Christmas Catastrophe(s)

CHAPTER ONE

December 13th – 9:49 p.m.

Charlie Jensen knew it was bad. That was a given. Now, in the aftermath of the bad, she was trying her best NOT to panic and NOT to bleed out.

It had seemed like such an easy task. She’d been finishing the brand-new mantel for her brand-new gas fireplace. Her brand-new media system’s centre speaker would be oh-so-cleverly masked inside the brand-new mantel by fancy-schmancy decorative metal.

She’d planned to snip the decorative metal, paint the decorative metal, and then install the decorative metal in the base of the afore-mentioned brand-new mantel. And it would all be done in time for her Annual Holiday Tea.

Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.

The tin snips had gone through the metal like butter. Much better than Charlie had anticipated. She’d even said out loud, “SO EASY!” while doing a seated victory dance in the middle of her living room floor. Her orange tom cat, Steve, stretched out in front of the fire, had also seemed impressed by her metal snipping prowess.

Cheesy Christmas tunes provided the perfect soundtrack as Charlie had next hammered teeny-tiny nails onto wood scraps – creating a kick-ass DIY drying rack. She’d then set the rack over artfully laid newspapers to allow for paint drippage, before moving on to painting and arranging all the metal pieces according to size – thereby satisfying her border-line OCD.

She’d been so on the ball that, in her mind’s eye, her own image had replaced the old-timey balancing pachyderms on circus posters.

Hubris.

She was guilty of hubris.

Using the tin snips as a microphone, she’d sung along with Kay Starr’s cover of “The Man with the Bag,” and danced her way through the extra-decorated Christmas Wonderland that doubled as her living room in the off-season.

Syncopated soft-shoeing across the passage between the living and dining rooms added some Fred Astaire flair to the moment. Charlie had just belted out a big-finish at the top of the basement stairs, when she unexpectedly lost her balance. She’d managed to stay on her feet for a quarter of the staircase. But from that point on, she had done a creditable impersonation of Buttercup tumbling down a steep hillside to catch up with Wesley at the entrance to the Fire Swamp. In the excitement, the 7-inch tin snips she’d been holding as her microphone had become lodged in her left side.

From her horizontal vantage-point at the bottom of the basement stairs, Charlie became fascinated by the brilliant yellow handles of the tin snips protruding from above her left hip. Yellow was usually such a happy colour.

She loved yellow.

Should she survive the fall and probable concussion, the soon-to-be-spectacular bruising upon her person would eventually turn yellow.

Charlie blinked. She could only see the rubberized handles. Where were the tin snips’ metal bits? Immediately her brain turned the phrase into a tongue twister.

Tin Snips’ Metal Bits… Tin Snips’ Metal Bits… Tin Snips’ Metal Bits…

Charlie blinked again.

Refocusing, she homed in on the snips at her side. No matter how hard she tried, she could not see the pointy bits. The pointy bits had not magically re-appeared. Distinguished guests! The pointy bits were here all along – with the use of simple misdirection they were hiding in plain sight!!

Where were the pointy bits?

Logic defied her for a moment.

When she’d bought the “home crafter” tin snips, the package said they were seven inches in length, and the handles were half that length, which meant three and a half inches of pointy bits… were… where?

Inside her?

Wait… WHAT!?!

Charlie forgot to breathe.

The lead for the story, popped Pavlovian into Charlie’s freelance writer brain. She saw herself clicking save on the article.

A 32-year-old woman was found in the basement of her exorbitantly-mortgaged Cabbagetown row house, the victim of a freak DIY accident. Interest in the events leading up to the accident seem to be overshadowed by this question: How could Charlotte Anne Jensen afford to own a home in Toronto, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, and more importantly, how much OVER asking would the home now sell for?

Flat on her back, Charlie sketched out the bullet points for her in memoriam article at lightspeed. It would obviously have to include a detailed section on financial solvency for the self-employed, another on the extreme generosity of family members past and present, plus many paragraphs on thrifty DIY. She imagined a wall full of post-it notes, each one storyboarding the evolution of her home.

A graphic novel! It should definitely be in graphic novel form! She’d always dug the art of Mariko Tamaki, maybe she could hire her to illustra—

Oh, for the love of… what are you doing?

Charlie closed her eyes and did her absolute best to remember where any of her major organs resided. She had enough knowledge of general anatomy to know she hadn’t been stabbed in either her heart or lungs.

Huzzah!!

Her eyes popped open. She looked down at the yellow handles again. Low. Very low, but off to the left side and, she hoped, not close to anything vital.

Where did Cristina get impaled by the icicle in that episode of Grey’s Anatomy? That would be a good place to be stabbed. Cristina had been released from the hospital that night!

She wasn’t feeling a lot of pain, but she was also fairly confident she might be in shock, and she knew that a side-effect of shock could be masked pain.

Charlie groaned. She had shit to do. She had writing deadlines to meet! She had to finish trimming up the mantel which involved adding three kinds of molding to render it all woo-woo for the Holiday Tea. All the molding would have to be caulked and painted. Plus… baking. So much baking to do.

Brilliant timing, Charlie. Have yourself a Merry Fucking Christmas!

Charlie considered the skin around the tin snips.

Skin.

That meant her festive platypus Christmas sweater had somehow managed to ride up to the top of her ribcage during the fall! Perry the Platypus sporting his Faire Isle scarf was one of her favourite clothing items. Its quirky coziness was an immediate, mood-improving garment. And, most importantly, it had not been punctured by the tin snips, which was an incredible bright side!

Focus Charlie.

She took a breath and gave her undivided attention to her waist. There was barely any blood around the wound. That had to be a good sign, right? Unless the snips were holding in all the blood, like some sort of ornate… metal… wine stopper.

Charlie salivated at the thought of a good cab-sav blend. She could picture the wine cradled in a hefty nine-ounce stemless wine glass.  She couldn’t get to the wine at present, but, if she could get herself to the freezer, she could get to frozen rum balls. If she ate, say, ten rum balls, the amount of rum…

You are not thinking rationally. Call 911!

Charlie looked up the staircase. She could faintly hear the strains of Billy May’s “Rudolph, the Red Nose Reindeer Mambo.” Her phone was Chromecasting Christmas carols to the speaker in the living room…

Charlie’s eyes widened.

Her phone was Chromecasting Christmas carols!!!

“OH!” Charlie exclaimed. “There IS a Santa Claus!! Hey Google!! HEY GOOOOGLE!!! CALL 911!!!” She cocked her head to the side, listening for a response from her Google Home device.

“Sorry, I can’t do that,” the virtual assistant replied, her pleasant, calm voice muffled from the other room. “Please call emergency services directly using a phone.”

“Oh, for the love of…” Charlie took another deep breath. Her chin sank to her chest. She spared another glance at the site of her… impaling.

“Okay… okay… you are not actively bleeding, Charlie, which is good. You are now speaking out loud… even better! You don’t know what’s been stabbed, which is bad.” She paused for a second. “You are using the second person to narrate the situation – very bad.”

She pressed her palms flat against the floor. The cool concrete somehow grounded her. “Get up Charlie. Get up off your clumsy ass.”

She did wonder, abstractly, if by moving her clumsy ass, she might make things worse. Securing her left hand around the tin snips, and curling her legs to the right, she leaned on her right hand and managed to get to her knees.

“JOLLY OH TAINT NICHOLAS!” Charlie sang out. That was not comfortable. But then again, it really shouldn’t be.

She should be feeling pain, but she suspected that the adrenaline singing through her system was stopping her from passing out. Charlie grimaced and closed her eyes, internally cataloguing her injuries once more.

Obviously, there was pain on her side. And she was also very definitely achy every place her body had hit the stairs on the way down. She touched her free hand to her right cheekbone and jaw. Definitely tender to the touch. In addition to the contusions on her face, she recognized some near-migraine-level headache pain. She opened her eyes and looked down at her fist clutching the snips. She let out a calming breath. Still no huge amounts of blood. Should she stay? Should she go? She snorted as the Clash song ran through her head.

“Focus!” she told herself.

She managed to get the balls of her feet under her. Very gingerly, maintaining a firm grip on the tin snips with her left hand, she rose up to her almost five-foot-four-inch height.

 “OH, HO-LYYYYYY NIGHT!” she sang out, before blowing out a deep breath. “Okay. We are standing. We have victory. Victory with a small ‘v,’ but victory just the same.” All she had to do now was stop her babbling and walk up the stairs to call 911.

Charlie looked up the stairs which, inexplicably, seemed to have trebled in count. It reminded her of that time in university when her friend Dev had passed her the bong at a backyard party and said, “Remember to suck hard.”

Charlie had known very well how to suck hard, thank you very much, and to prove it, had inhaled so hard she’d burned the back of her throat and then was the highest she’d ever been in her life. She got so high that she was sure her wind pipe had been permanently damaged, and that Dev, a third-year med student, was going to have to perform an impromptu tracheotomy using a Bic pen, which he would have to sterilize in his pasta pot.

Charlie’s brain on weed had then perceived Dev’s sixty-foot driveway slowly extending to become several kilometers in length. Dev took one look at her, had bent down and grabbed a river rock from the driveway, and placed it in her hand. He’d told her to hold that river rock tight, to concentrate on it. Then as her mind was focused on the rock, he’d held her arm and walked her home.

The smoothness of the rock, the cool of it in her palm had kept her steady. And apart from a minor hallucination of a cow over the neighbour’s fence, she’d been good. Then, Dev had stayed the night on her sofa to make sure that she continued to be okay. She wanted Dev here now. Dev always made things better.

At the top of the stairs, Steve the cat cheerfully looked down at her. She stared back at him. “Dude. Some help here?” The cat chirped, came down the stairs and began to aggressively headbutt her shins. “Seriously?” she ground out. “Not helpful.”

Charlie grabbed the hand rail and tentatively raised her knee. She paused, clocking the sensations in her body. She slowly lowered her knee before raising it again, in a knee-heavy version of The Robot.

“Fuck it,” she said. “Go big or go home.”

Steve was sprawled on the bottom step. Charlie stepped around him, and slowly began to climb one stair after the other until she was finally at the landing between the dining and living rooms. She suspected that an entire geological era might have passed during her climb.

White-knuckling the door frame, she caught her breath. Steve, having followed her up the stairs, affectionately headbutted her shins again before plopping down on the carpet in front of the unfinished mantel.

She scanned the living room for her phone… and groaned. Of course, it was on the floor. It was on the floor, adjacent to the drying decorative metal that had started this whole debacle. She stared at the phone dejectedly, willing heretofore-unknown psychokinetic powers to suddenly manifest.

“This, Steve, would have been a perfect time to utilize Google Communication,” she said. “Wouldn’t it have been smart of me to have already installed that app?” The cat purred loudly before licking his junk.

Charlie felt her adrenaline evaporating. She blinked unhelpful tears away from her eyes. If she didn’t make the call soon, she suspected that she might really lose it, which would render her unintelligible when she finally managed to dial 911.

As the kitschy melody of Capitol Studio Orchestra’s “Cha-Cha All the Way” played, she walked with deliberate poise to towards the phone. I need one of those garbage picker-uppers, she thought. “Hey Google! Add garbage picker-uppers to my shopping list!”

“Garbage picker-uppers have been added to your shopping list,” the virtual assistant said.

“Sure, that you can do,” said Charlie as she focused on the phone. She tilted her head back and found herself distracted by the room, all tricked out in its holiday glory.

The east wall, its entire length clad in built-in shelving, was chock-a-block with Christmas kitsch. Mid-century ceramics crowded the shelves. There were Relpo Santas driving sleighs filled with candy canes. There were Napco Christmas planters featuring girls in voluminous red dresses, candy canes fanning out from their cabooses. Lefton ceramic elf shoes overflowed with candy canes. Parma holly and ivy vases were stuffed with candy canes. Candy canes were a big theme on this wall.

“It looks like Christmas invaded,” she said with a grin. “In the best possible way.”

She noted that she’d have to futz with the spacing of the figurines on the farthest left shelves after she got back from… the… hospital.

A near-hysterical laugh began to bubble up. She tamped it down. “Get it together Jensen.”

Charlie shifted her weight from foot to foot and tried to figure out how to retrieve the phone without jostling the tin snips. Jostling would be very ouchy.

“Okay,” she told Steve, who was had rolled over onto his back and was now proudly displaying his stomach. “I’m going to do the most spectacular plié that I’ve ever done in my life.” She very gently moved her head from side to side, pumping herself up as best she could for the physical feat she was about to attempt.

Rocking an incredible knee turnout, she squatted more gracefully than she’d thought could be possible, given the circumstances.

“Miss Karen would be impressed that I can still pull that shit off,” she said as she carefully reached for the phone and slowly rose back up to her full height.

She dialed the phone.

“911 operator – what’s your emergency?”

“Hi! First-time caller. I have a minor tin snip impalement. I need an ambulance.”

***