Horror - Flash
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs. No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.
All rights reserved. Bullshit Christmas Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026
BULLSHIT CHRISTMAS
Douglas Swain white knuckles the steering wheel of one of the Greyland County pickup trucks. He’s mumbling to himself about the total bullshit of Christmas and the total bullshit of tinsel and wreaths and gifts and goddamned reindeer.
Snow’s falling, but the plows have been busy—Christmas Eve notwithstanding—and Swain’s having zero trouble maneuvering the exit ramp from Highway #1 back to Jonesville. He’s been on the road for six hours already, and over the course of the last month, he’s done a different but similar route once, sometimes twice, every day.
Maybe it was the Peanuts’ Twelve Days of Christmas that got him, maybe it was Mariah Carey or David Bowie and Bing Crosby. Maybe it was just time somebody did something about all the bullshit.
Swain hits the interior light and glances in the rearview mirror to be sure the payload’s still in the truck bed. It is. Wriggling and kicking even all these hours later, but it’s still there. He flicks the blinker and pulls to the industrial area just north of town. The streetlights cease, but the headlights cut the night just fine. He reaches the padlocked chain-link fence and pops out of the truck.
“Puh-puh-plea-ease,” the voice says from the truck bed, so cold his teeth are snap-chattering together. “Yu-yu-you guh-got the the the wrong guy!”
Swain clenches his jaw and says, “Bullshit,” more to himself than the man with wrists and knees tied together, a black hood over his head.
Fence open, Swain drives through and pops out again to lock it up behind him. Not that someone’s likely to swing by at 11:30 PM on Christmas Eve. Not here where the stink—if you ain’t used to it—will burn tears from eyes and tickle the gag reflex. Swain’s back behind the wheel and rolls another half-mile. He kills the engine. The yard lights around the waste treatment plant never go out while the grid’s up, so he’s seeing just fine.
“Bullshit snow,” Swain hisses as he opens the tailgate and grabs the man’s big black boot. The walkway is under about a foot of powder from just the last twelve hours.
“Puh-puh-please luh-let muh-me go!”
The man’s irritating Swain something fierce and he yanks him along the slick bedliner to the soft-packed snow. “I will,” he says, “but you gotta cooperate. Now, march.”
The man gets up and starts shuffling. They go about forty paces. Swain pulls the man’s red jacket to halt him and steps out front to take the lead. He withdraws a keyring and opens the heavy steel door. The stink pounds afresh and the man forgets his plight. “Cuh-Christ! Wuh-what is that?”
“Move it, Santa.” Swain’s behind and pushing again.
The man starts to tell him all over from the beginning that he’s got the wrong guy. Probably wanted the Santa from Lakeview or Springmount, a different mall altogether. Like he hasn’t heard the rumors or seen the news reports, like Swain’s looking for a particular bullshit Santa.
Their footfalls clang heavy on steel grating and the sound takes Swain back to childhood, when he was ten and his mother just beat breast cancer after enough chemotherapy to pret’ near do her in, and his father was behind the wheel, ten days back on the wagon, and there was that drunk Santa, fake beard dangling beneath his chin as he ran the red light in his Toyota SUV and smucked into the Swain family Chevy sedan.
Beat cancer?
Beat drinking?
Bullshit Santa says too bad, gonna die in the street and leave a little orphan named Dougie, oh, but maybe a little extra for your trouble yet…
Swain pulls the drifting half of his conscious mind from reverie and stops the man and says, “Right there’s fine,” and turns Santa so when he pulls off the hood he’s facing Swain.
The man screams and jerks backward, trips—they always do—upon seeing Swain’s stretched and shiny face. Time hasn’t been kind and his lips pull out around his gums and ridges of stiff flesh hood his eyes. His nose is flat on the end and he grows no hair anywhere on his face. The surgeon was junk, but to be fair, it was the ‘90s, and an insurance deal, so no bells or whistles included.
The Santa drops into the sewage treatment pool and immediately starts gagging and gasping. He can’t kick or wade and he sinks. Swain waits, leaning on the railing next to the opening. It’s 90 seconds before the last bullshit Santa rises to the surface.
19 red backs bob like apples in the thick brown sludge. Swain knows none of these men is the man who killed his parents and destroyed his face, but that doesn’t matter, when it comes to bullshit Christmas, it’s the thought that counts.
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