The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

"Molly, after five years together, I'm not sure we're supposed to be nasty." But even as he said it, Theo was moving toward the big evergreen, looking for the ropes that secured it to the Honda.

Over in the graveyard, the dead, who had been listening all along, began to murmur anxiously about the new Christmas tree and the impending sex show.

* * *

They'd heard it all, the dead: crying children, wailing widows, confessions, condemnations, questions that they could never answer; Halloween dares, raving drunks-invoking the ghosts or just apologizing for drawing breath; would-be witches, chanting at indifferent spirits, tourists rubbing the old tombstones with paper and charcoal like curious dogs scratching at the grave to get in. Funerals, confirmations, communions, weddings, square dances, heart attacks, junior-high hand jobs, wakes gone awry, vandalism, Handel's Messiah, a birth, a murder, eighty-three Passion plays, eighty-five Christmas pageants, a dozen brides barking over tombstones like taffeta sea lions as the best man gave it to them dog style, and now and again, couples who needed something dark and smelling of damp earth to give their sex life a jolt: the dead had heard it.

"Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah!" Molly cried from her seat astraddle the town constable, who was squirming on an uncomfortable bed of plastic roses a few feet above a dead schoolteacher.

"They always think they're the first ones. Ooooo, let's do it in the graveyard," said Bess Leander, whose husband had served her foxglove tea with her last breakfast.

"I know, there are three used condoms on my grave from this week alone," said Arthur Tannbeau, citrus farmer, deceased five years.

"How can you tell?"

They heard everything, but their vision was limited.

"The smell."

"That's disgusting," said Esther, the schoolteacher.

It's hard to shock the dead. Esther was feigning disgust.

"What's all the racket? I was sleeping." Malcolm Cowley, antique book dealer, myocardial infarction over Dickens.

"Theo Crowe, the constable, and his crazy wife doing it on Esther's grave," said Arthur. "I'll bet she's off her meds."

"Five years they've been married and they're still at this kind of thing?" Since her death, Bess had taken a strong antirelationship stance.

"Postmarital sex is so pedestrian." Malcolm again, ever bored with provincial, small-town death.

"Some postmortem sex, that's what I could use," said the late Marty in the Morning, KGOB radio's top DJ with a bullet — a pioneer carjack victim back when hair bands ruled the airwaves. "A rave in the grave, if you get my meaning."

"Listen to her. I'd like to slip the bone to her," said Jimmy Antalvo, who'd kissed a pole on his Kawasaki to remain ever nineteen.

"Which one?" Marty cackled.

"The new Christmas tree sounds lovely," said Esther. "I do hope they sing 'Good King Wenceslas' this year."

"If they do," spouted the moldy book dealer, "you'll find me justly spinning in my grave."

"You wish," said Jimmy Antalvo. "Hell, I wish."

The dead did not spin in their graves, they did not move — nor could they speak, except to one another, voices without air. What they did was sleep, awakening to listen, to chat a bit, then, eventually, to never wake again. Sometimes it took twenty years, sometimes as long as forty before they took the big sleep, but no one could remember hearing a voice from longer ago than that.

* * *

Six feet above them, Molly punctuated her last few convulsive climactic bucks with, "I — AM — SO — GOING — TO — WASH — YOUR — VOLVO — WHEN — WE — GET — HOME! YES! YES! YES!"

Then she sighed and fell forward to nuzzle Theo's chest as she caught her breath.

"I don't know what that means," Theo said.

"It means I'm going to wash your car for you."

"Oh, it's not a euphemism, like, wash the old Volvo. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge?"

"Nope. It's your reward."

Now that they were finished, Theo was having a hard time ignoring the plastic flowers that were impressed in his bare backside. "I thought this was my reward." He gestured to her bare thighs on either side of him, the divots her knees had made in the dirt, her hair played out across his chest.