Warning: Gory scenes await you. Merry Scary Christmas!


The cool winter air crisply and strongly embraced the headiness of freshly-baked bread before bumping shockingly into the iron-clad metallic tang of blood.

Dan, who had followed these olfactory clues to his wife’s location, was perturbed but not surprised to find her standing at the kitchen island, frozen as a statue. Diana was staring at a chunk of half-thawed out meat on the counter, her Japanese santoku knife in her outstretched hand.

Pausing in the shadows at the threshold, Dan absently registered that Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was playing softly on the radio, competing with the powerful hums of the industrial strength freezer and refrigerator. The window was let open to allow in fresh air, exorcising the room of the unpleasantness of thawing meat.

“It’s not going to bite,” he said softly, trying not to scare her.

His efforts were in vain. Diana reacted badly, jumping at the sound of his voice, her eyes opening wide to stare now at him. Like a deer in front of headlights, Dan thought automatically, and regretted.

Despite her strong reaction, she made the effort to place her knife carefully on the table. Breathing hard, she gripped the countertop and glared at Dan. In a tone frostier than the air outside, she said to him, “Not funny, Dan. Not funny at all.”

“Sorry sweetheart, but I was standing here for over two minutes and you didn’t notice,” Dan said, contrite. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Diana said. She busily moved things about on the counter, neatly restacking labelled herb bottles and arranging dirty utensils in a straight line.  

Dan weighed his words carefully. On the radio, Rudolph's attributes and adventures were being described in full Christmas cheer by the singer. Finally, he said firmly, “You know that she had to die.”

“I know, but…”

"Then why are you feeling guilty about it?"

"I'm not feeling guilty about it!" Diana exploded. She brought her hand down hard on the counter, dropping an empty metal plate on the floor with a clash. The plate made that peculiar woong woongsound as it rolled around in a circular pattern before finding a spot where it decrescendoed anti-climactically in a series of clatters.

Diana waited until the plate silenced before she bent down to pick it up. Dan stood patiently by the kitchen sink.

"I'm not feeling guilty about it," Diana repeated, softer this time. "I'm just ... afraid of people finding out."

"We should maybe talk about this," Dan said, unsure now of where the conversation was going.

"No," Diana said forcefully. She took a deep breath and explained, "It's not that I don't trust you. I'm just not ready yet."

She raised her head and looked at him imploringly. Dan moved over to where she was standing and gave her a hug.

"Everything will be alright. You’ll see," he said. It was the kind of impotent statement that people make when they're at the end of their rope.

Diana stood stiffly in his embrace but nodded, almost imperceptibly. After a moment she shrugged him off and started to slice the meat on the counter.

“I’ve got to get rid of the meat before it starts to thaw out completely. It gets difficult to cut up then," she said in a business-like tone.

"And … I don’t like the smell. Of the blood,” she confessed quietly, as though she was talking to herself.

Dan backed off. He watched her work with the knife that was his gift to her the Christmas before. Her face was set in the kind of emotional limbo that people have when they’re angry or upset and trying hard not to show it. A full choir hid in the radio and sang Handel’s Messiah lustily in piano.

“Well, if you need me, I’ll be upstairs tucking the girls in with a nice Christmas Eve bedtime story…”

Dan kissed her and she let him. As he made his way upstairs, he heard the gentle thumps of thin metal on wood. It punctuated the air confidently, determinately.


Two evenings before Christmas, Diana, Dan, and their twin eight-year-olds girls were jostled this way and that by impatient shoppers driven by guilt.

A party she was hosting had some last minute additions and Diana needed to pick up her orders from the downtown area shops. While she was buying a new butcher's knife, a cheer arose from the crowd outside. Santa was coming up the snowy street, waving from a deer-drawn sleigh that was incongruously borne by a motorised float.

"Mommy, Daddy, look, there's Santa on a sleigh with reindeer!" said Sherry.

"That's not Santa. It's the Mayor. And those are not real reindeer," said Brandy, executing a medically impossible eye-roll. She was right, as usual. The reindeer were five does, decorated with fake antlers and harnessed to the sleigh, bells and all. The lead doe had a blinking red nose.

"All I want for Christmas is some 'magina-a-tion," sang Sherry sarcastically, performing an identical eye-roll.

In order to forestall a brilliant twin ice-storm, Dan suggested that he take them to the town hall, where the Mayor was giving out gifts to the children. Diana agreed to meet them there, after she visited the butcher's.

"We only sell butchered meat," Diana said to herself softly, parroting the plain, hand-drawn words displayed over the meat counter.

She had always been drawn to the sign and not because of the red-brown splashes on the top right-hand corner, reeking ominously of blood. The concept puzzled her. What other kinds of meat could they possibly sell?

She posed the question to the butcher, a strapping young man of about thirty who cut, sliced, diced and minced beautifully, but had nothing but meat on his brain.

"I don't know," he said with a frown. "That sign's been there before I came here."
He kept on frowning as he filled her order.

At the cash-machine, he suddenly said, "You know, I think it has something to do with double-dead meat."

"What?" Diana said, shocked and confused, her moneyed hand wavering in between them.

"The sign," said the butcher, as he pointed over his shoulder.

"Oh."

"I think it means that we don't sell double-dead meat. You know; carrion. Sometimes, animals drop dead mysteriously. They could have been sick."

"Ah."

"Our meat is from healthy animals, shipped in frozen but fresh from the slaughterhouse. Butchered; not found," he said, insistently.

"That makes sense," Diana said. She was about to leave when the butcher cleared his throat loudly.

"Or ... Maybe it means that we only sell meat from animals that had already been slaughtered and cut up before it got here."

"Huh, isn't that what butchers do?"

"Well," the butcher said uncomfortably. "Old Man Tate and I have a secret." Old Man Tate was the town's previous butcher, who had retired due to old age, but who still had a partnership in the store.

Diana looked at her package suspiciously. "This isn't mystery meat or anything is it?"

"No! No, nothing like that," the butcher said, gesticulating wildly. "We guarantee the quality of meat that we sell, but it's not as fresh as it could be."

Again, Diana looked at package.

"Please, don't misunderstand. What I mean is, the meat could be a lot fresher if we got live animals and did our own slaughtering out back. If we did that, instead of saying that we sell 'butchered' meat, we can say that we sell 'fresh' meat," the butcher said, marking the inverted commas in the air with his fingers.

He beamed at her, proud of his convoluted logic. "But we don't sell 'fresh' meat, we only sell 'butchered' meat," he added, pointing out the obvious.

"I think I see your point," Diana said uncertainly. "Out of curiosity, why don't you sell 'fresh' meat?" she asked, unconsciously making the same finger movements in the air.

The butcher squirmed and Diana wondered if those were tears in his eyes. "I, ah, worked in a slaughterhouse before and it was horrible."

"I remember, they were teaching me how to slit the cow's neck ..." Here, he made a violent slashing movement as if to show Diana how it was done. She stepped back automatically.

"And the foreman, he was getting the cow ready and when he raised the knife, I felt sick, like I needed to throw up. So I tried to look somewhere else because I didn't want to see what he was doing. And ... and I looked into the cow's eyes. I shouldn't have. One moment there was something there and the next ..."

He left the sentence hanging as his own eyes glazed over, remembering the nastier bits of his education.

"I couldn't do it. That was my last day on the job. I quit before they could fire me. I wandered around, jobless. Who'd want to hire a butcher who couldn't slaughter an animal? And then I found Old Man Tate. He understood me. He understood the knife."

The butcher absently caressed a chunk of honey-cured ham in his arms, speaking quietly, almost in a whisper.

"The feel of the meat, soft and yielding as it cleaves cleanly under our blade ... it's a strong experience, always different, always good. Like, like a religion, you know."

"And the rituals, sharpening the knives, different knives for different meat, different cuts for different meat ... It makes me feel safe. Secure."

He stopped speaking as he put the ham in its usual place. He glanced at Diana, noting her trepidation

"You think I'm strange, talking about my craft this way. I'm proud of the meat I've carved and put on display here. They're like children to me. It gives me anxiety if I think they're going to the wrong people, to be used in the wrong way."

"Me and Old Man Tate, we're alike. We cut meat, but we don't enjoy cutting up animals.

Then, he bent forward, so close she could feel his breath on her face.

"I may be a butcher, but I don't kill," he said.

And then he straightened up and turned away, seemingly embarrassed by his outburst. He wished Diana a good day and a Merry Christmas, murmuring into the wall.

She smiled at his back, brightly. Without realising it, he had solved her problem. Thanks to the butcher, she was cured.


Diana made her way happily to the town hall through delicate flakes, which were dropping from the sky in sparkly fits, powdering the ground evenly with castor sugar prettiness. Sounds were muted save for the crunch and squeak of fallen snowflakes, surrendering beneath her boots. It was like walking in bubble wrap, she thought.

As she trudged through the picture perfect snow, she repeated a new mantra in her head. It was her cure and salvation. She thought:

Only use butchered meat.
Only use butchered meat.
Only use butchered meat.

Her precious sense of calm was suddenly disrupted by a terrible, loud crash, followed by another, and then, panicked screaming. The sounds came from the direction of the town hall. "The children!" she said out loud. She started running, her shopping bags flapping by her side, beautiful snow all but forgotten.

She turned the corner and was greeted by chaos. There was a dais set up at the steps of the town hall, where Santa was to sit on as he addressed the crowd. It was in shambles. The float had backed up against it somehow and the entire dais had collapsed.

Diana couldn't spot her children or husband in the crowd. She made her way to the knot of people milling about near the float, praying that her family wasn't buried in the disaster.

She gagged when she reached the scene of the horror. There was a pungent smell of fear and blood in the air, and somehow, Diana knew that it would stay with her forever.

From what she could see, the same jolt that had destroyed the dais had also dislodged the sleigh from the float, causing it to fall on the unfortunate does. At one glance, Diana saw blood, bone and the exposed flesh of deer. Three were already dead in the carnage.

There was the sound of air bleeding from tyres. It was coming from one of the deer, its chest cavity pierced by a sharp piece of broken wood. It was still alive, barely. The legs were kicking, like it was struggling to get up, but it was impaled and could not move. Blood spurted and burbled.

The deer still breathed unevenly. Short, high-pitched sounds escaped whenever it tried to inhale and its exhalations were a bloody rattle. The wheezing and rattling went on for several seconds, almost an eternity to the watching Diana, and then, the doe was still.

In grievous pain and sensing that its kin had just died, the final deer started keening. It was a long, drawn out wail, sounding uncannily human. Unearthly, loud and pathetic, it cut through the spine like a buzz saw.

Diana saw that the deer was still crushed under the sleigh, its hind legs and back portions looking oddly flat. She knew the wound was fatal.

"Somebody, do something," Diana said, desperately, feeling sick at the sound of the dying deer.

But everyone just stood there, still as statues. It was the kind of situation nobody was really prepared for. Someone said something about calling the vet and someone else mentioned the butcher. Nobody moved.

Diana raised her hands to cover her eyes and realised that she was still holding on to her shopping bags. Something large and hard in the bag hit her on her shoulders. It was the butcher knife she had just bought.

Instinctively, she removed the knife from the box and ran to the doe. She crouched and looked into the doe's soft, brown eyes. I shouldn't have done that, Diana thought immediately.

"This will hurt, but only for a bit," she told the deer.

She gulped. She needed to make this clean. No hacking around, she told herself. Remembering the butcher's story about the cow, she held the knife out and positioned herself properly. The doe had stopped keening, as if knowing that the pain would soon end.

"Diana."

It was Dan. Diana paused.

She remembered the look in the doe's eyes. Quickly, she felt the neck of the suffering beast, finding a rapidly beating pulse. Marking the spot by eye, she summoned all her strength and slashed the deer's throat open.

The deer struggled in its dying throes, and then, mercifully, it stopped moving. The eyes were closed, calm and relaxed, as though merely in slumber. Its nose was still blinking. It was Rudolph.

In the heavy silence that followed, Diana, still holding a bloody, almost brand-new butcher knife, said out loud, "Double-dead meat." Tears ran down her cheeks.

She stared numbly at the falling snowflakes, noticing for the first time, that some fell straight to the ground in a dead weight, while others fought bravely against gravity, trying to go back to the heavens. The recalcitrant snowflakes resembled the movements of moths by the dying flame.

Dan appeared beside Diana and pulled her into an embrace.

“Darling,” she whispered in his ear. “Remember that Christmas Day ten years ago, right after we were married? And we didn’t have an oven, so I had to carve up the uncooked turkey into tiny pieces for stove top cooking?”

“Uhm,” said Dan, unsure where she was heading.

“Well,” Diana said, in a matter-of-fact way, “It made me evil.”


Their first Christmas as a married couple, Dan and Diana ended the day sitting on the couch by the fireside. Diana had spent the afternoon de-boning the turkey, doing it with military precision after a close examination of the proper diagrams. She had methodically disassembled the turkey and stored them in the freezer, recipes already forming in her mind on how she wanted to use them.

Her head rested on Dan's shoulders and she caressed his muscular chest. She thought, "Meaty. He'd probably be nice as a medium rare steak."

Sleepily, she kept caressing him, and had another thought, "If we're not going to eat it straightaway, I could store those parts in the freezer. I hope Dan doesn't mind eating that for dinner next week."

The next morning, they were both stiff and sore from falling asleep on the couch. Diana was about to tell Dan about her semi-conscious thoughts, but something held her back. What if she scared him away? She shrugged and went on with her life.

But as Diana became more accomplished in the kitchen, she found that the thoughts were getting more intrusive. Her husband's calves and biceps became candidates for curry and his thighs were earmarked for sausages.

One day, she ended up running to the bathroom in dry-heaves. She was gazing lovingly into Dan's eyes, when she found herself thinking about how you'd have to remove the corneas from your mouth, after sucking out the jelly in fish eyes. Ironically, Dan thought she had food poisoning.

The thoughts positively attacked her after her children were born. Try as she might, she couldn't help but think of their soft, sweet, baby flesh as meat for the pan.

Diana stayed awake for many nights, stuck in a living nightmare of obsessive thoughts, always worried that one day, she'd come out of a daze and find that she had cut up her family and stored them in saran wrap in the freezer.

She hid her misery well. Outwardly, she was the perfect wife and mother, but to her, it was the shell for the perfect monster.

There was no help anywhere. How could she confide such things to her pastor, or a counsellor, for that matter? Dan was a kind fellow, a sweet gentle soul and wonderful husband, but even he would have his limits, Diana thought.

She doubted that she could go up to him and say, "My love, I think of you every day as pieces of meat. In fact, I've got your hindquarters marked for a nice lovely roast. How would you like that for tomorrow's supper?"

Diana suffered alone for many years, always hoping that help would be just around the corner. Hearing the butcher's story was the first time in a decade that she actually felt free of the burden. She thought that if she stayed away from taking a life, it would prevent her from carvng up her family.

Mercy had been her barrier and her cure for less than ten minutes. And then mercy became her downfall. The best laid plans...

Kneeling in blood-soaked snow, clutching the warm, breathing body of her husband, Diana wondered if she had room in her freezer. She started laughing hysterically.


Meat minced better when half-thawed out, Diana thought. Her knife, thin in profile and made of Damascus steel, sliced easily through the meat with a satisfying crunch. She set up an easy, flowing rhythm, slicing the entire block within a few minutes. She increased her pace, mincing the meat mercilessly, adding in other ingredients as the meat thawed out with the friction.

The raw, primal scent of uncooked meat was starting to get to her. She reached for the herb bottles, expertly dashing in a little bit of this and a little bit of that without measurement. The herbal scent now emanating from the mound of minced meat calmed her slightly.

She pushed the sleeves of her sweater to her elbows, and closing her eyes, plunged her hands deep into the mound of minced meat and other ingredients. Her hands felt cold and slimy. There was a squelching sound. She mixed the ingredients together tentatively, gently, then with more force and confidence.

Kneading with both hands, with her back completely involved, Diana treated the pliable material with great contempt, first squeezing, then slapping, and then pounding the mixture with her bare palms. When it stuck together in a round ball, she picked it up over her head and threw it down unto the countertop with all her strength. BAM!

Dissatisfied, she again squeezed, slapped, and pounded the meat, once more slamming it unto the counter with a loud BAM! Unto the countertop it went again, and again, with a need as visceral as a scream, as primal as a moan. BAM!
BAM! BAM! BAM!

Heaving, Diana sucked in great gulps of the fresh cool air that was streaming in the window. She stared at her bloody hands. The loaf of meat sat placidly on the countertop, while Carol of the Bells faded away.

Slowly, as though she was dancing through chiffon, she picked up the cutlery for washing, taking extra care with her beloved knife. The water flowed on the blade, mimicking the knife’s delicate suminagashi marble patterns. She dried the knife with a soft cloth, putting it carefully in the drawer.

“I’m sorry, Dan,” she whispered. “It’s too late.”


On Christmas Day, Diana greeted her six guests at her door. She was dressed in her best Christmas sweater, her hair light and radiant around her head like a halo. She led them into a beautifully decorated dining room; with french windows and a patio view of the backyard.

Corelli's Christmas Concerto was playing in the background, and the fireplace was warm and sweet. The dining table was laden with food, silver and matching Christmas table sets.

Diana invited her guests to tuck in. Shortly after appetizers, one of them looked up and asked, "Diana, where is that charming family of yours? Please don't say that we've taken their place at the table!"

She smiled in reply. "No, no. They had to ... go somewhere. Please. Don't worry about it. They'll show up halfway through lunch. Here, have a meatloaf. I'll be out with the turkey in a short while."

The guests tucked into the meatloaf.

"Wonderful meatloaf," said another guest. "This is amazing. What is it made of?"

Diana paused.

"Venison," she finally answered.

"It is sumptuous. Perfect," chimed in another guest.

"Just like you and your family," gushed another guest.

"Yes, just like my family," said Diana, smiling serenely.

Everyone laughed and had a good time. At the end of the party, Diana raised her glass in a toast.

"Merry Christmas everyone," she said.

"Merry Christmas!" they echoed.

Dan and the twins were not present at the end of the party. The guests were too distracted by the food to bring them up again.