Sausagey Santa (2 page)

The day she presumed I was about to try to break up with her she decided to show me what she did for a living. I had no idea what her job was. She didn’t look like a fighter. She never had any scars. She was very tall and in great shape, but she wasn’t all that muscular. The next thing I knew she was beating the utter piss out of a 400 pound tank of a Russian. This guy was a behemoth of muscle and platinum chest hair. Bigger than any wrestler or football player I’ve ever seen. Bigger than any boxer. If I saw him in the wild I’d think he was the abominable snowman.

But Decapitron made short work of him. Without ever getting touched, she broke his ribs, cracked open his ankle, crushed his liver, shattered his foot, ripped a tendon out of his arm, and then decapitated him with her toes.

After they dragged the corpse away, she told me, “If you ever leave me I will annihilate you.”

So instead of breaking up with her we got married and started making kids.

I lean against the counter and check out the cake. How The Grinch Stole Christmas is playing on the surface. Right now it’s on the part where the Grinch encounters Mary Loo Who and is trying to come up with an excuse for stealing her family’s Christmas tree.

The cake is a television cake. It is one of the most popular styles in this new era of hi tech cake design. The icing of a television cake has the ability to pick up images from satellite TV and display them on your cake. You just have to tell the satellite company which channel you want on your cake and they charge your credit card by the hour until you cancel the service. You can’t control the volume on the icing but it’s usually not too loud or too quiet. The show continues playing while you eat the cake, but you won’t be able to see the whole screen anymore. I don’t like to eat television cake. I just watch it while the family cuts pieces away. It kind of freaks me out.

The weird part of it is that the show still plays inside of you after you’ve eaten it. Whenever Decapitron eats her cake she always opens her mouth to show me the chewed up TV show. Sometimes she puts her belly to my ear so I can hear the muffled sounds of the show’s characters inside of her. But worst of all, she likes to freak me out by leaving floaters in the toilet after she’s eaten the cake. She knows that poop covered in sparkling television static bothers the heck out of me.

The technical advancement in cakes is sure impressive, but I prefer to eat good old fashioned German chocolate cake. You just can’t improve on that.

CHAPTER TWO

CHAINSAW ANGEL WINGS

I don’t hate every member of my family. Well, I wouldn’t hate any of them if they weren’t so difficult to like. But there is one of them that I love. My second daughter, Angelica. My little angel. Decapitron likes to think of Angelica and Matty as my kids, and Nora and Voltron as her kids. If we separated and I was allowed to live that’s probably how the family would be split up.

Angelica is upstairs coloring pictures of Santa’s workshop, wearing angel wings made out of chainsaw blades. My wife made them for her. She thinks they are pretty cool. Being only five, Angelica doesn’t know exactly what chainsaws are for. She just thinks of them as very heavy metal angel wings. Just like Decapitron she is surprisingly strong and has no problem wearing chainsaw blades around the house.

“Hi, Sly Fry,” Angelica says as I moonwalk into her room. She’s the only one who sometimes calls me Sly Fry.

I point gun-fingers at her and wink.

“Wanna see what I colored?” she asks.

“Sure, honey bunny.”

She shows me a picture of elves wrapping presents. The whole page is purple. She only colors with purple crayons because that’s her favorite color.

“Awesome,” I tell her.

She shows me five more pages of her coloring book, all of them purple. Her purple crayon is just a tiny nub. Soon she’s going to have to color with the red and blue crayon squeezed together.

“It’s almost story time,” I tell her.

“Santa stories?”

“Yeah, Santa stories.”

I hold her hand as we go down the stairs. Decapitron and the other kids are waiting for us impatiently. Nora taps her wrist at me, as if she’s ever worn a watch in her life.

Besides singing Happy Birthday to Jesus, Decapitron has a few other stupid Christmas traditions she forces on us. One of them is to have crab balls filled with mushrooms and vodka sauce for dinner on Christmas Eve. I liked the crab balls okay when her mother used to make them, but Decapitron puts a spin on the recipe that completely ruins them. Instead of putting a dab of vodka in the creamy tomato sauce she puts a glass of vodka, two shots of rum, a shot of gin, a shot of tequila, and % cup cognac. It is the Long Island Iced Tea of sauces. But unlike Long Islands, her sauce tastes like shit. The only reason to eat her crab balls is to get wasted. Unfortunately, the alcohol and the shellfish never sit right together in my stomach. I’ve been holding back a puke all night.

Another tradition she has is to make dozens and dozens of snowmen in the yard. Every year, we wake up early the day before Christmas and construct an army of them. But they aren’t the jolly nice kind of snowmen. They are freaky weird snowmen. Some of them have nails for hair, others have axe limbs and steel wool beards. Some have shoes for breasts. Some have fan blades for faces. Some have pineapple horns, sledgehammer heads, or telephone chord tentacles. It takes most of the day to make them and they fill the yard like some kind of grotesque crowd of frozen mutants. The kids have fun but I dread constructing them every year. I’m the one who roles the balls of snow. They are the ones who get to decorate the faces with items from the house. Decapitron always says it just wouldn’t feel like Christmas without them.

My wife’s favorite tradition is to sit around and tell Santa stories on Christmas Eve just before bed. It seems like a fun tradition when you think about it. I’m sure a lot of kids would like to hear tales of Rudolf, Frosty, Mr. and Mrs. Claus, presents, Santa’s toy shop, elves, and winter wonderlands. But the problem is Decapitron doesn’t tell any of those stories. Her family raised her to believe in a different Santa mythos. One that I find a bit disturbing and not suitable for kids.

Decapitron tells the story of Sausagey Santa.

She says it is the true story of Santa Claus. According to her, Santa was once a king of a small country who hated children and Jesus so much that he tried to outlaw both of them in his land. King Kringle was a ruthless tyrant who sent his armies from village to village burning down their churches. All children under the age of twelve were rounded up and shipped overseas to be sold into slavery. And all men were forbidden to impregnate their wives under the penalty of death.

This went on for only eighteen months until the citizenry picked up arms and conquered Kringle’s armies. But he was not killed. His people instead left his punishment up to God.

The Almighty Lord decided to damn Kris Kringle to an immortal life. He would spend eternity spreading holy joy and cheer to the children of the world by delivering them presents every Christmas Eve. It was a living hell for the ex-king. He attempted suicide several times, but he just couldn’t die. Whenever he chopped off his head or got his reindeer to quarter him, the elves would just sew him back together and send him on his way. The elves were master craftsmen and there was no organ in Santa’s body that they couldn’t fix no matter how damaged it became.

For his final suicide attempt, he put his body through a meat grinder. This mulched him up into a thick paste that he was sure could never be put back together again. For a couple days, he thought he’d succeeded. The elves didn’t know how to reassemble him. But then after much discussion, the elves just remade him into a new shape. They stuffed his meat goo into sausage casings and linked them all together until they formed a man.

Kringle never attempted suicide again after that. It was bad enough he had to live an eternity as a collection of sausage balloons. He didn’t want to make it any worse. After a few hundred years, Kringle started to enjoy his work. Kids didn’t bother him anymore. Jesus stopped being a big part of Christmas. His personality changed from a sour wicked tyrant into a happy jolly soul. When he laughs, his body parts jiggle like balloons filled with meat jelly.

Then he changed his name to Sausagey Santa, or just Santa for short.

Decapitron tells the tale to the children, widening her green and yellow cat eyes as she speaks. She tells it more like a ghost story than a happy children’s fantasy. But the kids never get scared. They get excited. They don’t care that she describes Santa as a horrible tyrant turned jolly meat creature. They just care that he brings them presents.

“But Momma, how does Santa get down the chimney?” Angelica asks.

“He greases himself up with orange marmalade,” Decapitron says. “And he’s inflammable so the fire never burns him.

“But Momma,” Angelica says, stretching her arms around her chainsaw wings, “how does he get around to every house in the world all in one night?”

“He rides in a sleigh made out of lightning,” Nora injects with an uppity tone, as if her little sister is a complete retard for not already possessing the knowledge. “He can travel at the speed of light”

Angelica nods her head in agreement, pretending she knows all about the speed of light.

The twins are passed out on the couch and Nora’s eyes are getting weak and droopy, probably from all the blood she lost while running around in the snow today. Decapitron decides it’s time for everyone go to bed, but Angelica is wide awake and wants to hear more stories.

“Santa won’t come if you don’t go to sleep,” Decapitron says. “He’s hideously deformed and doesn’t like kids to see him in his sausagey state.”

“Ahhh, but Momma . . ” Angelica cries.

“Help Momma put out oysters and chips for Santa.”

“What’s that?” she asks.

“Sausagey Santa doesn’t eat milk and cookies like mainstream culture thinks he does,” Nora says, holding in her goopy head. “He likes deep fried oysters with freedom fries.”

Nora calls them freedom fries because she’s a big George W. Bush supporter.

“We also leave him a tall glass of coconut stout,” I say, pouring a creamy beer into a large holiday stein.

“He doesn’t drink on the job,” Nora tells me.

“Well, just in case . . ” I say.

Decapitron flash fries some oysters and chips for a couple minutes, then puts them on a mistletoe-patterned paper plate and hands it to Angelica. My little chainsaw angel carries it out to the living room and sets it on the coffee table next to my frothy beer.

“It’s just going to get flat,” Nora says.

“Well, I bet you five candy canes that the stein will be empty by tomorrow morning.”

Nora just puffs her lips at me. “I don’t need to bet you. I know I’m right.”

After Decapitron takes the kids up to bed, I chug Santa’s beer until only foam remains. That’ll teach the little freak not to question the sly man.

“Sly Fry: one, Nora: zero,” I tell the fireplace.

I spin around on one foot and groove my way up the staircase, singing the hit Spelunker song “Sky Diving Escape Plan” in my head.

I’m lying in bed, waiting for Decapitron to get out of the bathroom.

Christmas time isn’t so bad. It could be worse. I could be at work. My day job was supposed to be a dream of a career. I work as a video game designer for Nintendo. But it’s really a piece of crap job that hardly pays and usually forces me to work long grueling hours in order to meet deadlines. I’m usually always working on the worst games, too. Most of them tend to get cancelled before their release. Right now I’m working on Video Foosball. Not only is it a retarded concept to make foosball into a high definition 3D holo-game, but the gameplay and controls are just horrid. You have to use both joysticks on the controller with each of your thumbs, and you control your goalie using your index fingers.

The only part of the game that I like is the facial expressions on the faces of the little bowling pin-shaped people that hit the ball. That was my idea. If they miss the ball their faces get sad or angry. If they hit the ball they get all excited and howl.

I have a feeling that after this game flops my career will be

over.

There’s one more Christmas Eve tradition that Decapitron forces me through every year. That is: Christmas sex. Every year she has to have some kind of Christmas-themed kinky sex.

Decapitron comes out of the bathroom wearing green and white holiday latex. Her hair is all tucked inside of a green rubber helmet strapped to her head. Deer antlers are attached to the sides of the helmet. They are real deer antlers, two feet high and nearly scraping the ceiling. Around her neck are reindeer bells. She’s wearing dark green lipstick and eye makeup. She’s even colored her eyebrows green.

“You didn’t open your present,” she says.

I look at the present near my feet.

“I was waiting for you,” I say.

I open it up to find a matching green latex outfit. Only it is designed for a man and comes with a cape. Every year she buys us costumes for our Christmas Eve sex. They usually create a theme that we can roleplay. In the beginning, she didn’t have me dress up as anything. She would usually just dress as a sexy Mrs. Claus for me. Then she had me dress up as a sexy Santa to go with her sexy Mrs. Claus. Then she had me dress as Mrs. Claus and dressed herself as Santa. Then she has us dress like Santa’s elves. Then she dressed us up like snowmen. Then she had me dress like the nutcracker and she dressed as a music box ballerina and we did it inside a giant present. Last year she had us dress like Christmas candy and we did it inside of a giant stocking that was suspended from the ceiling.

This year we are reindeer. I put on my outfit for her, trying not to ruin my hairdo too much, and discover that my antlers aren’t as big as hers. She probably likes the idea of having bigger antlers than me.