LSF Publications: spanking fiction ebooks

Blue Christmas
by Austin Carr
A young man, lost and adrift over his girlfriend leaving during the holidays, finds peculiar solace at a local bar...

It took me over two and a half decades of life, but I was finally getting a handle on the whole 'Bah, humbug' deal.

Victorian literature turned to film wasn't really my deal. It seemed like a lot of impossibly stiff people dressing in improbably engineered clothing trying to get their mouths around ridiculously awkward sentences, and my exposure was pretty much limited to the two dozen or so renditions of Dickens' A Christmas Carol that inundated TV screens every December. For my money, which admittedly was limited, Mr. Magoo's turn as Scrooge lapped the field, although I always wondered what Snoopy could have done with the role had a Peanuts version been completed.

But this year I was feeling a little more kinship with old Ebeneezer. Granted, the old guy had a lot more reasons for bitterness than I did. I didn't have a dead partner spending half the company money on enough chain accessories to make even the most Goth chick envious and then dragging the ensemble along my nice hardwood floors. Nor did my parents get so lashed to the hookah pipe that they named me Ebeneezer, although Morgan wasn't exactly a social resume enhancer. But I did get the same holiday brush-off from the girlfriend. Okay, maybe not quite the same. Old Scrooge got the stiff arm because he loved cash too much; I apparently got the brush because I didn't have enough of it, and limited prospects of turning that reality around. Either way you looked at it, the girl was gone, and I could feel myself well on my way to curmudgeon status.

So now I thought I understood the translation. "Bah" meant you were screwed and "Humbug" obviously had something to do with double penetration. I looked sourly at the strings of Christmas lights adorning the house. Quite a few hours of labor invested in that money-sucking undertaking, and all of it because Shelly was a Christmas creature of the first rank. The shinier the baubles, the better she liked it. I didn't mind the effort, since it seemed to make it more likely that my own baubles would get properly shined. Now my baubles were on their own, and all I could see was a number of burnt out bulbs and sagging lines that I had no interest in fixing.

I couldn't stand being around the house, looking at a bed with only one side rumpled, a sink with one bowl in it, and a Christmas tree with a handful of presents that Shelly would never open. I'd already picked up one and put it in my shirt pocket; a gold tennis bracelet with a trio of small diamonds as accents. It wasn't a Faberge piece by any stretch, but the young saleslady had seemed wistful at the purchase, which was a good enough barometer for me.