Tenth of December

by George Saunders

What about this guy, behind Mr. Small Package, standing near the home entertainment center? With a thick neck of farmer integrity yet tender ample lips, who, placing one hand on the small of her back, whispered, Dreadfully sorry you had to endure that bit about the small package just now. Let us go stand on the moon. Or, uh, in the moon. In the moonlight.

“Am I a monster?” he said. “Do I remember birthdays around here? When a certain individual got athlete’s foot on his groin on a Sunday, did a certain other individual drive over to Rexall and pick up the cream, paying for it with his own personal money?” That was a nice thing he’d done, but it seemed kind of unprofessional to bring it up now.

Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day’s end. They were manifesting as the earth’s bright-colored nerve endings, the sun’s descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird’s distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squawking, others rapturous.

Do we use drugs ourselves? Kids, those of you who are here, believe me when I say we don’t, and never did! Because, as someone who does feng shui for a living,

Yeah, right. Like any of that was happening. Like he was racing back. They’d see through him. They’d fry his ass. People were always seeing through him and frying his ass. When he’d stolen Kirk Desner’s flip-downs, the kids on the team had seen through him and fried his ass. The time he’d cheated on Syl, Syl had seen through him, broken off their engagement, and cheated on him with Charles, which had fried his ass possibly worse than any single other ass frying he’d ever had, in a life that, it recently seemed, was simply a series of escalating ass fries.

He pulled out of the driveway. Mom was right. The world was beautiful. Here was the pioneer graveyard with its leaning yellowed stones. Here was the very vivid Jiffy Lube. A dense ball of birds went linear, then settled into the branches of a lightning-blasted tree.

So goodnight to all future generations. Please know I was a person like you, I too breathed air and tensed legs while trying to sleep and, when writing with pencil, sometimes brought pencil to nose to smell.

In elevator, some still holding our little dry sandwiches, stood all of us red-faced men in ties, making jokes about enough Fall Flinging, the Fall Fling has been Flung, etc., etc. Then the embarrassed silence as we, in our minds, resaid the things we had just enthusiastically heatedly said, as if vying for some sort of Stupid Utterance Prize.

No one laughed, all just made that sound that is like laugh placeholder, so Anders wouldn’t feel bad, as his mother has recently passed away.

Because Lilly our oldest, we have soft spot for her, soft spot that is also like worry spot.

Leslie’s mother arrives (in BMW). Leslie, Leslie’s mother bicker briefly re. pond. Leslie’s mom: Les, love, you already have three streams. Leslie (caustic): Is a stream a pond, Maman?

Ryan’s parents had sonorous/confident voices that seemed to have been fabricated out of previous, less sonorous/confident voices by means of sudden money.

I saw we’d agreed to play it reasonable. One way we were playing it reasonable was saying everything like a question.

At that point, I started feeling like a chump, like I was being held down by a bunch of guys so another guy could come over and put his New Age fist up my ass while explaining that having his fist up my ass was far from his first choice and was actually making him feel conflicted.