I'll Be Home For Christmas - III
“The existence of Santa should not be the most shocking part of all… all this!”
Randy blinked furiously as a roll of toilet paper, a towel, and more than one wrapped piece of feminine hygiene product bounced harmlessly off his chest. But, no amount of tampons painlessly striking his head or toilet paper rolls could erase the image in his mind’s eye. He’d only seen it for a second before he’d blinked - maybe even less than that - but it remained burned in his head in vivid, lurid, and exceptional detail.
There, on the bathroom floor, was Pran, sprawled out on top of the towels she’d knocked off the bar mounted by the shower and surrounded by debris scattered when she’d taken the small wicker basket of toiletries by the sink down with her as she’d fallen. She’d ditched the layers of outwear in the room and was wearing nothing but a pair of thick, woolen, winter socks, black, form-fitting leggings, and a green sweater bearing the words FELIZ NAVI-DOGS in bold, white letters, and lined with the faces of various dog breeds, which added a surreal and almost comically absurd air to the scene that somewhat undercut the fact that Pran’s socks were in tatters, hanging in ragged scraps around a pair of hooves.
Cloven hooves.
Black, shiny cloven hooves that were framed by a fringe of white fine white fur that gave way to a coat of chocolate brown hair - the same that sprout from the tears in her leggings, which had been rent open as they tried to conform to a very inhuman and unnatural digitigrade leg structure that they were not made to conform to.
She gripped the toilet for support with fingers that had fused into some strange, broad, and awkward mix of digits and hooves, which was almost as confusing and troubling as the tuft of thick, white hair that had erupted from underneath the collar of her sweater, or the distinctly inhuman, seemingly equine ears poking through the curtain of her mussed, unruly, and disheveled blonde hair, just from underneath the hem of a knit cap with the logo of the Seattle Seahawks on the front.
“Randall Kray!”
Randall Kray blinked. The sound of his full name was enough to jar him back to reality, and one last tampon striking his forehead fully broke the disoriented state he’d lapsed into. He realized that his vision had returned.
Pran was still there. She was still on the bathroom floor. The towels were now hastily spread over her in a crude, shoddy, patchwork covering that hid her legs. She held one up over her upper-half, careful to keep her hands behind it and the towel up over her nose.
“Randy.” Pran sounded as if she’d just finished running a marathon. “Get. Out.”
It seemed like a good suggestion. He could shut the door. Go back to the couch. Lay down. Watch the Trail Blazers continued to get spanked by the Mavericks and eat cookies and drink wine and forget he saw Pran with hooves instead of feet and white fur poking out from underneath her collar and, maybe, hopefully, later that night, Pran would come back out, normal as she ever was, and they'd sit down and watch A Christmas Story or Family Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and he'd never, ever bring up the scene again for as long he lived, even under threat of torture and potentially death.
That would be nice. That would have been the preferable course of action. But, seeing your girlfriend with hooves sticking out of a busted pair of socks - that just wasn't something one could walk away and forget about, even if said girlfriend did reappear hours later with very human, very normal, and very plain feet.
But Randy had a feeling that wasn't going to happen. Mostly because, even with most of her body hidden behind towels, she'd forgotten something.
“Pran.”
“Randy,” Pran growled from behind the veil of towels. “Y-you - I don't know what you think you saw… but - b-but - you didn't s-”
“Pran,” Randy interjected, his voice sounding very small and distant in his own ears. With quaking fingers, he pointed to one. His right one, specifically.
Both of Pran's twitched. Each of her pupils dilated to pin-pricks as every muscle in her body seemed to tense at once, bringing a sudden stop to her trembling.
Without a word, before Randy could blink, the towel in front of Pran's face was on top of her head.
“Go,” she said. “Now.”
If Randy could have, he would have, but he couldn’t, and he knew it. Pran had to know it, too, on some level. That, however, was about he all he knew about the situation, because he certainly had no idea why any of this would be happening otherwise. Just like their little dispute in the kitchen that had cost the lives of so many gingerbread people, Randy knew he was in the thick of something as uncomfortable as it was difficult to navigate, with the added issue of being really, really weird, to boot. Unfortunately, the only way out, it seemed, was once again through.
“Pran…”
This time, Pran didn’t say anything. She just sat there, still, as if she had adopted a strategy of just waiting him out, or perhaps hoping that, if she didn’t move, he’d lose sight of her and walk away, like some kind of predatory creature that hunted on movement alone.
“Pran,” Randy said again, careful to keep his voice as even and tempered as he could. “Listen. I just… I have one question for you that… that I’d really appreciate it if you’d answer. Just one.”
Pran, again, offered no reply, which he took as a sort of tacit permission to ask. He knew there was quite literally nothing he could ask her that was going to be warmly received, but… he at least had to know if his mortal soul was on the line. So, he swallowed his reservations. He took a deep breath.
“Pran,” said Randy. “Please… tell me you aren’t a demon.”
Randy only saw a fleeting glimpse of Pran’s hands as they shot out from underneath the towel she’d hid them under and, in one quick pull, tore away the one resting over her head
“Demon?”
Well - at least her face looked the same. There was a concerning among of that fine, feathery white fur creeping up her neck, but, besides that - and the ears - her face wasn’t any different; she was scowling at him no differently than she might have if he’d forgotten to flush the toilet or washed her lacy unmentionables with his less delicate undergarments.
“Do I look like a demon?” Pran balked. “What about me makes you think that I’m a demon?” He noticed that her ears - which, apparently, she was too mad to bother hiding right now - were pinned back. In his youth, back when his grandfather owned a ranch in Eastern Oregon, he spent a lot of time around horses, and he remembered them doing the exact same thing.
They do that when they ain’t happy, he recalled his grandfather saying. When they get like that, best just leave ‘em be ‘til they calm back down.
Unfortunately, given that this was not a horse that lived in a stable, and was rather his partner who lived in the same apartment, Randy wasn’t sure he had the luxury of just leaving her be. Especially not if she was actually a demon.
“What are you trying to say?” Pran said.
He pointed to her feet. “Hooves,” he replied. “I'm trying to say that I saw you have god damn hooves.”
At first, Pran looked puzzled. Then, she looked plain angry. That angry fizzled into a look of reluctant resignation. She opened her mouth. She shut it again just as fast. She had the look of someone who wanted to argue, wanted to protest, but knew that that they didn’t have a digitigrade, hoofed leg to stand on. A wordless growl of impotent frustration came from behind tightly sealed lips. With naked hesitation, Pran pulled the towels aside.
Randy hoped - vainly, he knew - that, perhaps this would be like some sort of magic trick, where she’d yank back the towel and reveal that it had all been some illusion, of a sort. Of course, he wasn’t so lucky. Sure enough - the hooves were still there, as were the busted remains of her socks and weird, ungulate legs. With the jig decidedly up, she allowed her partner to study the bizarre sight in front of him, her cheeks burning roughly the same shade of red as a santa hat.
“There,” she huffed. She braced herself with both hands on the floor. Randy could see now that her fingers looked more like hooves than human digits, and each of them clicking rather than slapping against the tile. “Yes. Very astute observation, Randy. I have hooves.”
Randy clasped his hands to his chest. “Why - why are you barking at me?”
“I'm not barking,” Pran barked.
“Well, I - I mean - you're yelling at me like I'm the one who did something wrong.”
“I told you,” Pran hissed. “Don't! Come in!”
Randy gave a bitter, bemused laugh. “Oh, yeah. So I wouldn't see that, apparently, you've… somehow been hiding from me the fact you have goat legs!”
“Goat?” Pran sounded more hurt than offended, and she wore the same face she did whenever she caught him telling a lie about the quality of her cooking. “I am - I’m not a god damn goat!?” The tone of her voice implied that even she wasn’t entirely sure tha she wasn’t a goat.
“I didn’t say you were a goat!” Randy protested. “I said that you have goat legs, god damn it! Which you do!”
Pran, somehow, found the audacity to scoff, as if, somehow, Randy was the one out of line here, and not the person that was currently and inexplicably sitting on the floor with goat legs in place of the human ones they had not even a day ago. “They’re not goat legs, you ass. Deer.” She placed one of her weird, black hands up by her thigh, and sharply drew it down all the way to her ankle, as if to display just how not goat they were. “They’re deer legs.”
Goat. Deer. Randy weighed the two animals in his mind, comparing and contrasting them for a brief moment before asking himself what the point of it all was.
“Okay? And that makes this any less weird… how, exactly?”
Pran opened her mouth, but the only sound that came out was a groan that was something between a pained groan and a frustrated growl. Randy wasn’t sure - was she in physical agony? Or was she just mad? Randy blinked, and both of Pran’s hands were raised. She stared up at him with the look of a sulking child.
He blinked again. Unfortunately, Pran’s hands remained as weird as they had a moment before. It really did look as if each digit was some sort of hard, inflexible piece of hoof rather than a finger, but they were all bending and flexing like one might in a defiance of all logic. Pran stretched a little further and splayed each one of her strange hoof-fingers out, her brows furrowing even deeper over her eyes. He noticed that her scowling lips looked darker than usual. Maybe it was a trick of the eyes - he never really sat there and focused on her lips before, and the exact shade of pink that they were, but, upon closer examination, he was certain that they had taken on a darker, almost plum-like shade of violet that hadn’t been immediately apparent when she was yelling. He had the feeling that the color wasn’t due to some bold new experiment with cosmetics, either. Her nose, too, he noticed, seemed unusually pale, with the smattering of freckles that had always been there, often easy to overlook, were starkly apparent.
For the first time since the night they’d met, Randy felt hesitant to touch his girlfriend. He reached out for her hands and found his fingers hovering just above hers.
“What?” Pran snapped. “If I was gonna bite you, I would have done it already.”
Randy closed his fingers around hers - if they could rightly be called fingers. To the touch, they were hard, but at the same time, they bent around his own in a way he hadn’t expected them to, and a way they didn’t look capable of moving. He steadied himself as Pran pulled, hauling herself up with a grunt of exertion. Even with her new legs, she was still shorter than he was, and he found himself looking down at her as she pulled on the hem of her sweater to hide what looked to be a trail of coarse brown hair that crept just above the waistline of her ruined leggings.
For a long, uncomfortable moment, the couple stared at one another as if they were strangers - Randy looking at Pran as if he’d never seen her before, and Pran looking at Randy as if he was a random person who’d just rear-ended her car.
Randy’s patience broke first, and his curiosity overpowered his good sense.
“So, um -” He paused and coughed into a fist. “What’s… what’s this all about?”
Again, Pran huffed as if he’d just asked a stupid question, instead of one that was completely valid.
“Well,” she said. “Screw it. You’ve seen too much now. Might as well just say it.” She planted her hands on either side of her hips. “I’m a reindeer.”
Individually, all of the words made sense, but, together, they refused to come together. Like a broken string of computer code, every time Randy’s brain tried to process it, the result was an error, but, unlike a computer, it provided no indication as to where the break in logic was. The only output this data in his mind put out was a single word that eventually forced its way out his throat in a coarse bark.
“Huh?”
Pran sighed. She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Let me - I’ll - let me walk you through it.” She placed both of her hands on her chest. "I?”
Randy nodded. That part checked out.
“Am - as in the present form of the word be. You follow?”
“Okay. You - you don’t have to talk to me like I’m an idiot, here.”
“I’m not,” Pran protested.
“Well, no. You kind of are. Like - yes. I can see that you… you are, ah…” His eyes ran up and down Pran’s body. She watched with her arms crossed and a sour look on her face, which told him that his next words were best chosen judiciously and particularly. He coughed to stall for time, giving himself a precious few seconds to settle on just using the word that she’d used - just to be safe. “You are… a reindeer. Partially.” The words didn’t feel right as they left his mouth.
Pran did not protest this claim - probably because it was one she was making, herself - but way she further narrowed her eyes suggested that he was still on this ice, and would be smart to tread lightly.
“However,” he said. He clapped his hands together and pressed them to his lips as he continued to study the various changes to his girlfriend’s anatomy. It took no small amount of willpower to keep both his volume at a reasonable level and the increasing, feverish blend of panic and confusion currently pumping through his heart like nitromethane from leaking into his voice as he said, “I… I think the problem I’m really having trouble with here is… why.”
For her part, drew deep breaths through flared nostrils, her dark lips pressed together in a tight line as she, too, visibly regulated her emotions.
“Well,” Pran started, a bit of an edge still present in her voice. “The thing is…” Her eyes flickered shut and she inhaled deeply. Whatever she was about to say, it was obvious that she didn’t want to say it, which made Randy wonder if he really wanted to know what it was. Pran exhaled. She opened her eyes. Then, plainly, soberly, with complete and uncomfortable sincerity, answered his question.
“You know Santa’s reindeer?”
“Are… are you about to tell me I’ve been dating one of Santa’s reindeer?” The question practically jumped out of Randy’s mouth.
Pran’s lips turned down in a scowl. “No.” Before Randy could figure out whether or not that was a good answer, Pran added, “My parents are.”
Randy choked. On what, he didn’t know, since nothing was in his mouth, but he still found himself sputtering like he was gagging on something lodged in his throat before spitting out the words that had jammed in it. “S-Santa? Like - the Santa? There’s a Santa?”
Pran nodded slowly, with an air of grim, almost morbid resignation. “Well, legally, his name is Kristoffer Kringle, but - for all intents and purposes, yes,” she said plainly.
“You’re telling me Santa’s real?” Randy gasped.
Pran’s composure completely fell apart in time with his own.
“That’s the part you’re hung up on here!?”
Randy nodded. “How could I not be?”
Pran bared her teeth with a growl. She gripped the top of the Seahawk’s cap and yanked it off, pointing one of her hard, black fingers at one of the two small, nubby, velvet-covered growths peeking through her blonde hair.
“I’m growing horns!” she hissed. “And you’re more surprised by fucking Santa?”
Randy balked. “How was I - Pran, you were wearing a hat! How was I supposed to see those?”
Pran look at the hat still clenched in her hand as if she’d forgotten about it over the few moments that had elapsed, and then grimaced at it as if it had personally offended her. With a huff, she threw it on the ground.
“Whatever!” she snapped. “The existence of Santa should not be the most shocking part of all… all this!” Pran waved her arms in an arc, encapsulating all this in a gesture.
“Actually,” Randy snapped back. “The existence of a man who lives in the North pole and flies around the world in a single night and delivers presents made by elves to every child on planet Earth is a whole lot weirder than you growing horns, Pran."
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What’s what supposed to mean?”
Pran opened her mouth, the beginnings of a retort already beginning to materialize when a series of quick, light knocks against the front door silenced her. The couple looked towards the door, which, from the bathroom, with the door open, could be seen.
“Shit,” Pran said under her breath. “That’s probably the neighbors.”
The idea of fighting to the point that neighbors would come to check on the situation struck Randy with an icy, lancing sensation of fear. Especially because he didn’t even know their neighbors, which made him wonder if it wasn’t the police, who had been called by their anonymous neighbors, in which case…
“Good going,” Pran whispered.
Randy shot her an ugly look. He slapped his hands against his chest. “Me?”
“You yelled first,” said Pran.
Randy grit his teeth. “You’re the one that’s been a reindeer for four f-”
Whoever was on the other side of the door knocked again. And they probably weren’t going away. Randy felt guilty for even thinking about it, but, after this sudden, inexplicable, and unpredictable turn of events, he kind of wanted to send Pran to answer the door, just to see what would happen. But, he reminded himself - the only person who was having a worse day at the moment was her, and if she was… testy… well, that was understandable. He could say the same for himself, of course, but he also wasn’t the one with a pair of velvet-covered horns sprouting from his skull.
“Just - stay here,” he whispered. “Shut the door. I got this.”
Pran didn’t need to be told twice. No sooner had Randy stepped out of the bathroom was the door shut behind him, and the useless lock engaged again, as if it mattered any. Randy took a moment to compose himself, running a hand through his hair, taking slow, measured breaths to steady his heart rate again, and approached the door, all the while inwardly offering prayers to any god that might listen to please, please, please not let it be the glowering face of a cop on the other side of the peephole.
If Santa, of all things, was real, and his girlfriend was actually… was she some sort of reindeer hybrid? Was she turning into a reindeer? She hadn’t specified, and, really, it didn’t matter, because the fact that it was happening suddenly made the possibility of higher powers of any stripe seem much more likely than it had when he’d woken up that morning.
Randy stood by the door. He hesitated before bringing his eye to the peephole, but, when he did, a wave of relief washed over him - one so powerful that he physically rocked on his legs. With a smile on his face and a laugh in his throat, he unlocked the door, opened it, exchanged a few words with the man on the other side, and closed it again. The sound of the shutting door was followed by the click of the bathroom lock being undone. It opened, just a sliver, and Pran poked her now horned head out.
“Randy.”
Randy said nothing. He stood there in front of the door, feeling the palpable sensation of stress melting off him like snow, warmed by the immense relief radiating from in his chest.
“Randy!” Pran hissed. “Who was it?”
He shook his head with a low chuckle, bemused by the entire situation. “Man,” he sighed. “I got so caught up in, uh… in all that,” he said, cribbing Pran’s own terminology. He turned and held up the plastic bag, printed with the words THANK YOU in bold, red letters, for Pran to see. “I forgot that I ordered us take-out.”
To anyone who suspected that Pran was, like, actually an elf, or related to Santa Claus - I apologize.
I won’t lie - my first impulse is to litter my stories with profanity, as I use it rather liberally in casual conversation, often to a fault, and keeping it to a minimum in my writing is, at times, quite difficult. So, I allowed myself exactly one tactical F-bomb for this story, which I used here, and proved to be an exceedingly difficult challenge.
Fucking Reindeer. Nice one Y.A.
I, of course, thought she was related to Santa at first, but having her actually be a reindeer is much more gnarly and clever. My only complaint is that Pran is kind of a bitch, and I feel like poor Randy deserves better.