* * *
■ ■ ■
As soon as the brother rang the bell in the portal, they all understood that it was time to go home. So she stepped from her own formlessness into the squares of her mother’s advent calendar, where there were soft white blankets on the ground, and little mice leading manageable lives, sleeping in empty matchboxes. And each morning, expectant, opened the envelope of another day.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The words Merry Christmas were now hurled like a challenge. They no longer meant newborn kings, or the dangling silver notes of a sleigh ride, or high childish hopes for snow. They meant “Do you accept Herr Santa as the all-powerful leader of the new white ethnostate?”
* * *
■ ■ ■
The dread of standing at the top of her grandmother’s stairs on Christmas Eve, hearing the phrase gold standard, and knowing she was going to descend straight into the hell of an uncle’s conversation about bitcoin. So she lingered a moment in the scent of old lace and potpourri and mildewed towels, looking at childhood pictures of herself, the happy face like butter spread on brown bread, which suspected no such future—suspected nothing beyond fat clankings in a piggy bank, more Christmases, and eventually having enough.
* * *
■ ■ ■
In the White Elephant Gift Exchange, the most sought-after gift was a rusted bug-out box. “You could do anything with it,” exclaimed the bitcoin uncle, the one who eventually nabbed it. “Store your ammo in there. Bury it for years.” Hoarding ammo must be just like hoarding wealth, she thought, and saw again the heap in the vault, the free spreading wings of the money eagle. If your body was a pile of ammo, how could it ever be brought down? If it was already buried, how could it die?
* * *
■ ■ ■
“No, no,” her sister protested, faced with a bite of rare Christmas venison. Their brother had shot the deer himself—a mistake, as it turned out on closer inspection to be a mother with only three legs. “No, please don’t, I’m pregnant!” A fizzing black void opened behind her eyes, where the long backward root of her sight was, and she gathered her sister’s rough blonde hair in her hands. There was still a real life to be lived; there were still real things to be done—above all, there was still good news, to be heard over a forkful of three-legged deer.
“Mamma mia,” she said to her sister’s stomach, and offered it a tiny chef’s kiss. She hoped, as an afterthought, and despite all her debasements, that English would still be intact when it came time for the baby to learn it.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The fizzing black void that she saw—was it anything like the portal? Possibly. Both were dimensions where only one thing happened: you revised your understanding of reality, all the while floating in a sea of your own tears and piss. “I know what you’re going through,” she said silently to the baby, “but sometimes you’ll be scrolling along, and NASA will post a picture of the stars.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
“My bud’s wife is pregnant too,” her brother said, sipping a gold inch of scotch with an air of meditation, his face covered with the requisite rusty pubes of his time. “A bad guy, has terrible internet poisoning. And the other day he says to me, Saw my daughter’s tits on the ultrasound. Looked pretty good! And I was like, Damn, dude, really? And he just gazed far off into the distance and said, I don’t know how to act. I’ve been this way so long, I don’t know how to be anymore.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
The difference between her and her sister could be attributed to the fact that she came of age in the nineties, during the heyday of plaid and heroin, while her sister came of age in the 2000s, during the heyday of thongs and cocaine. That was when everything got a little chihuahua and started starring in its own show. That was when we saw the whole world’s waxed pussy getting out of a car, and said, more.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Remember this?” her sister said, and held up a screenshot of the opening of Paris Hilton’s sex tape, which had been dedicated to the memory of 9/11. “Ahahaha!” they all laughed together, the new and funnier way.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The difference between her and her brother, though, could be attributed to the fact that he had gone to the war and stayed there for a very long time. Now whenever she stayed in the same house as him she had to carefully scrub out the tub every time he used it, so as not to contract the flesh-eating foot fungus he had brought back home with him, along with so much else she would never know—so that when he said the word merked, it sounded so much heavier than when her friends in the portal said it. Or Murica, or Freedom, or All Up in Them Guts.