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Revenge-Tree
About a funeral home/cemetery at Christmastime. Eheh.
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Swearingen’s Funeral Home and Cemetery did not believe in Christmas lights. It was a large, dark, rambling building with overhanging eaves and narrow windows. Christmas lights could only have been an improvement. The ornaments were kept in the basement, which could only be reached via a hidden door off the coffin showroom. A single light-bulb swathed in cobwebs hung from the ceiling, though occasionally this dusty shroud was blown away by drafts from the furnace.
The air duct was so low that unless Pearce ducked immediately upon entering the room, he‘d give himself a concussion. He was a tall man and had enough experience being clocked in the head by the air duct that he was ready to put it on his resume, assuming he could ever leave Swearingen’s. The basement was crammed full of relics—discontinued urns, toys left on the graves of babies, unclaimed cremated remains, and, of course, Christmas decorations. These were not colored with the cheerful holiday theme that the living know and love. The colors were funereal: purplish maroon and a shade of green so dark it was nearly black. There were several wreaths, a few miniature Christmas trees, and a large, tacky picture of Santa Claus. Pearce supposed these decorations had been new at some point, but it was hard to imagine. What was not actively falling apart was either shedding or moldering. There was one huge wreath that united the cemetery department with the funeral department in common hatred because it took several people to lift and hang. After it was hung, fake snow, the sort that looked like the "frosting" on frosted-wheat cereal, fell off in big curdled-milk-looking chunks. There was nothing the staff could do about that because Swearingen’s did not have a vacuum cleaner. Fake berries or tarnished baubles or crumbly pine cones fell off in a steady and mystifying profusion. Pearce felt obliged to pick them up and balance them on the wreath, even though every time he got anywhere near it, he was sure the whole thing would fall on him.
The wreath was not universally hated. It was merely hated by every single person in the whole place except the sales manager, Joanna Ghrist, whose mandate it was that they decorate the funeral home in the first place. That doughty woman took great pride in being able to arrange the various accoutrements to their best advantage. Everything went where she said it would look best, which was always in the same place it had been the year before. Naturally this included one large Christmas tree that took up an inordinate amount of room on Pearce’s desk… so it would not take up floor room. Ghrist explained this with a smile which told Pearce that this was her revenge for his constant interruptions during her alien abduction stories. The tree did not stand up on its own. It had to be positioned next to the wall so it could lean there, thus obscuring the calendar.
“This is a well-thought-out and heartwarming tradition,” said Pearce with such cheerful candor Ghrist paused, trying to figure out whether the revenge-tree had gone over his head.
Even he had to admit that there were good things about the tree, however. One was that the ornaments and tinsel were never removed, so they never had to be put back on. These things had acquired a withered look over the years. The ornaments no longer needed strings. The little angels and Santas were enmeshed in the tree's fake needles. Another thing Ghrist liked was Christmas music. She had one of the first CDs ever made (the enclosed leaflet provided instructions for how to place the CD in the player) with assorted Christmas songs performed so slowly they seemed to reach back to the past, and the same songs played next year and the year after that ran back to meet those in the present. During December time stopped as the CD played day in and day out. Swearingen’s resident priest, Adrian, used this to explain the phenomenologist’s view of time. Meanwhile Ghrist explained that customers liked to hear Christmas music and they did not know the same 12 songs were on spin-cycle. Reason and existentialism aside, the player was found mysteriously unplugged with increasing frequency despite Ghrist’s threats of what would happen when she found whoever was unplugging it.
Everyone at Swearingen’s was grateful when the New Year dawned and they could safely consign all the Christmas paphernalia back to the basement. From vents throughout the funeral home came the deep, reverberating gong of Pearce’s cranium against the duct; it did what the revenge-tree could not.
“Someone should see if he knocked himself out,” a funeral director suggested.
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