Excerpts featuring Christmas scenes from my Feral Rebirth series of novels (part 1)

(Warning-- These are gloomy and may be depressing to some. )

(Excerpt #1 with somber Christmas mood from my vampire novel Revenance, book 1 of Feral Rebirth series, available in digital and paperback formats via various online retailers. This scene features one of the main characters, a vampire, visiting a hospital in search of patients who are so seriously ill they want to die.)

Invisible to human eyes, he walks through the white corridors of the old medical school hospital, looking for those who are praying for deliverance.

Raspy, wheezing, cajoling, demanding, obsequious, desperate, the voices only he can hear call to him. He is their savior, their lost love, their forsaken but fervently desired hope, their nullifying nowhere-guiding last embrace.

A sigh, like a drooping flag, signals surrender. He pauses, breathes in the subtle scent which, eluding antiseptic, tantalizes his nostrils. It summons him, and he approaches the little girl from whom it so seductively emanates.

Tubes slither from her frail, bruised arms, tubes ferrying clear liquids and dispatching yellow fluids. She is the port through which these watery cargoes proceed.

One liquid flows untubed, undisturbed. Underneath her cool, blue-white flesh this liquid churns—warm, pulsing. Placing his fingers against her neck, he feels the wild throbbing of hidden tides.

Her eyes open, their dark brown depths muddied by disease. A tall, slim man stands beside her, his long black hair shimmering darkness within a halo of flame. Fire of warmth, fire of comfort. She smiles, thinking of Christmas stockings and her grandfather’s cottage, the Yule log burning.

The flames surrounding the stranger billow towards her. They are everything she wants them to be. Her will is their command. All she has to do is make a wish and they will become her favorite things. They flicker, becoming blurry, malleable dream taffy shaped by her imagination.

Kittens with fluffy fur play by the hearthside, tickling her toes. Silver tinsel dangles from a Christmas tree, the pine scent, ancient yet fresh, promising blissful surprises. Red foil packages seem to wink at her as the flirtatious flame reflections glide across the shiny wrappings. Everything twinkles and sparkles in a firework bravado she hopes will never subside.

His lips, soft as her mother’s satin nightgown, press against her throat. He cradles her in his arms, the flames beckoning her into their warmth.

That paler wisp of flame is a golden pony, its darker companion a stately stallion. The black stallion whinnies softly, inviting her to climb upon his back.

“Yes,” the stranger says gently. “All the pretty little horses, all your favorite things are yours, forever and ever.”

She grasps the black mane and clutches tight, as eyes closed, she feels a soaring gallop merging her with a force stronger than any fairytale magic. Riding with this force, fused with it, she is flying into a radiant sunset, which, like the fireplace flames, bathes her in warmth. The rays of the ebbing sun reach towards her, orange red tendrils caressing. “Hush . . . shhhh,” they whisper as a darkness even more beautiful than the black horse, dappled ponies, fluffy kittens, or endlessly twinkling tinsel, ushers her into its sheltering, inescapable depths.

(Excerpt 2 with Christmas theme from Toxicosis , book 2 of Feral Rebirth series, features the female narrator (a vampire) and her male vampire consort that she refers to as her Awakener, searching for people who want to die)

Christmas has come and gone. Even as a vampire, I cannot escape my cloyingly parasitic attachment to the Yuletide season or evade the toxic aftertaste of its sugar plum-sated demise. I can’t bear to take down the tiny, tacky artificial tree my Awakener stole from one of our post-Thanksgiving victims.

Summoned by that dear, departed soul’s suicidal temptations, we had entered his dreams and his home shortly after he swallowed a potentially fatal dose of barbiturates. He, like us, had glimpsed horror in the Nutcracker’s jaw clenched merriment. He knew that the sweet-toothed magic would only leave behind a gaping, aching cavity inside him as ghosts of Christmases past rattled their bone-bedecked garlands.

In his house the tree, sagging with fragile, glittery ornaments from a 1940s childhood, stood on a flimsy card table beside a recently lit fireplace. The sweet smell of cedar and cinnamon lingered in the living room, where he lay resting upon a brown corduroy covered couch. His chest rose and fell with a whistling sound, lonely and dreary as the call of a loon.

As I touched the wispy silver of his hair, it was cool and soft against his rugged, sun-scorched face. Amidst the rough, weathered plain of his skin, it felt like a feathering of snow.

“Silent snow, secret snow,” I whispered, reminded of the Conrad Aiken story describing a child’s descent into chilly, tranquil, inward-turning insanity, another victim of the heart-numbing, soporific frost. This old man has loved the winter, rejoicing in it as a child—first snows, first, ephemerally sparkling promises of Christmas to come—then, later, wooing it as he fondled his fiancee’s sweater-clinging bosom while he and his bride-to-be sat beside the fireplace, drinking champagne and exchanging presents, vowing to love each other for the rest of their lives. A long time that life together then seemed, so many years, so many happy moments, joys made even more precious with the addition of children, a son and a daughter, to share the blessings of their union.

All too soon, though, the years came to this lonely December conclusion. His wife had died, his children, grown-up, had moved far away, too absorbed in their own families’ celebrations to make the long wintry journey back home. Alone, taunted by the phantom visions of cherished, never-to-be relived experiences that seemed closer, more irresistible than ever as he grew more tired and sad, he decided to commemorate his most beloved time of year with his last weary breaths.

“Sleep, just let me sleep,” he muttered, either to the haunting visions or to the presences he perhaps felt hovering beside his bed. Too weak to open his eyes, he did not see our shadowy forms, but he sighed as if sensing my fingers stroking his hair.

As I kissed his parched lips, I tasted the bitter residue of the sleeping pills and noticed a few whitish crumbs around his mouth, which, like traces of a Communion wafer, seemed to mark his final earthly passage. He showed no resistance as we pierced his flesh and drank his blood. It was as if he were already elsewhere, walking in a night-time field, silver stars sparkling against the vast black sky, the soft, crisp crunch of his boots as he stepped upon the newly fallen snow, heading towards the ringing of bells or the chill-voiced carols of awaiting angels.

Excerpt 3 with Christmas theme from Dark Visitations (prequel to Feral Rebirth series). Dark Visitations focuses on the female narrator’s childhood/adolescent/and young adult experiences that shape her future existence as a vampire

(Warning—this excerpt, partly based on real-life experience from my childhood, deals with family strife related to Christmas celebrations when a member of the family has a potentially terminal illness. )

We were all nervous about seeing Evelyn after her latest chemotherapy session because of the havoc it wreaked upon her body and her emotions. Would she experience a brief remission that would refuel her hopes, only to callously destroy them later? Or would she languish, every moment, every memory a macabre reminder of the life she is slowly leaving behind?

With mouth-clenched forbearance, Grandma prepared for Evelyn’s visit, wanting to make sure everything went smoothly despite the stress over her sister’s dismal prognosis and the mandatory merriment associated with the holiday. Before her illness, we had always griped about Evelyn’s habitual lateness while we waited at the dinner table. Now, however, we grimly practiced patience as tensions simmered and the turkey in the oven began to burn.

When she arrived, looking even thinner and yellower than before, I lost any semblance of Yuletide joy. What use was there to pretend to be cheerful, when everyone here knew it was futile? The lights on the Christmas tree flaunted their festive allure, as fake as the plastic tree they covered and the mannequin smiles we displayed.

A thick, lumpy mound of mashed potatoes smothered with pasty gravy lay untouched on my plate as dishes of cranberry jelly, candied yams, and grayish canned peas were passed around the table. I managed to choke down a morsel of dry turkey, then moisten my poultry-parched lips with a gulp of iced tea. Grandpa used a chunk of bread to sop up the gravy.

“Did you wash this fork?” he asked Grandma, trying to prevent a reluctant pea from rolling off his plate. “See that?” He held the fork in his hand as if it were a murderous weapon. “I could cut my tongue on it. Can’t you see straight?”

Grandma slammed down a clean fork in front of him, then listlessly helped herself to more gravy.

A few drops of iced tea from my glass splattered onto the Christmas-tree-green tablecloth. I hid my spill, my suppressed anger under my Santa Claus plate.

Holidays brought out the worst in my grandparents and their relationship. Sooner or later, one or both of them would probably stomp off into another room while the rest of us tried to maintain the pretense of holiday cheer.

My jaws chewed mechanically at a piece of raw celery as Evelyn started to talk about the new church she had recently joined, one of many she had enthusiastically embraced throughout the years. None so far had appeased her spiritual hunger, but this one, she vowed, would give her the faith she craved during her struggle against death.

Worried that Evelyn’s desperate zeal might further upset the precarious peace of our Christmas celebration, Grandma tried to shift the conversation to a less contentious topic. “Have you visited our brother’s house recently?” she asked.

“I was there a few months ago,” Evelyn said. “A week or so after a teenaged girl in his neighborhood was killed by a drunk driver.”

“Oh, how sad,” Grandma exclaimed with a worried frown.

“Yes,” Evelyn sighed. “So young. We never know when our time will come. As my priest, Father Johnson, says, we can’t escape death; but if we put our faith in God, we need not fear it.”

“Right,” Grandma muttered noncommittally, then passed the yams around again. “Have some more, there’s plenty!”

“Yes, please help yourself!” Grandpa grumpily chimed in, handing the plate to Evelyn. “I can barely chew this tough turkey she overcooked as usual.”

Passing food around the table was my grandparents’ favorite distraction during mealtime tensions. I could tell how tense a conversation was by the number of times a bowl made its circuit around the table. Try as they might to be on their best behavior, my grandparents couldn’t resist the urge to argue.

“That young girl is in God’s hands now,” Evelyn continued, oblivious to Grandma’s attempts to divert us with food. “May her soul dwell peacefully in His care, no fears, no troubles until Resurrection Day, when all the saved are given eternal bodies that will never die or suffer again.”

“How long does she have to wait before everyone gets their new bodies?” I asked, suddenly interested in the thought of a new, immortal body since my current one was headed towards a transformation I hoped to prevent.

“I’m not sure,” Evelyn admitted. “But if she is baptized, then she will be bathed in grace and joy forever.”

“But what if she wasn’t baptized?” I persisted despite my grandmother’s warning glare to stop asking so many questions.

“Well, then, she will either end up in Limbo or in Hell,” Evelyn replied.

Mom and Grandma glanced warily at Evelyn while Grandpa stared at his nearly spotless plate. Almost every droplet of gravy had been wiped clean by his bread.

Tears prickled like thorns at the corners of my eyes before dripping down my cheeks. Although I had recently found out that, unlike my cousins, I hadn’t been baptized, I didn’t until now understand the significance of baptism. It had seemed to me merely a minor difference that set me apart from other people I knew, not nearly as crucial as lacking a father. I didn’t realize that, all this time, I had been considered damned in God’s eyes, destined for Hell. My tears couldn’t save me, not even, according to Evelyn, prayers or good deeds; only a few drops of pastor-dispensed water could protect me from my infernal fate.

Terrified at the thought that I might die at any minute and spend the rest of eternity with mass murderers, I began sobbing.

“See what you have done!” Grandma snapped at her sister. “If Alley and her mother decide she should be baptized, they will do it. I would kindly appreciate it if you kept your religious opinions to yourself from now on.”

Getting up from the table and grabbing the bowl of stuffing, Grandma headed to the kitchen. When she returned, she took away the plate of turkey. I heard her running water in the sink and noisily scraping plates.

Evelyn folded her cloth napkin, pushed away her seat, then walked to the door. “Goodbye!” she said sadly. “I can sense I’m not welcome here today. God willing, I will see you again someday, in this world of the next.”

As she opened the door, she lingered before stepping out into the bleak, snowless chill. There was no white Christmas this year, no splendid winter landscape for her to mark her last Yuletide on Earth, only the slushy remnants of last week’s ice storm and the biting cold wind to gnaw through her bones. She glanced at us, then raised her withered yellow fingers to wave goodbye.

A sullen silence followed her departure. Grandpa set aside his scraped-clean plate, got up from his chair, and shuffled off to his bedroom. Mom lit a cigarette, letting the smoke fill the cheerless space where happier memories were formed.

I stared at the stain on the ceiling, an ancient blot of catsup commemorating an argument that took place long before I was born. It, like my stigma of sin, endured.

My tears spilled, unrestrained. I tasted their salt, like blood, against my lips.

Excerpt #4 with Christmas theme from Dark Visitations (prequel to Feral Rebirth series)

(Warning—this excerpt, partly based on my experiences with my grandfather’s terminal illness, also contains depressing subject matter)

Vigil

At the beginning of another frigid winter, Grandpa was taken to the hospital for the last time. Christmas lights glimmered along the way, their seductive glimmer reflected in the cascade of self-annihilating snowflakes. Such lights always used to blanket me with the fairy tale flannel of happily-ever-afters. Like the love-lit amber eyes of our dog Rosie, like bonfires nestled in encompassing darkness, they promised warmth and protection. Now, however, I could see beyond their sparkly illusion of joyful renewal, see the dying evergreen tree they smothered. Uprooted from its life source, its sweet-scented needles desiccating, it languished beneath their electric radiance, to be tossed aside when the Christmas season was over, or it could no longer conceal the signs of death.

The lights, leering with holiday cheer, mockingly guided our way into the waiting room. As Mom lingered outside to finish her cigarette and Grandma settled into a green vinyl chair, I slouched on a gray fabric sofa near the overhead TV set.

Beside the couch stood a white plastic table littered with magazines and children’s books. A paper coffee cup, half-full of brown liquid mixed with someone’s anxious spittle, perched precariously on the table’s edge as if left behind in panic.

The TV struggled to command the attention of the few people biding their time there. Since it was two days before Christmas, commercials proliferated with holiday imagery—sledding, snow-suited teddy bears, manic gift-juggling shoppers, and giggling, gift-unwrapping toddlers. Piped-in secular Christmas songs and an overburdened artificial tree crowned with a winking, torso-less Santa completed the drearily festive atmosphere.

Tearing myself away from the annoying lure of the TV, I turned to the magazines. While Grandma was striking up a conversation with a middle-aged woman next to her, and Mom, having finished her cigarette, sat on the couch beside me, I leafed through a Ladies’ Home Journal, skimming past photos of spongy elf-shaped cakes, wiggly green and red gelatin desserts, and toothless babies with rubbery wrinkled faces.

Bored with the magazine, I pawed through the others on the table. Amongst the Good Housekeepings and Newsweeks was a familiar book of children’s Bible stories lying with pious slyness under a small pile of Highlights For Children issues. Remembering a story in that book that had scared me as a young child, I flipped through the pages. There it was, all these years later, just as I remembered it—a tale about a little boy who had been hit by a car and taken to the hospital. As the child lay in his hospital bed, swaddled in bandages and entombed in plaster casts, an older kid in the bed next to his told the suffering, badly injured boy that Christ comes to the hospital every night and the people who are too sick He carries off to heaven. All you had to do, the older boy advised, was raise your hand as you do in school, and Christ would know you wanted to die. Since the boy in the accident was unable to do this, the other child somehow propped up the injured boy’s hand. The next day, the nurse visiting the room saw the lifeless body with one hand still limply propped in the air.

This story had triggered many frightful bedtimes for me when I was younger. Afraid that I might accidentally raise my hand in the night and then Christ would carry me off, I often slept on my hands, clutching them tightly against my body so they wouldn’t make any unwanted gestures when I was asleep.

Closing the book, I glanced at the large wall clock—8:00 p.m.―Grandma, Mom, and I had been waiting two hours to see Grandpa. When I blinked slowly and tried to relax, splotches of color like a Jackson Pollock painting stained my inner canvas. I wished I could disappear inside that splattered canvas, not have to see the same old commercials and magazines and hastily abandoned coffee cups, not have to witness Grandpa’s weakly struggling body resist its inevitable demise.

As I, eyes closed, focused on the soothingly swirling colors behind my eyelids, my mom suddenly nudged me back into jittery awareness. A nurse had told us we could visit Grandpa now.

Following the nurse through the meandering corridors that led to Grandpa’s room, I noticed a stretcher with tightly strapped white sheets parked beside a hallway door. Although it appeared empty, I wondered if it was actually one of the Concealed Cadaver Transport carts I had read about. If so, somewhere beneath the sheeted platform was a hidden second platform on which the body lay on its way to the morgue. In the hospital death must be masked at all costs, its grisly identity given the appearance of the ordinary. The sheet-smothered dead faces, the bleaching of the grim reaper’s messy traces—such was the subterfuge of the riderless cart.

After passing a few more suspiciously empty carts, we came to Grandpa’s room. Outside his door was posted a chart filled with indecipherable measurements, intake/outtake ratios, and various scrawled signatures. Inside, the subject of these officious calculations lay on his bed, his TV blaring the same holiday commercials I had already heard countless times in the waiting room.

Slowly, he raised his head as we entered the room. I didn’t know what to say, so I relied on the predictable formulas of hospital conversation and asked him how he was doing.

“O.K.,” he muttered sleepily. “I’ll be all right.”

I wanted to say something more, but in this atmosphere of sterile gauze and rubber gloves, words were shielded from meaning for fear of contagion. No germ-filled human emotion dare infect the sanitary illusion of medical omnipotence. None dare challenge the almighty power of our Surgeon Father, who wields the sacred scalpel.

In a few minutes, Grandpa closed his eyes, and we sat, watching him sleep. A cross hovered over his bed. Like the caduceus, it was a twisting impalement, a hissing of pain and triumphant release. Christ writhed, a worm on a hook, God-bait, waiting to sprout wings and swoop down from that cross to carry the moaning, hand-raising souls off to heaven.

While I sat beside Grandpa, I thought back to my own experience in a hospital, my tonsillectomy when I was six years old. I remembered the cross, just like Grandpa’s, over my bed. Most of all, I remembered the visions I saw when I was given anesthesia.

As I breathed slowly and counted backwards, I heard my voice bounce hollowly off distant white corridors like a deflating rubber ball. 10...9...a ghostly sleeper in a pastel blue backless gown, I breathed colorful images upon a barren field…8…7.. neon-green grass soft and fragrant ...6...5... golden honey-scented summer flowers...4...3...2... scab-red autumn leaves and rotting harvest apples oozing brown worm nectar...1. ...The colors melted together in a murky molasses river. An aroma of sugary syrup filled my nostrils, and a high-pitched shriek, like a teakettle, blasted in my ears as I began spinning in circles beside the river. My feet whirled faster and faster, trees and flowers spiraling around me in a frantic galactic orbit. When I suddenly stopped spinning and collapsed onto the grass, my galaxy continued to revolve around me. Above me, swollen white clouds drifted in the pale blue sky, ballooning into the shapes of pompous giants and bloated, gaseous dragons. In a rowboat gliding past the riverbank, a cartoon mouse, sporting trademark white gloves, dangled a fishing pole. Oblivious to the shrieking danger that lurked behind the clouds, he didn’t notice a pair of majestic wings suddenly swooping down from the sky.

Too late, the anthropomorphized rodent, no longer cartoon invulnerable, squealed for help as the massive silvery white wings smothered his screams and carried him upwards.

For a while, the river and clouds were motionless. No breeze stirred. My breath seemed to stop.

Then, with a roar like a speeding train, there was a blast of air as the giant wings reappeared and began surging towards me.

Luminous as the sun, the celestial predator—-all wings, talons, and glowing domed skull—smothered me with its ether-fragrant feathers. Upwards, then, its wings soared, carrying me past icy clouds lying in rows like vacant hospital beds. Suddenly, dropped through the clouds, I was falling, the chill air cutting into my gasping lungs, my heart racing as quickly as my gravity-doomed descent. I closed my eyes, blacked out my inner world.

When I awakened, I was lying on a cold, white-sheeted bed. My mouth tasted like scorched milk, and my pillows were sticky with black, clotted blood.

I wondered what visions, if any, Grandpa had, as he drifted between worlds. Did he dream of a miraculous cure or a release from suffering? His eyelids fluttered as a nurse entered the room to give him medication and run some more routine tests. It was time for us to leave.

When Grandpa came home from the hospital, all illusions of healing had been extinguished. Even Rosie, his faithful companion, appeared to sense his approaching death and was so distraught that she began having seizures. Only a few days after Grandpa’s return, her seizures became so severe that we had a vet come to the house and put her to sleep.

Her eyes rolled up, white curtains over white walls, as the vet threw her lifeless body over his shoulder. A few minutes before her death, I had kissed her, smelled her kibbly dog food breath, and caressed her soft, warm fur for the last time. She was still our dog then, the familiar, loving presence throughout most of my childhood and adolescence, but draped over the vet’s shoulder, she had become a thing, and I couldn’t bear to look at her. I didn’t want to see the lolling tongue, for then it would all seem like a sick, cartoonish joke, stiff legs, x-eyes, and tongue sticking out. I wanted to laugh myself sick because the tears were so deep down I couldn’t reach them to cry. Roll over and laugh. No, I’d rather play dead instead.

“Here, honey, take this half of a sleeping pill,” Mom had said after the vet had left. “Take the pill and off to bed.”

The sun won’t rise in the dead dog’s eyes. Morning wouldn’t wipe away the spot where she died, by the door to Grandpa’s room. And now Grandpa lay with his night light on, not reading but just staying awake until the birds started to sing again and the lonely, nighttime vigil was broken.

As Grandpa’s illness progressed to the point that we could not help him out of bed or move him for fear of breaking his fragile bones and causing him even more agony, Grandma decided that he should be taken to a hospice despite his insistence on staying at home. While Grandma and Mom waited in the living room for the hospice attendants to bring him to his final residence, I sat with Grandpa in his room.

His cheeks were sunken, deflated of hope, his clouded eyes devoid of light. I couldn’t think of anything reassuring to say, for words had lost their magic. Even my words of love sounded hollow, like an echo in a lifeless, meaningless universe.

Nothing seemed real anymore. As I listened to the usual noises outside his open bedroom window—a dog’s bark, children’s laughter—they sounded mechanical, counterfeit, no more real than the Mirror Maze clown’s robotic giggle or the mirrors’ glimmering illusion of escape.

Maybe what Mark Twain wrote in that story we had recently read in English class, “The Mysterious Stranger,” was true. Maybe nothing existed except a solipsistic thought that, creating an imaginary universe, suddenly realized none of it, not even itself, was real.

Clinging to an elusive sense of physical reality, I grasped Grandpa’s hand. His cold blue fingers clutched mine like a vice, as if he, too, were sinking into an unwaking dream. But I could not stop him from drowning. I could only try to keep myself from fading into oblivion.

When my mom suddenly entered the room to say that the attendants had come for Grandpa, his hands gripped mine one last time. Then, tearing away from my grasp, he raised his hands towards the ceiling as if beseeching some presence only he could see.

Sobbing, I left the room, feeling like a traitor who, in letting them take Grandpa away, had betrayed his trust. He had already lost Rosie, and now, he had lost everything he loved.

That night, after he had gone to the hospice, I dreamed of his hands. Thin, white, and slimy as spaghetti strands, they flung themselves against the maroon lampshade by his chair. Only his hands were visible to me. The rest of him was shrouded in shadow, as if already engulfed by the abyss. Was he trying to send a message before he was completely swallowed by darkness, or were his hand motions merely the mindless reflex motions of a body already dead?

The next morning, the hospice called us to say that Grandpa had died. He had only lasted one night at the hospice. All hope lost, separated from his family, his home, everything he loved, he had stopped fighting death. His hands, like a white flag, had signaled his surrender.