The turkeys strutted around their yard for weeks, eating the little bits of birdseed on the ground that the birds dropped. Georgie’s father chased them off and they glared at him with their beady eyes and flared their wings like sparks flying from a fire.
“Georgie, chase them with me!” her father said, laughing. But Georgie shook her head, staring at the way their huge talons clenched the soil, and at how they sometimes seemed bigger in the shadow of the big fir tree out front. Something in the way their too-small heads bobbed on their long necks stirred a primal, instinctive fear inside Georgie, like an ancestral memory passed down from a coelacanth had lit up in her brain. Don’t move, it seemed to say. Stay still. You must make them think you are a bush or a stone.
His father just laughed and took her out for ice cream. He did that whenever Georgie acted afraid. Which, admittedly, was a lot. Two months ago, she’d jumped when the toaster had gone off in the lunchroom, and of course “Na-na-na Tucker,” the older third grader who scrunched his face at all the girls and screeched “na-na-na” at them, had seen it. Every day since, he’d tried to scare her with it in the lunchroom. One time he’d finagled an extension cord from the school closet and snuck up behind her with the toaster halfway across the cafeteria. The last few weeks, she’d eaten lunch in the bathroom.
On Christmas Eve, Georgie wanted to see Santa Claus. She pretty much figured he didn’t exist, because her father had done the “Ho Ho Ho” laugh at the supermarket to the cashier lady, and she’d said that if Santa Claus had come to town, would he like to try out her sleigh, and he’d responded that he might just do that if she was alright with him sliding through the chimney. And they’d both laughed, and Georgie had stared, and thought, If they’re not scared of making fun of Santa, then Santa must not exist.
But she had to be sure, because for a long time, her father hadn’t gotten any gifts from her mother, and maybe he’d just gotten used to the feeling.
“I’m going to watch for him,” she said to her father.
“Well, just remember, he knows when you’re awake, so don’t be surprised you don’t see him.” He ruffled her hair and sent her to bed with a plate of cookies “for Santa.”
She watched outside her bedroom window for an hour.
The turkeys rambled into the yard in the light of the moon, and she held her breath. One of them, the biggest one leading the others, twisted its head up to peer at her window, and she lurched back and splayed against the wall, her heart pounding.
The moonlight dimmed, and the shadows of the turkeys lengthened, and stretched, and something whuffed right outside her window, and the sound reminded her of when they’d gone to the zoo and the elephants had blown water out of their trunks. A glob of something sticky shot through the window and landed on her bed.
Do not move. Stay still.
She thought of ice cream. She thought of how her father chased the turkeys. She thought of how her father laughed with the cashier, and how he’d used to laugh that way with her mom before she’d left.
The shadows whirled in her room like leaves in the wind, the streetlight casting the pattern of scaly, leathery skin on her wall. A. Really. Big. Turkey.
She caught its reflection in the mirror hanging on her bedroom door. The turkey’s—no, the dinosaur’s eye—stared in through her window, darting around, searching for her.
It made a crek-crek-crek sound in its throat. Then the patterns reeled, and a gigantic tongue slithered through the window, paused as if testing the air, touched the plate of cookies, and slurped the entire thing into his maw.
The moonlight returned, and the dinosaur’s shadow shrank back down, down, down.
Georgie shuddered. She waited thirty seconds, or an eternity, in other words. Then she peeked out the window, even though the fear pounded behind her eyes.
The turkeys had roamed to another yard, nibbling at the neighbor’s birdseed. A sliver of the moon shone down. The coelacanth ghost in Georgie’s brain muttered something inaudible. Though she watched all night, the moon did not turn fully dark again.
The next morning, on Christmas, her father ruffled her hair. “So, squirt, did you see Santa Claus last night?”
I saw something with claws.
“. . . sort of?”
“Sounds like a dream.” He chortled and uncovered the big present he’d hidden in the closet. A bike. “Did you see him drop this one off? It’s for you to get away from those turkeys!”
She gave him a shaky grin, then handed him a picture she’d drawn of her, him, and the cashier lady in line at the store, with the words, “I like when you laugh.”
He stuck it up on the refrigerator, and said, in a wobbling voice, “Do you want some ice cream from the freezer? I’d like some ice cream.”
When she returned to school, she scooped some of the glob that the dinosaur had snotted on her bed into a large cup. When Na-na-na Tucker tried to scare her with the toaster, she still jumped, but she threw the cup at him, and the goop smeared all over his face, and he screamed and ran away. He never tried to scare her again after that. Santa Claws had given her a gift.
Every year, on Christmas Eve, Georgie never left her bedroom, and always had a plate of cookies ready. Just in case.
About the author:
Emmie Christie’s work includes practical subjects, like feminism and mental health, and speculative subjects, like unicorns and affordable healthcare. Her novel “A Caged and Restless Magic” debuted in February 2024. Her short stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Infinite Worlds Magazine, and Flash Fiction Online.
Find Emily:
Website
Facebook: @EmmieChristieFiction
Instagram: @EmmieChristie33
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