A Box Under the Christmas Tree Looks Suspiciously Like a PlayStation 5

A box wrapped in green and red plaid paper, which looks suspiciously like a PlayStation 5, appears under the Christmas tree. Like, almost three feet tall by ten inches wide, this box, not just a console jankily wrapped in paper—the things have a distinctive look, like a science fiction toaster.

At the moment, a PlayStation 5 is impossible to find at Target, Walmart, etc. You can buy one online for almost twice its official price and you’re likely to get scammed. 

For this and other reasons, such as existential guilt that I have better shit to do with my free time (reading, writing, exercising), which is ample after losing my job—our boutique bookstore finally closed last month—I told my wife I didn’t want a PlayStation 5. If I ever get one, I’d wait until they were available in stores and cheaper.

I’m not handy. I don’t own any tools. My wife is, and she’s got a whole, for real toolbox. Today, while she’s at work advising students at the university, I check in her toolbox for measuring tape and don’t find any. I do find a ruler in the drawer of my stepson’s school supplies. 

I Google the exact dimensions of the PlayStation 5 box.

The box under the tree is just a little too short, half an inch, but maybe the measurements I found online aren’t up to date. Maybe this is some kind of new packaging. Second-hand and repackaged by eBay scalpers. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what she’d buy for me that would come in a rectangular box this size. 

I peek through a fold of wrapping paper. I find a loose place where I can just slightly lift and peep in with a flashlight—gently, so as not to rip the paper. The box inside is white. The PlayStation 5 box is white. I accidentally tear the paper, just the tiniest bit, trying to catch a glimpse of the logo or any writing, so I quit.

When my wife comes home from work, she sets immediately to cooking dinner. I’m a miserable cook. She dislikes anything I make and isn’t polite about it. She’s the kind of honest that doesn’t smile and eat shitty food. She wanted to go to cooking school but couldn’t afford it. She can bake difficult things like sticky toffee pudding and did so when my mom asked last Christmas. 

I follow her around the kitchen, wanting to ask her about the mystery box, and worry she’ll notice I tampered with it. I can think of nothing but the box and seem distracted until she finally asks me what’s up? 

I break down and ask. 

(By the way, I’ve already called my mom to tell that I suspect my wife bought me a PlayStation 5. My mom says that sounds like something only my wife would do. She means that as a compliment.) 

I confess everything—the measuring, the peeking.

Well, I try to, anyway; she cuts me off at the “tearing the wrapping paper” part and tells me it’s a pasta maker. 

I start crying. Feel helpless. Mortified. 

Besides books, which I normally buy for myself, I haven’t asked for anything for Christmas in years. We’re poor. Not miserably so, just fine. I don’t enjoy shopping or spending money. 

She says it’s okay to want things. 

When we go to, say, Target or TJ Maxx, and my wife just goofs around and browses things while I stand silently—like a dick—and think, “junk,” ruining the whole normal American thing for her.

I lie, promise I’m alright, that a pasta maker sounds fun, and we talk about cooking pasta, our mutual love of pasta, the time we’ll spend together, how I’ll learn something (improve my cooking; just improve at something), but I’m half talking and half listening. I’m entirely hoping she’s lying, that it is a PlayStation 5 and this has been subterfuge, that somewhere there’s a PlayStation 5 hiding—in her closet, in the attic, in her office, somewhere.

After Steel Magnolias

With a deep and queer passion, I live in delusion. If I were to die before her, heaven forbid, knock on wood, my mother will perform a tremendous impersonation of Sally Field from Steel Magnolias. A sublime performance in that greatest of films. She would buy a dress for the occasion, a stylish black number snatched off the rack from David Jones. She would match it as best she could to the shoes she had. She will clutch at the soil on my grave and scream. She will rip and tear at her hair and jewellery. My father would passively tell her to calm down and to get a hold of herself. She will swipe him away with a large hand.

“I wanna know why, I wanna know! Why my son’s life is over!”

My sister will heave my mother up from the fresh grave. Both women will struggle to compose themselves, dabbing their cheeks, eyes, and nose. My sister will dust my mother’s knees and gently scold her for getting dirt on the bottom of a brand-new dress. Our mother will look stoic for a moment only to lift her head to the sky and howl. Like a wild animal. My beloved husband will have already driven off to the wake, to sip an icy old fashioned and fan themselves with the funerary program.

“I’m fine… I’m fine… I’m fine!”

Mother takes a manicured fist and smacks it into the palm of her other hand and swears viciously. Like her mother did and her mother before her. My father would again tell her to calm down with his shaky, emotional voice. Repetition would not enhance the phrase’s effectiveness. My mother ignores her blubbering husband and rants with vitriol rising in her voice, eyeliner moving to stain her tired face.

“I don’t think I can take this… I… I don’t think I can take this! I just wanna hit something! I just wanna hit somebody… till they feel as bad as I do! I just wanna hit something! I wanna hit it hard!”

Again she stumbles. My sister will back away as she drives her hand deep into the soil and squeeze a handful of it in her fist.

“I’m supposed to go first!”

She struggles to hold herself upright. Her ankle will bend at an awkward angle. She has sprained it painfully but will only become aware of this tomorrow morning as the alcohol leaves her system.

“I’ve always been ready to go first!”

 She will weep thick tears and stain the words on my small tombstone. At the wake, she will get so emotional she will try to blow her nose with the funerary program and get a paper cut just beneath her nose. My cousins will grin and snicker at the red mark and say Mother got it shaving her beard off.

In his own very particular kind of mourning, weeks from now, my father will plant over my grave a magnolia tree. All day my father will slave over a hole in the ground. Dressed in a stained white skivvies and tradie’s shorts. He will dig it alone with nothing more than a shovel, despite the gravedigger turning up as the sun begins to set, with a post hole digger that gets it done in a quarter of the time and with no sweat.

The magnolia tree will grow tall and straight, unassisted by unnatural fertiliser, to close to its full height of 5 metres tall. Children with their parents, on visits to the graves of grandparents and great uncles they cannot remember, will pluck the creamy flowers to leave as gifts on stranger’s tombstones. A lonely woman, whose parents are all dead now and her girlfriend will sit under it and weep. Years later, cemetery garden maintenance will be instructed to trim it back in the winter. But they will be pruned too far and the following year later it will die. All that will be left of my crumbling grave is a rather small tombstone and a dead magnolia tree. My mother will another hole in this cemetery. My father will be quietly cremated and his ashes scattered on the property his second wife owned with him. My sister will tear at the soil and earth holding my crumbling body until she can hold me aloft. From my rotting mouth, I sing to her.

“Behold the Ship of Theseus”.

On the way to the wake, Father plays ‘Past Carin’ by the Bushwackers Band on the radio. The thrum of the guitar and heavy lyrics fill everyone’s hearts. My sister whispers, almost to herself, that the song reminds her of that Australian film, Acute Misfortune. The artist Adam Cullen dying alone on his stripped mattress. Mother is moisturising her dirty and red hands with the creams she keeps in the glovebox.

“That is awful, just awful”

Slowly, the tears will dry and the sniffling will stop. The group’s individual gazes move out to stare at the landscape, the vanishing road beneath the car and the slow-moving cattle stomping through the passing fields.

No comment (Reflections of Bathsheba)

The rooftop tiles stayed warm long after sunset. They reminded her of her home in the desert…her feet buried in the sand waiting for Father to come home with the sheep…her mother by the fire, pressing the dough against the hot stone. She would listen to them talking softly as the stars slowly overcame the night sky until nothing was felt except their brilliance.

She wondered…why had she left? The answer came back…everyone did. The city’s gravity was too great.

The rooftop became her escape after the streets had wound her heart too tight.

She used to sit there with her knees pulled to her chest, watching the steam from the bath drift over the ledge. Lights from the palace reflected in the water, red and gold. A drone passed once. She thought it was a bird. That was before.

The photo came two days later. Someone else’s angle, taken from above. Her hand resting on the stone rail. A twist of steam. The soft curl of her neck. 

My good side, she thought later.

Winced.

She didn’t read the first headlines. The phone buzzed until the battery died. When she finally turned it on again, the word trending blinked in the corner. Her name, everywhere, spelled wrong and shouted loud. Bad AI made her eyes move in unnaturally. Looking where she wouldn’t have looked.

He posted a video: soft lighting, piano music, tear at the corner of his eye. He used the word mistake like a lifeline, tossed it into a crowd and waited for applause. They gave it to him.

The messages kept coming:
Witch.
Whore.
Queen.

A lawyer asked if she had known he was married.
A reporter asked what she had been wearing.
Someone else asked if she would “share her side.”

She closed the door softly after that. Curtains drawn. Phone face-down.

Later, someone knocked to tell her about Uriah. Sand, shrapnel, friendly fire. A rearrangement of words that meant the same thing: gone.

She remembered how he used to hum when he shaved. Always the same song, just the melody. The sink would be wet when he finished. She would wipe it dry with the edge of her sleeve.

His toothbrush was still in the cup by the sink. She threw it out. Then took it back out. Rinsed it. Left it on the counter.

The palace moved on. The man who had wept on camera returned to the pulpit, then to the boardroom. Then to the throne.

She moved into a smaller place with peeling paint in the stairwell. No one recognized her there. She bought a new phone and didn’t log in. The bath in this apartment was deeper. The water sounded different. More distant, somehow.

Sometimes, when the light caught the tile just right, she could see her own reflection. Not her face…just the outline. A shimmer. A body interrupted.

One night, she poured salt into the bath. Not much. Just enough to feel the difference. The water held her more gently that way. Her eyes stung. She didn’t mind.

She stopped watching the news. She stopped explaining.

Online, her page still exists. The last post remains:
Her hand, a white robe, her neck just so.

Her good side.

The comments are off.

The archivist

Cork, Present Day.

The rain turned the city to shadowed glass. Clíodhna Feldman sat in the archives, watching mist creep across the River Lee. The air felt wrong, too still, too thick, like paper soaked in old breath. Each keystroke echoed louder than it should, as if tapping the lid of a coffin.

The obituary blinked onto the screen. Harold Simms, 47, sudden exsanguination in Toronto. No evidence of foul play.

Simms. A name she had flagged years ago in a Hampshire record from the 1500s. She had dismissed it as coincidence. But then came the others: Vermont, Dakar, Tasmania. All descended from a militia that razed an Irish village in 1494. All deaths by blood loss. All called natural.

She opened her private logbook and wrote beneath the red heading: Lineage 12C – Mallow Incident.

Later, at dinner, an elderly woman leaned close, her eyes flickering like moths against flame.

 “You’ve seen the pattern,” she said.

Clíodhna nodded.

“Archivists call it the Red Thread. It moves through bloodlines like a needle through flesh, sealing wounds not to heal but to hush. Those who see it are marked. Those who feel it are already sewn in.”

Clíodhna swallowed. “Who is he?”

“He was fae once. Then something older bound him. Now he walks among us with purpose. He is the blade of a promise kept to gods no longer worshipped.”

Clíodhna thought of her dream: a man in a black suit, cane tapping, fog swallowing him whole.

“He doesn’t kill innocents,” the woman added. “Only the blood‑guilty. Only those who carry the line of the massacre.”

“And me?”

“Because you remember. Because your people kept the Book when others forgot.”

When Clíodhna finally saw him, the rain bent around his body. His hat cast no shadow. A busker’s saxophone spat a discordant note as he passed, and a dog blocks away began to howl.

Black linen suit. Ivory shirt. Panama hat. The cane shimmered briefly, eagle‑headed, then plain again. Its rhythm matched her heartbeat. He turned, nodded once, and kept walking.

The nod echoed down her spine. Recognition, not of her name, but of her role.

That night she logged another death. Bridget McHale, 38, Durban. Hampshire blood. No family. The body collapsed inward, veins shriveled to black threads, mouth open in silence, eyes peeled wide as if they had seen something vast before the blood turned to vapor.

Clíodhna whispered a prayer, then closed the file.

Her dreams were not quiet but silent, as if the world itself had stopped listening. No wind, no voices, no cane tapping. Only the sensation of something stitching beneath her skin.

When she woke, red pinpricks marked her wrists, constellations she did not recognize.