Okay, fair warning, I was listening to Fairytale of New York, which is not exactly the most cheerful Christmas song.   

And I had that lyric stuck in my head, Happy Christmas you Arse, Pray God it’s Our Last. But I thought it said Thank God it’s Our last, and I was like… no it ain’t, you’re young. And besides, why’d you want it to be?

Why yes, I argue with song lyrics all the time.  Where’ve you been?

Fae apoc, but human protagonists or at least not using magic or the Law. 

Content warning aside from “not really cheerful” is… this is set in the middle of an apocalypse.  Implied off-screen deaths. 

Um, but now that I’ve written a whole microfiction of lead-in to this story…

🎄

Happy Christmas your arse

I pray God it’s our last (but no, not really)

They bombed Athens (Georgia) on December 23rd, and that — that was that. 

We’d been doing our best to pretend that the world was going to go back to normal, denying reality to beat the band, going on with our lives — work and school, pinball and darts Thursdays and Fridays and hikes in the park on the weekends; the kids were still playing soccer and baseball, doing cheerleading and gymnastics and karate and Kung fu, and all we’d done to acknowledge that the world was quite likely to change was to grocery shop a little more intently, give a little more money to charities, and make sure all our camping gear was up to snuff. 

And pray. We’d done a lot of that, but silently, sitting in the back of the church and praying to god that this was just a bad dream, that all those people in Seattle, in Las Vegas, in New York City, in Greece and Spain and Russia, Japan and India and Zimbabwe and Liberia, that they’d all be okay, that some of them would be okay, that even one person, one family, would bee okay. 

But mostly, mostly we pretended it was going to get better.  Mostly, we pretended it was another problem that we couldn’t do anything about, that was just somewhere nearby and not… not really real.  Continue reading →