I Found Christmas Lights Slithering Up My Street (I Found Horror)

by Ben Farthing

Swallowing my fear, I stepped down off the sidewalk to look into the storm drain. Four costumed carolers stood in the catch basin.

The carolers leaned toward me, stretched upward toward the basin’s ceiling. Their noses came into view and then their chins. They had no mouths. Skin stretched and folded as they worked their jaws with song. I fled for home, falling only once.

Erica had been wearing her Christmas Eve pajamas when they finally found her frozen body.

Only the part of me that had lost Erica existed. That’s all anybody saw. The rest of me was empty.

When someone dies, grief is a twister trapped in a glass jar. When you realize that you died too, that jar breaks.

It was only one gift for him, which I thought was weird until I got older and understood that my family was poor but not poor poor.

Christmas was the one time of year when everyone had a reason to be happy for no reason.