The stupidest angel: a heartwarming tale of Christmas terror

holding and realized that maybe he should be more specific about what was supposed to happen. "Come forth from the grave! Celebrate! Feast!"

    Nothing. Nothing whatsoever happened.

    There, said the angel to himself. He popped the last of the Snickers bar into his mouth and wiped his hands on his coat. The rain had subsided for a bit and he could see a ways into the woods. Nothing was happening.

    "I mean it!" he said in his big scary angel voice.

    Not a damn thing. Wet pine needles, some wind, trees whipping back and forth, rain. No miracle.

    "Behold!" said the angel. "For I am really not kidding."

    A great gust of wind came up at that second and another nearby pine snapped and fell, missing the angel by only a few feet.

    "There. It's just going to take a little time."

    He walked out of the woods and down Worchester Street into town.
    * * *
    "Wow, I'm famished all of a sudden," said Marty in the Morning, all dead, all the time.
    "I know," said Bess Leander, poisoned yet perky. "I feel really strange. Hungry, and something else. I've never felt this before."

    "Oh, my dear," said Esther, the schoolteacher, "I can suddenly think of nothing but brains."

    "How 'bout you, kid?" asked Marty in the Morning. "You thinking about brains?"

    "Yeah," said Jimmy Antalvo. "I could eat."

For Luck, There Is No Chapter 13
    JUST THIS CHRISTMAS PHOTO
    ALBUM
    Sometimes, if you look closely at family snapshots, you can see in the faces of the children, portents of the adults they will become. In the adults, you can sometimes see the face behind the face. Not always, but sometimes…
    Tucker Case
    In this shot we see a well-to-do California family posed in front of their lakeshore estate in Elsinore, California. (It's an eight-by-ten color glossy, embossed with the trademark of a professional photographer's studio.)
    They are all tanned and healthy-looking. Tucker Case is perhaps ten years old, dressed in a little sport coat with a yachting ensign on the breast pocket and little tasseled loafers. He is standing in front of his mother, who has the same blond hair and bright blue eyes, the same smile that looks not as if she is presenting her dental work, but as if she is just seconds from bursting out laughing. Three generations of Cases – brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins – look perfectly coiffed, pressed, washed, and shined. All are smiling, except for one little girl down front, who has an expression of abject horror on her face.

    A closer look reveals the back of her red Christmas dress is tossed up to one side, and snaking in from the side, from under his little blue sport coat, is the hand of young Tuck, who has just stolen an incestuous squeeze of his cousin Janey's eleven-year-old bottom.

    What is telling about this picture is not the surreptitious booty grope, but the motive, because here Tucker Case is at an age where he is much more interested in blowing stuff up than he is in sex, yet he is precociously cognizant of just how much his advances will freak his cousin out. This is his raison d'кtre. It should be noted that Janey Case-Robbins will go on to distinguish herself as a successful litigator and advocate for women's rights, while Tucker Case will go on to be a serially heartbroken horn dog with a fruit bat.
    Lena Marquez
    The shot is taken in someone's backyard on a sunny day. There are children all around and it's obvious that a big party is going on.
    She's six, wearing a fluffy pink dress and patent-leather shoes. She couldn't be any cuter, with her long black hair tied up into ponytails with red ribbons and flying out behind her like silk comet tails as she pursues the piсata. She's blindfolded, and her mouth is wide open, letting forth a burst of that high, little-girl laugh that sounds like joy itself, because she's just made solid contact with the stick and she's sure that she has released candy, and toys, and noisemakers for all the children. What she has, in fact, done, has solidly smacked her uncle Octavio in the cojones.

    Uncle Octavio is caught in a magic moment of transition, his face changing from joy to surprise to pain, all at once. Lena is still adorable and sweet and unsullied by the disaster she has wrought. Feliz Navidad!
    Molly Michon
    It's Christmas morning, post-present-opening storm. Tissue paper and ribbon are strewn around the floor, and off to one side you can see a coffee table, and on it an ashtray the size of a hubcap overflowing with butts, and an empty bottle