Aunt Phyllis is Yours This Christmas

He rings the doorbell again, shivering a bit in the chilly air. He knows someone must be home — all the lights in the house are on.

The elderly woman he is holding by the arm is shaking much worse than him, though there’s no telling the difference between her shivering from the cold and the shakiness from her essential tremor. She has hair blue rinsed and curled into gunmetal coils, and her cheeks are rose red, more from the overapplication of rouge than from the cold. She has on a peacoat and an unseasonable combo of frumpy skirt and thin blouse she insisted on wearing. He rings the doorbell a third time before the door is finally opened.

“Doug?”

“She can’t stay with me.”

“But Doug, I’ve already got eight drunken swordsmen reenacting Stalin’s Great Purge in my dining room.”

“But Carol, it’s Christmas Eve and — .”

“I am painfully aware of that.”

A champagne bottle comes flying end over end out of the doorway, narrowly missing Doug and dotting them all with little drops of sweet alcohol. “What,” he asks, “is going on in there?”

“I told you,” Carol says, “the Purge.”

Doug cranes his neck around his sister. Sees the goings-on. There are white feathers floating down the stairwell…