Monday, December 25, 2017

I

Smelled smoke; an intense heat shrouded me; I ran out the room yelling the names of the four boys who had exiled me out of existence. I ran upstairs to the fourth floor living room and found Jack all by himself overlooking the ocean from the balcony. A whirlwind kicked the curtains.

"Jack! What have you done!" I ran at him, grabbed him by the shirt and knocked him against the rail.

What stopped me was his swift turn and joker's smile, the two bottles of vodka in his hands, and the cry of lifted delirium, "Merry Christmas, Bitches!"

I slid into him and hammered my fists into his chest over and over. "You murderer!"

But Jack didn't seem to hear me as he dropped his vodka bottles carelessly with a glassy smash, and he picked me up in his arms and planted grueling vodka kisses on my face, even my eyes, and the unshaven whiskers on his lip scratched me.

"Get off of me! Put me down!" I screamed. "Go help Craig!" I tried to believe he hadn't just thrown the boy over the balcony. I almost mustered the courage to seek the murdered body over the flood of debris, but then a blaring trumpet started playing the song "Chestnuts." I turned and it was a drunken George.

"George! Help me! Help Craig!" But George's "Chestnuts" got even louder, and Travis swung in from the rooftop with a tenor saxophone. I screamed for him to help me, but then Brett ran down and started to drum a pair of bottles along the walls until he caught me by surprise and helped Jack lift me completely off the floor in a horizontal float. "Put me down!" I screamed. The two of them cheered as they ran my body across the living room, followed by the musical Travis and George. They carried me up to the roof—where I shrieked and saw a long wooden board had been bolted on the edge of the roof to form a bridge to the neighbor's roof—

The other building was on fire! A row of Molotov cocktails lined the sides of our roof, ready to be lit and thrown at the other building!

Another surprise shook me—racing across the wooden bridge from the neighbor's house to our own was an enormous population of meowing cats! Jack and Brett dropped me and laughed as I fell with a thud to the concrete roof on top of a clowder of tomcats, all smelly and scratching as they raced to safety out from under me.

I scrambled to my feet. The flames and the hordes of cats seemed to spin around me. "Where did all these cats come from!" The cats must have been starving in the other building all this time. They only appeared once the boys built the wooden bridge and forced the cats across by accident once they started the fire. The smoke from the other building shifted toward us. Was I dreaming?

All four boys shouted in joviality, "Merry Christmas! These cats are for you! We saved them and now they can die with us too!"

I looked around with bewilderment. No one was coherent enough to comprehend the seriousness of my words, "But where is Craig! Where the hell is Craig?! Was that a body or a cat that I saw? What fell past my window just minutes ago?!"

Everyone looked at each other and laughed. But then Travis was the only one who seemed to catch himself, when he lowered his tenor saxophone by the handle around his neck and pointed to the other building-- "We forgot! We sent Craig across the bridge to find food in the other house! We told him it was the only way we'd let him out of exile. He's still in there!"

"But that building's on fire!" I cried. I ran at him and scared him to death.

Travis and the rest snapped out of their stupors, and turned pale. We all turned to the one man who seemed strangely in charge of this awful situation: and all eyes that fell onto Jack said the words, "Jack, even though you hate Craig, we have to go save him!"

Jack looked horrified at all of our drunken attention in that moment and in an internal struggle, he looked with hurt, blood-shot eyes at me, and after a moment the smoke blew clear of us both, and he nodded, turned his back to me, and shouted, "It's Christmas! Let's go save that sonuvabitch!"

Pop! Some glass windows burst as a blaze of fire spouted from the burning building.

We all ran to the bridge, and the fiery smoke from the opposite house seemed to build into the sky like a blackish-brown devil rocketing out of hell.