Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer

Christmas is a time… a place in time, that has been stolen by so many. So, she, her — did think… she would take it again.

She creamed out of the moulting detritus of the very first rocks. She rolled into the bawling pain that spat her kind upon the arching back of all this plain was ever to become. She had evil at her lips and bits of it dribbled between her thighs.

So, anyway now — it is today.

A house. Any house, you can choose. Go on… any street. Any town.

Christmas eve.

A mother or a father be, they step with delicate toes through the night passage. They want that thing, the prize that is only offered to lovers of innocence. That bleary morning face… eyes caked in barely rubbed sleep — that smile as the gifts they are opened.

Nothing, not a thing compares. The bad… the not so bad at all… the fucking obscene thing you did in that alley… it flakes away… not entirely, but it all, does it not, soothe beneath the weight of a child’s tooth-wanting smile?

Her name is Rhace and she comes for those who need her most, the easer of pain and suffering and that unknown weight that swings in the gallows of the chest of the cheated. In ancient times she was no more than festering disease, a killer of all that sought only but to breathe.

Her face is pale but it talks not of sickness, moreover it screams of blearing light over shifting sands. She stands in the shadow beneath the un-kissed mistletoe and she waits and her breasts inflame and her nails drag against her beading flesh.

She watches as they lay their carefully wrapped presents alone, as they place them so carefully at the foot of tiny beds.

She follows the wronged into their bedrooms and she watches as they lay down beside their unworthy mates. Her purpose has evolved through the millennia, pestilence grew boring, now she has such a very fine and true mission at hand.

She is not of this earth, but then nothing ever is, are we not all just fragments of distant spinning rocks? But here, and it took much time, but this being found her place in our forever fluttering shudder of time.

Her body weeps as it rides yours. It ebbs, it flows and it bends and it fills all that you lack. She holds time tight in her clutch and you are finally allowed to scream. Nobody hears and you finger through the flow until the morning sun punches through and patterns your dried sweat with the intricate spirals of your Grandmothers lovely laced curtains.

And in that final moment as you blink, as she is gone, a whisper…

“Kiss me and suckle again the plump fat of my lips. For upon them there is a cancer that is harmless unto you. But now turn, as I leave, and plant this dirty seed upon the mouth of the one who wronged you so. Or not, the choice is only but yours. Know… I love you. This is my sincere and most merry of Christmas gifts”.