CHRISTMAS CATASTROPHE(S)
CHAPTER ONE
December 14th – 9:49 p.m.
Charlie Jensen knew that it was bad. She knew this because she was misquoting Shakespeare.
To panic, or NOT to panic. That is the question.
Scratch that. Panicking was never the better choice, particularly in a situation where one might bleed out.
December 14th – 9:12 p.m.
Charlie was industriously completing the mantel for her newly installed gas fireplace. Her media system’s central speaker would be cleverly hidden inside the mantel, covered by a piece of fancy-schmancy decorative metal.
The plan was to snip the decorative metal, subsequently paint it, and then install it in the base of the afore-mentioned mantel. This renovation would be done well in advance of her Annual Holiday Tea.
Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.
Tin snips made short work of the job. It went better than Charlie had anticipated. She exclaimed, “SO EASY!” while doing a seated victory dance in the middle of her living room floor.
Stretched out in front of the fire, her orange tom cat, Steve, also seemed impressed by her metal snipping prowess.
Cheesy Christmas tunes provided the perfect soundtrack as Charlie hammered teeny-tiny nails onto wood scraps – creating a kick-ass DIY drying rack. She set the rack over artfully laid newspapers to allow for paint drippage, before moving on to arranging all the metal pieces according to size – thereby satisfying her border-line OCD. And then? Then she painted.
She was so on the ball that, in her mind’s eye, her own image replaced the balancing pachyderms on old-timey circus posters.
Using the eight and a half-inch tin snips as a “microphone,” Charlie sang along with Kay Starr’s cover of “The Man with the Bag,” dancing her way through the Christmas Wonderland that doubled as her living room in the off-season.
Soft-shoeing her way across the passage between the living and dining rooms, Charlie was belting out a big-finish at the top of the basement stairs, when she lost her balance. She managed to stay on her feet for a quarter of the staircase, but from that point on, she was less dancer and more drunken acrobat, tumbling her way down the rest of the stairs.
December 14th – 9:50 p.m.
Hubris.
Charlie had been guilty of hubris.
Flat on her back at the bottom of the basement stairs, Charlie tentatively raised her head to glance down the length of her body. She became fascinated by the brilliant yellow handles of the tin snips.
Yellow was 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. She’d had the tin snips in her hand at the top of the stairs.
Where were the tin snips’ metal bits? Her brain immediately tongue-twisted the phrase.
Tin Snips’ Metal Bits … Tin Snips’ Metal Bits … Tin Snips’ Metal Bits …
Charlie blinked again.
Refocusing, she homed in on the handles above her left hip. No matter how hard she tried, she could not see the pointy bits.
Where were the pointy bits?
Logic defied her.
When she’d purchased the “home crafter” tin snips, the package said they were eight and a half inches in length. The handles were maybe half that length, which meant that over four inches of pointy bits… were … where?
Inside her?
Wait … WHAT!?!
Charlie’s concept of breathing stalled.
The lead for a news story, popped 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 this Toronto home?
From her horizontal vantage-point, Charlie sketched out bullet points for her in memoriam article. It would obviously have to include sections on financial solvency for the self-employed, the benefits of extraordinary familial generosity, plus many mentions of thrifty DIY.
Oh, for the love of … what are you doing?
Charlie closed her eyes and did her absolute best to remember where 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 Yang get impaled by the icicle in that episode of Grey’s Anatomy? She had been released from the hospital that night!
Charlie wasn’t feeling a lot of pain, but she was also fairly confident she was in shock, and she knew that a side-effect of shock could be masked pain.
Annnnnnnd … now she was imagining the introduction of a new super-hero, PAINTM, in a mask (obviously) … and possibly a cape.
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.
She saw skin.
If she was seeing skin, that meant her festive Christmas sweater had ridden 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, Perry 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 cogitated for a moment on the perfection of a good cab-sav blend. She could picture the wine painting the sides of a hefty, nine-ounce, stemless wine glass. She couldn’t get to the wine at present, but, if she crawled to the freezer, she could get to frozen rum balls. If she ate, say, ten rum balls, the amount of rum …
Oh for fuck’s sake Charlie! Call 911!
Charlie looked up the staircase. She heard the faint 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 cried. “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 floor above. “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 … 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.”
Charlie did wonder if, by moving her clumsy ass, she might make things worse. Securing her left hand around the 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 yelled. This was not comfortable. This whole situation was decidedly uncomfy. But, then again, she should be feeling pain.
She suspected that the adrenaline singing through her blood 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. She was also starting to recognize aches at every place her body had hit the stairs on the way down. She touched her free hand to her right cheekbone and jaw. Both were tender to the touch. In addition to the contusions on her face, she suspected that underneath the shock, there might be 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 gushing 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 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 yodelled, 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 feeble witticisms 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 best 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. To prove it, she’d inhaled so hard that she’d singed the back of her throat while becoming the highest she’d ever been in her life. She was dead certain that her windpipe had been permanently damaged, and that Dev, a third-year med student, was going to have to perform an impromptu tracheotomy using a pen casing, which he would have to sterilize in his pasta pot.
Charlie’s brain on weed was also convinced that Dev’s thirty-foot driveway had become several kilometers in length. “It’s going to take me days to walk home,” she’d said.
Dev took one look at her, bent down and grabbed a large river rock from the driveway, placing it in her hand. He told her to hold that river rock tight, to focus all her attention on it. Then he’d held her arm and walked her home.
The smoothness of the rock, its cool surface in her palm had steadied her. And apart from a minor hallucination of a cow over the neighbour’s fence, she’d been good. Dev had spent the night on her sofa and never told her to suck hard again.
She wanted Dev here now. He always made things better.
Seated at the top of the stairs, Steve the cat cheerfully looked down at her. She met his gaze. “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 handrail and tentatively raised her knee. She paused, clocking the ramifications of the movement. She slowly lowered her knee before raising it again, in a knee-heavy version of The Robot.
“Screw it,” she said. “Go big or go home.”
Steve sprawled on the bottom step. Charlie stepped around him and carefully began to climb one stair after the other until she arrived at the landing between the dining and living rooms. She suspected that an entire geological era might have passed during her ascent.
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.
Charlie scanned the living room for her phone … and groaned. Of course, it was on the floor, adjacent to the drying decorative metal that had started this whole debacle. She glared at the phone, 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 away unhelpful tears. 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 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. Parma holly and ivy vases were stuffed with candy canes, as were Lefton ceramic elf shoes. Napco Christmas planters mimicking girls in voluminous red dresses, featured candy canes poking out from their cabooses. Charlie was a big believer in candy cane ornamentation.
“Christmas has 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 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, low-key pumping herself up before she attempted the phone retrieval. She blew out a breath.
Rocking an incredible knee turnout, Charlie squatted. Her subsequent plié, given the circumstances, was perfection.
“I need to tell Miss Karen 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.”
***