This Is Christmas Metazen

Sometime later I woke on the couch to the sound of my parents thrashing about in the Christmas tree. A bird with blue feathers and a plumed tail trilled frightfully. The punch bowl was empty, upended onto the carpet. The bird few from the tree into the curtains, then reemerged seconds later to stare down at my parents from a light fxture. I had the impression that the bird was taunting my parents, so harshly did it tweet. My father punched at the light fxture, shattering the light bulb. An electric-blue fash lit the room, then everything went pitch-dark.

“We’re never going to catch him,” Mother said.

A moment later, the bird alighted on my head. Until then, I had never heard a bird’s wispy breaths, or sensed its frantic heartbeats. It must have been as terrifed as I. What I feared most was that, hoping to annihilate the bird, my father would make a wild lunge at me. My parents would tell me later that the bird sprang out of the nest in the tree while I was sleeping. How it had got there, they couldn’t say. My parents opened windows in hopes of chasing it outside, but after this failed, things turned nasty. Now the bird was on my head, its plumed tail feathers tickling my nose.

“Hold still, son,” Father said. “I think I hear him.”

“Be careful,” Mother said.

“I will.”

Loaded up on boozed eggnog, my father was in no condition to be careful. He barreled into me shoulder-frst, pummeling me into the wall. The bird dug its feet into my head, and the next thing I remember, my parents were standing over me, gasping.

I spent three days in the hospital and returned home with bandages on my head and a cast on my right arm. The tree was gone and nothing was mentioned about the gifts that were piled around it, but almost every day thereafter we’d fnd pine needles in the strangest places—mixed into my box of Cheerios, or jammed into the television remote control chamber where the batteries were supposed to be. Sometimes I still fnd them, the needles, lodged behind my ear where the Christmas Bird scratched me worst.