This is my entry for the 2012 Winter Holiday Story Contest. Enjoy!
Christmas editing love to SlySubmissive.
*
I eyed the khaki-colored concoction in the cocktail glass, complete with cranberries, with concern, and a little consternation.
"You better taste good, you bastard," I warned it. I took a sip, swished the liquid around my teeth, and then swallowed. "God damn it!" I roared, hurling the glass, and the foul sludge within it, into the sink, where it shattered. I picked up the bottle of Wild Turkey on the kitchen counter and crunched across the broken glass that now littered my kitchen floor, heading to my bedroom.
I momentarily wondered if the Turkey was the reason for my most recent failure. "Make a turkey-flavored drink, and use Wild Turkey. It'll be a hoot," I said to no one, mocking myself. The Turkey wasn't to blame. The finest bourbon wouldn't have saved that mixological monstrosity. Even without a myriad of spices and other flavored liquids, though, it would still serve its purpose tonight. I hoped. And, after all, turkey IS the tradition on Thanksgiving.
I stripped down to my boxers and sat on my bed, flipping on the TV. I liked infomercials. The people on them, and the people watching them, felt like kindred spirits -- lost, and looking for something to relieve a problem they didn't really have, instead of facing the ones they really did. Who the hell is so bad at flipping an egg they need a combination spatula-tong? Who needs a cloth that can absorb five gallons of liquid?
I spent the next hour or so nursing the bottle of bourbon. Not nursing as in drinking it slowly. You can't drink half a fifth in an hour and call it slowly. More of nursing like an infant at its mother's breast -- sucking greedily.
As bleary-eyed consciousness gave way to chemically-induced unconsciousness, I begged whatever higher power might be listening to grant the one wish I had every night. "Not tonight, please." They never listen.
Gunshots woke me a few hours later. It wasn't gang bangers, or an angry spouse. We weren't being invaded by some overly aggressive East Asian country. They were gunshots no one else heard. I always thought that sightless dreams were strange. Just an angry, startling sound, heard (if what one experiences in a dream can truly be described using the standard sensory input terms) three times in quick succession. Those were the good dreams.
The bad ones had a droning, monotone audio, clinical and cold. "Thirty-five year old white male. Three gunshot wounds to the torso, no rear exit wounds." That uncaring voice would go on to describe every step of dismantling a human body during an autopsy, and I never managed to wake up before it was done. As a pharmaceutical research chemist, I knew enough biology to be unhealthily (for my own sanity) familiar with the process.
The man being so dispassionately disassembled was my father, Steven Morgan, on the night he was shot and killed at the pharmacy where he worked. It was a random robbery by a drug addict, the third place he hit that night. The worst part -- I never found out why. There were no signs of a struggle. The video showed my father calmly and quickly handing over a few bottles of pills. He never made any sudden or aggressive moves. He didn't even say anything, other than, "OK." The druggy took the pills, and then calmly put three bullets in my father's chest.
When the police cornered the robber (and murderer!) outside the gas station he went on to rob after the pharmacy, he opened fire on them. They shot back, and he was dead as soon as he hit the ground.
I was so angry when I found out, angry that my father had been taken for no reason, that the man who had done it couldn't tell me why, that the police had done nothing but ensure that I would never have my answers. I was furious with my mother for allowing him to work extra hours because she had slipped and broken her arm a few weeks earlier, preventing her from working at her assembly line job. I was disgusted with my grandmother for getting old -- paying for her nursing home was the only reason mom had to work.
Mostly I loathed myself, because I would never be able to answer that question.
***
A digital chirping coming from Stacey's desk interrupted my train of thought. Stacey was a post-grad student, doing research for her doctorate. She was a brilliant young biochemist, far smarter than me. She was one of three post-grad students chosen by my company to do her research in our labs. She was also a mom, and a sister. That kept her phone pretty busy. People generally did whatever they could to avoid talking to me.
"Stacey Stacy," she said, answering the phone without looking at it. The poor girl had a seriously unfortunate married name. Born Stacey Marie Jenkins, she married her college sweetheart John Stacy about five years ago. She joked that she lost an initial, but gained a stutter when they were married. Over the course of six months, I had gotten to know a little about her. When I asked her why she took his last name, she told me she did it, "in deference to tradition, and the groom's pushy parents." Since John was an only child, they desperately wanted their last name perpetuated.
I asked her once if she ever went by her middle name, or had a nickname. She blushed a deep rose pink, and pressed her lips shut.
"Hey, it's none of my business. Forget I asked," I told her.
"No, I want to, it's ... not a nickname I like, and telling the story helps."
"OK..."
"My sister calls me ... 'Pinky'."
"Why? I don't think I've ever seen you wear pink. Is there something wrong with your hand?" I peered curiously at her fingers.
She chortled. "No." Then, she pointed at her cheeks, which were still flushed. "When I was a kid, I was painfully shy. Anytime someone talked to me, I would blush and be totally unable to speak. The more they tried, the worse it got. When I got home from my first day of kindergarten, my entire face was bright pink. Jamie, my sister, has called me that ever since."
"I can see how that kind of thing just feeds back into itself."
She blushed, but smiled. "Yeah."
This phone call triggered the opposite reaction. Her normal peaches and cream complexion faded to a deathly white. Her eyes widened, and filled with tears. "Oh no. No no no. Oh God!" she moaned into the phone. I knew that expression. I'd seen it on my mother's face many years ago. She listened for a moment, whispered, "OK," and the hung up the phone.
She moved mechanically about the lab, gathering her things.
"Stacey?"
"That was my sister," she answered hollowly. "John has been using her car for a few days. They fished it out of the river this morning. They think he hit a patch of ice. He didn't have any ID on him, so they called her to ... to ..." She broke down, sobbing.
'To identify the body,' I finished mentally. I started to move toward her, but I had no idea what to do or say. Before I could figure it out, she fled the lab.
***
"Thirty-five year old white male. Three gunshot wounds to the torso, no rear exit wounds." I thrashed in my sleep as the voice droned on about Y-incisions, organ weights, and other morbid facts about the body on the stainless steel table. "Cause of death appears to be a gunshot wound to the heart, puncturing the left ventricle..." With the sound of a metal freezer door slamming shut, I shot upright in bed. Then, I reached for the bottle on the table beside it. Now that I had reached the age dad was when he died, the nightmares had gotten more frequent, as had the guilt that I had lived longer than him, and still had no idea why he was taken.
***
I saw Stacey three days later, at her husband's funeral. I had planned just to offer my condolences and make a quick exit.
"Oh, Tom!" Stacey wailed, flinging her arms around me as soon as she saw me. I tentatively hugged her while she sobbed. After a moment, I felt a tug at my pants.
"You work with mommy," said a voice at my knee. I looked down into the upturned jade green eyes of Stacey's daughter, Megan.
"That's right. My name is Tom. You must be Megan."
"My daddy is with Jesus now," she informed me.
I wish I could say the same thing, kid. Maybe I could sleep at night.
Stacey's eyes caught mine for a second, her face miserable with heart-wrenching grief, and something else I couldn't identify. She tore her gaze away, and rotated to another mourner, who sobbed along with her, and Megan was scooped up by Stacey's sister.
"Thank you for coming," she told me. I nodded. Then, I made a surreptitious exit as soon as they were both distracted.
I picked up a bottle of Jack Daniels on the way home and tried to drink away mine and Stacey's pain. About a third of the way through the bottle, the sensation of Stacey's breasts against me when she hugged me dominated my thoughts. I hadn't so much as touched a woman for close to two years. I drunkenly, guiltily masturbated to thoughts of Stacey greeting me wearing nothing but her lab coat. The next morning, I accepted the nightmares as punishment for those thoughts.
***
When I arrived at work the following Monday, Stacey was already there. I rarely sleep late, thanks to the nightmares, so I'm always one of the first people to the lab in the morning.
"Hi, Tom. Thanks again for coming to John's funeral."
"Of course. I just wanted you to know that, well, I'm here if you need anything."
She smiled. "Thank you."
She wasn't the distracted zombie I expected from someone who had just lost their spouse. She certainly wasn't her chipper self, but she appeared to be coming to terms with his death.
That turned out to be a complete façade. An hour into the day, barely aware of what she was doing, she burned herself badly with a strong basic solution. The caustic substance rapidly demolished the soft tissue of her hand, actually converting any fatty tissue with which it came in contact into, well, soap. I heard the tinkle of glassware one never wants to hear in a lab, and I looked over to see Stacey staring blankly at her hand. She sucked in a sudden deep breath, and started to scream before running to a water faucet.
I knew she had been working with the auto-titrator. That meant that whatever she'd gotten on her, water would just make it worse. "Stacey, no!" I yelled, charging across the lab. I managed to intercept her just before she turned on the water.
"It hurts!" she screamed, panic and pain lighting up her face.
"I know," I said, dragging her back toward where she was working. When I saw what she had spilled on herself, I knew what neutralizing solution I needed. We keep them beside the titrator for that reason. I poured a copious amount on her hand, sloshing some on both of our lab coats, while she fought to escape my grasp, screaming, "It hurts! It hurts!"
Finally, the weak acid broke down the powerful base, and the damage stopped spreading, but Stacey went into shock. A three-inch swath of skin spanning the entire back of her hand was a blistered, bleeding, weeping mess. She took a few ragged breaths. Then, her eyes rolled up in her head, and I barely managed to steer her away from the spilled chemicals before her dead weight dragged us to the floor.
