His body was muscled and hairy where it emerged from his chiton. Medallions and weapons hung about him everywhere.

Without looking away from her, Zeus shot a hand into the heavens and filled his fist with fire. Heavy bolts of burning light into the swollen wound of her womanhood he hurled. Thirteen times the fire struck. Thirteen times it singed her flesh, burrowing deep inside her womb.

"You shall leave Santa Claus and Anya and Rachel and Wendy and those they love forever in peace. From this day forth, the North Pole is off limits to you.

"You shall avoid the Easter Bunny at all costs. He has been reformed.

"Never again shall you dare to harm one hair on a child's head. The mere thought of doing so I disallow.

"These my words you shall heed, or I swear by the God I have become, I will return and annihilate you. Slowly. The pain I have visited upon you now shall be, I promise you, as the tenth part of a fleabite when set against the torments I shall mete out on that day!"

Then he vanished from the sky. The sizzle of her flesh filled her nostrils. Her belly was one flaring pit of pain. Healing, when it came, was horrendous and slow. Still, she thought, she would survive it. She would endure the expulsion of mortal hurts and let immortality make her whole again.

A smile, despite her agony, appeared on her lips.

But then something caught inside her, a thing of claws and scales. Her smile rounded into a howl. Her screams split the sky. Through pain immense, she watched her belly stretch and swell like some demon had flexed his thorned fist deep inside her womb. Then, when her flayed insides hung in ribbons and the ribbons frayed to crimson fuzz, he began to pull his invisible arm out of her, the claws delving deep red furrows in the blistered flesh of her birth canal.

But what emerged from the bubbling froth was far worse than a demon's hand. It was squat and fat, her infant, and when its girth stuck halfway and her straining labia refused to stretch further, it blinked its bloody eyes at her. "Muzzer," it buzzed with murderous hate. Then it twisted about, teeth flashing like razors, and episiotomized her perineum all the way to her anus and beyond. The fat thing tumbled out, dragged its bloody afterbirth down to where the breakers thudded in, and battened on it.

Thank God that's over, she thought, lying spent and sweaty on the beach. But then, as one who having vomited feels an instant of well-being but is immediately seized by renewed wrack, she suffered the thrust of the giant's fist again into the bleeding wreckage of her womb. Her belly ballooned up, as did her agony, redoubling the torment that had gone before.

There on the beach beneath a slate-gray sky, the Tooth Fairy gave birth to thirteen impossible imps, each fatter and uglier than the one before. Thirteen times her belly ballooned. Thirteen times her vulva blurted out a brat. Each dropped goblin took longer than the one before, stretching torment beyond itself. Many times she screamed for death to take her.

Deaf ears.

When the last one spilled out, the universe was one solid throb. Clotted sand stretched from her sex to the sea. From belly to thighs, she was nothing but bruise and blood. Her lungs hurt from howling.

Then they attacked her breasts. One fat whelp waddled up, sniffed at her torso, and, having found his prize, put two three-fingered hands around her right breast and opened his head about her nipple. His suck staggered her. A second one dragged himself up from the waves and, seeing what his brother was about, took a pull at her left teat. One by one, the others crowded around and reached their heads in, snuffling at the blue-veined bulges that held the stores of milk they craved. "Wait your turn," she said, and three heads lifted as one and glared.

Then the first one bit her. She whacked him on his large flat head and said, "No!" His eyes rolled toward her. He growled over his meal and bit into her so hard that rivulets of milky blood trickled down the sides of her breast. A tongue came out of the crowd and licked up the spill. Its owner, baring his teeth, sank them into her, seeking milk ducts in the most direct way he could. Then thirteen heads tore into her and made mincemeat of her chest, finding the lactation they demanded in the bloody ruins of her breasts.

Her hands tore helplessly at their hunched backs as they fed. But eventually she gave it up, embracing the pain as her lot. For her baker's dozen bastards she even felt a mother's love. No question they were wicked and selfish and nearly impossible to control. But they were hers. Even through the agony of birth and first feeding, part of her understood what wonders she could work with them.

*****

And that's what she did.

Her nights she spent as usual going from bed to bed collecting teeth and leaving coins; and despite her every intent, her thoughts turned benign in those bedrooms and left her furious afterward. But the rest of the time she spent with her brood, suffering anew their feeding frenzies and then, as her bloody chest healed, sitting them down on the shore and filling their eager hearts with hatred.

Hatred of God.

Hatred of Santa Claus and his kiss-ass crowd of sycophants.

Hatred of mortals of every stripe, especially children.

She mapped out a mission for them and for ten months drilled every detail into their heads. She made little Santa suits for them, taught them world geography, gave them lessons in flight and magic time, showed them how to scan the earth for likely victims.

They learned fast, her brood, demonstrating a marked precocity for all things vengeful. When Christmas was but two weeks away, she sent them out, one each day. Her firstborn went first, Gronk of the piercing eye and the tight fist. He slouched and slavered down to the sea, then lifted off and bumblebee'd eastward away from his brothers' envious taunts. They turned then and savaged her for milk. But she only grimaced, looking ahead to Christmas Day when they'd be gone for twenty-four hours, wreaking havoc on the world and leaving her in peace.

And so it was. Her imps went forth and made the holiday season less joyous. Food and water they randomly polluted with their undetectable urine and feces, bringing on cramps and stitches, dizziness and fainting spells, nightmares that induced deep despair. They smothered family pets in their sleep, withered the branches of Christmas trees, and stole benevolent thoughts from sleepy heads. But their favorite task was to roam the streets on those nights leading up to Christmas, hunting for bad boys and girls to feed upon. Their screams they drank with glee, gobbling down their sinful little bodies to augment their own stores of wickedness.

Thus was a new tradition established. And the Tooth Fairy saw that it was good.

But her boys had one more tradition they'd long been scheming to institute. For they were precocious in more ways than one.

When, on the day after Christmas, they came swarming back to the island, they fell, full of spunk and vinegar, upon their mother. The vinegar of their misdeeds they waited until evening to recount. But the spunk homed in at their groins and made them stiff, with which stiffness they penetrated mommy dearest, unleashing upon her the unholy force of their desires.

And the Tooth Fairy laughed and saw that this too was good.

And when they were spent at last and she lay drenched in imp spunk, she hugged her loathsome brood to her and said unto them: "Thus shall you go forth into the world every Christmas hence, my boys, spreading evil cheer. And thus shall you return to your mother's arms.

"God damn us, my blasted little boys. God damn us every one!"

Afterword: Making Light of Santa Claus

Montaigne once said, "There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life." Saint Jerome warned, "A fat paunch never breeds fine thoughts." More to the point, Goethe had this to say: "The ideal goat is one that eats hay and shits diamonds."

*****

Born in 1947, I was brought up in a modest three-bedroom home on Long Island. Here's what I remember about Santa Claus. I remember being too excited to fall asleep right away on Christmas Eve. More than likely, I keened my ears into the stillness, knowing it was too early for Santa's visit but caring not in the least. In the crisp morning, I woke to the astounding realization that Santa Claus had been by. My three-years-younger sister Margie and I raced down the hall, skidding on our pajama'd knees before a rain-festooned tree topped by a lighted star and anchored with a green striated bulb we called the Toilet Plunger for its resemblance to a float ball. "Presents!" we exclaimed, re-racing and re-exclaiming until we tired of the game. No gifts were ever unwrapped in our house before breakfast, and our parents were unbearably slow in waking on Christmas morning. Still, the bracing aroma of pine needles pervaded the air amid the certainty that we had indeed been visited by the jolly old elf.

I wasn't much of a visual child. Not even before my mind's eye did I spin notions about where Santa stood and what he looked like as he bent to our tree. Neither did I much wonder how he gained access to our chimneyless house. My images of him were culled from magazine ads, black and white TV, Christmas songs, and a ViewMaster disc that told Rudolph's story in dioramas I can summon forty years later with near-total recall.

As for the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, I had no images of them at all. Yet their unquestioned visits made our house feel and smell special indeed.

*****

I wrote the initial version of
Santa Steps Out
in 1988 and 1989. Why did I do that?

First, I had after long gestation brought to light my initial attempt at a novel,
Oedipus Aroused
(a clever botch never published, though it landed me a mediocre New York agent). That book had taken two years of research into 13th century B.C. Delphi, Corinth, and Thebes, into Minoan and Mycenaean quirks, customs, clothing, weaponry, roadwork, abortifacients, bull-leaping, the vast network of oracles of which Delphi was only the most famous, and so forth, and nearly another two years to weave all of it into a novel. I promised myself that my next effort would require as close to zero research as possible (true except for bunny behaviors, which are drawn from Marshal Merton's
A Complete Introduction to Rabbits
and especially from R. M. Lockley's delightful
The Private Life of the Rabbit
).

Second was the emergence of the basic imaginative material. Precisely how that happened is lost to memory, but here's the gist: Suppose the all-giving Santa Claus had once been the all-grasping Pan? Suppose further that the creatures of our common childhood fancy—that magical triumvirate we accepted without question, who slipped into our homes to leave us money and candy and gifts—shared a forgotten, forbidden, pagan past? And that a crossing of paths which never ought to have happened did, by dint of heavenly bumble, happen?

Greek mythology had been an enduring love of mine since, at age nine, I played Zeus in a dramatization of
The Iliad
, twice performed in the school auditorium at Newbridge Road School—with a different Hera each time, I note with delight and curiosity. Here was a way to bring into renewed existence the chaos, the daring, the sheer exuberance of that treasure trove of myth, to celebrate the vastness and majesty of our Dionysian impulses while having great heaps of fun.

We never really lose our younger selves. Rather, we accrete new selves about them. The spellbound child at our core remains, I believe, as emotionally attached to these three beloved nocturnal visitors as it always was. (For a study of precisely this topic from the perspective of a child psychologist, see Cindy Dell Clark's
Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith
, University of Chicago Press, 1995.)