The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

"My lunch is coming up, a rum-pa-pa-pum," sang Gabe.

* * *

Meanwhile, the girls were running around the Santa Rosa Chapel, putting up decorations and preparing the table settings for a Lonesome Christmas. Lena Marquez was making her third circumnavigation of the room with a stepladder, some masking tape, and rolls of green and red crepe paper the size of truck tires. (Price Club in San Junipero only sold one size, evidently so you could decorate your entire ocean liner without making two trips.) The act of serial festooning had taken Lena's mind off her troubles, but now the little chapel was starting to resemble nothing more than the nest of a color-blind Ewok. If someone didn't intervene soon the Lonesome Christmas guests would be in danger of being asphyxiated in a festive dungeon of holiday bondage. Fortunately, as Lena was moving the ladder to make her fourth round, Molly Michon snaked a foot inside and pulled the chapel's double doors open; the wind from the growing storm swept in and tore the paper from the walls.

"Well, fuck!" said Lena.

The crepe paper swam in a vortex around the middle of the room, then settled into a great wad under one of the buffet tables Molly had set up to one side.

"I told you a staple gun would work better than masking tape," Molly said. She was holding three stainless-steel pans of lasagna and still managed to get the oak double doors closed against the wind with her feet. She was agile that way.

"This is a historical landmark, Molly. You can't just go shooting staples into the walls."

"Right, like that matters after Armageddon. Take these downstairs to the fridge," Molly said, handing the pans to Lena. "I'll get you the staple gun out of my car."

"What does that mean?" Lena asked. "Do you mean our relationships?"

But Molly had bounded back out through the double doors into the wind. She'd been making more and more cryptic comments like that lately. Like she was talking to someone in the room besides Lena. It was strange. Lena shrugged and headed back to the little room behind the altar and the steps that led downstairs.

Lena didn't like going into the basement of the chapel. It wasn't really a basement; it was more of a cellar: sandstone walls that smelled of damp earth, a concrete floor that had been poured without a vapor barrier fifty years after the cellar had been dug and so seeped moisture and formed a fine slime on top in the winter. Even when the stove was cranked and an electric heater turned on, it was never warm. Besides, the old, empty pews stored down there cast shadows that made her feel as if people were watching her.

"Mmmm, lasagna," said Marty in the Morning, your drive-time dead guy in the a.m. "Dudes and dudettes, the little lady has certainly outdone herself this time. Get a whiff of that?"

The graveyard was abuzz with moldy anticipation of the Lonesome Christmas party.

"It's highly inappropriate, that's what it is," said Esther. "I suppose it's better than that horrible Mavis Sand woman barbecuing again. And how is it that she's still alive, anyway? She's older than I am."

"Than dirt, you mean?" said Jimmy Antalvo, whose faceprint was still embedded in a telephone pole on the Pacific Coast Highway, where he'd hit it at age nineteen.

"Please, child, if you must be rude, at least be original," said Malcolm Cowley. "Don't compound the tedium with cliche."

"My wife used to put a layer of hot Italian sausage between every layer of cheese and noodles," said Arthur Tannbeau. "Now, that was some good eatin'."

"Sort of explains the heart attack, too, doesn't it?" said Bess Leander. Being poisoned had left a bitter taste in her mouth that seven years of death could not wash away.

"I thought we agreed not to talk about COD guilt," said Arthur. "Didn't we agree on that?" COD was shorthand of the dead for Cause of Death.

"We did agree," said Marty in the Morning.

"I do hope that they sing 'Good King Wenceslas, " said Esther.

"Shut the fuck up about 'Good King Wenceslas, would you? No one knows the words to 'Good King Wenceslas, no one ever has."