Tinsel

Spattering sparks flicker in her eyes, highlighting each salty rivulet as they roll down on to the carpet stair. The jolly tunes are her confidant, the garland and tinsel her jury. “The car snapped in half,” she hears, failing to grasp how souls can be plucked like birthday cake candles, leaving deformed icing no one wants to lick. It is indeed a white Christmas, bloodless and loveless, deathly pale with tended fangs looking for love for sale. As she cries, and as the little drummer boy’s snare pops drag slightly behind her bare sobs, she imagines how he sleeps in heavenly peace, his remnants reserved in her every last teardrop.