The stupidest angel: a heartwarming tale of Christmas terror

but look at this son of a bitch. Look at this glorious bastard!"

    "You cut it down with your sword?" Theo wasn't so worried about what she had cut it down with, but from where she'd cut it. He had a secret in the forest near their cabin.

    "Yeah. We don't have a chain saw that I don't know about, do we?"

    "No." Actually they did, in the garage, hidden behind some paint cans. He'd hidden it when her "artistic" moments had been more frequent. "That's not the problem, sweetie. I think the problem is that it's too big."

    "No," she said, walking the length of the tree now, pausing to jump through the branches and turn off the Honda's engine. "That's where you're wrong. Observe, double doors into the chapel."

    Theo observed. The chapel did, indeed, have double doors. There was a single mercury lamp illuminating the gravel parking lot, but he could clearly see the little white chapel, the shadows of gravestones showing dimly behind it – a graveyard where they'd been planting Pine Covers for a hundred years.

    "And the ceiling in the main room is thirty feet tall at the peak. This tree is only twenty-nine feet tall. We pull it through the doors backward and stand that baby up. I'll need your help, but, you know, you don't mind."

    "I don't?"

    Molly pulled open her jean jacket and flashed Theo, exposing his favorite breasts, right down to the shiny scar that ran across the top of the right one, cocked up like a curious purple eyebrow. It was like unexpectedly running into two tender friends, both a little pale from being out of the sun, a tad humbled by time, but with alert pink noses upturned by the night chill. And as quickly as they appeared, the jacket was pulled shut and Theo felt like he'd been shut out in the cold.

    "Okay, I don't mind," he said, trying to buy time for the blood to return to his brain. "How do you know the ceiling is thirty feet tall?"

    "From our wedding pictures. I cut you out and used you to measure the whole building. It was just under five Theos tall."

    "You cut up our wedding pictures?"

    "Not the good ones. Come on, help me get the tree off the car." She turned quickly and her jacket fanned out behind her.

    "Molly, I wish you wouldn't go out like that."

    "You mean like this?" She turned, lapels in hand.

    And there they were again, his pink-nosed friends.

    "Let's get the tree set up and then do it in the graveyard, okay?" She jumped a little for emphasis and Theo nodded, following the recoil. He suspected that he was being manipulated, enslaved by his own sexual weakness, but he couldn't quite figure out why that was a bad thing. After all, he was among friends.

    "Sweetheart, I'm a peace officer, I can't – "

    "Come on, it will be nasty." She said nasty like it meant delicious, which is what she meant.

    "Molly, after five years together, I'm not sure we're supposed to be nasty." But even as he said it, Theo was moving toward the big evergreen, looking for the ropes that secured it to the Honda.

    Over in the graveyard, the dead, who had been listening all along, began to murmur anxiously about the new Christmas tree and the impending sex show.
    * * *
    They'd heard it all, the dead: crying children, wailing widows, confessions, condemnations, questions that they could never answer; Halloween dares, raving drunks-invoking the ghosts or just apologizing for drawing breath; would-be witches, chanting at indifferent spirits, tourists rubbing the old tombstones with paper and charcoal like curious dogs scratching at the grave to get in. Funerals, confirmations, communions, weddings, square dances, heart attacks, junior-high hand jobs, wakes gone awry, vandalism, Handel's Messiah, a birth, a murder, eighty-three Passion plays, eighty-five Christmas pageants, a dozen brides barking over tombstones like taffeta sea lions as the best man gave it to them dog style, and now and again, couples who needed something dark and smelling of damp earth to give their sex life a jolt: the dead had heard it.
    "Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah!" Molly cried from her seat astraddle the town constable, who was squirming on an uncomfortable bed of plastic roses a few feet above a dead schoolteacher.

    "They always think they're the first ones. Ooooo, let's do it in the graveyard," said Bess Leander, whose husband had served her foxglove tea with her last breakfast.

    "I know, there are three used condoms on my grave from this week alone," said Arthur Tannbeau, citrus farmer, deceased five years.

    "How can you