Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (2 page)

Now the Son, once Dionysus, spoke. "Michael," He said, "you know that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are never to cross paths. It's one of our Father's most solemn injunctions."

Michael hung his head. "It only happened once, for a moment, in Idaho, Christmas of 1969. They had the barest glimpse, then she vanished and it was over. Except that they began . . . doing things on their own."

"Christ!" God peered down in disbelief at the earth below. His all-seeing eye traced the effect of the lapsed cherub's suggestion, short range and long, watching it ramify over three-and-twenty years. "Oh Jesus, will you look at 1991, it's all
three
of them. They're going haywire down there!"

"Easy, Father. No need for apoplexy. I'm sure it's fixable."

And it was.

At a cost.

*****

The twenty-fourth of December, 1970.

The Tooth Fairy, wearing nothing but a necklace of huge blood-flecked teeth, squatted on the eastern shore of her island and looked out to sea. A storm was kicking up out there, a real corker.

Good, she thought, chewing over the remains of an eagle she had dropped from the heavens with a high-flung silver dollar. Whatever resentments she harbored against the being who these days called himself God, she liked the way he made his creatures: with the tastiest part, the skeleton, on the inside.

Staring seaward, she mapped out the evening's itinerary. As always, instinct told her which dwellings to visit, which bedrooms to enter, which brats to loom over, longing to rip the teeth clean out of their skulls like moist sweet kernels of corn, but confined, alas, to the meager leavings beneath their pillows.

But this night, this Christmas Eve, the Tooth Fairy had a second agenda. Centuries of God-imposed isolation had created an itch inside as deep and omnipresent as a toothache. She sorely missed the old frolics through glen and dale, the thud of randy hoofs at her heels, the goat-breath blasting hot against her shoulderblades.

She needed a lover. Someone all-giving, warm, and cheery, whose stamina went beyond that of mere mortals.

She needed Santa Claus.

In the days before God had laid a veil of forgetting over his mind, she had enjoyed him often. A thing of danger and abandon he had been then, beautiful to behold and incredible to couple with.

She pictured him as she had seen him in Boise the year before, kneeling by the tree in the Sloane residence off Cloverdale Drive, his distressingly cherubic face radiant with philanthropy. The memory made her quim throb. Before this night was out, she vowed, she would enjoy him once more.

Until then, the ocean harbored a treasure of its own, something that would do as a stopgap.

Digestion's clink and jingle sped the masticated eagle through her system. Inside her rectum, thin disks of metallic waste stacked up neat and heavy as rolled coins. There in the sand, as the wind skimmed along the shore and blasted her full in the face, she relaxed her sphincter and shat a quick clatter of quarters.

Relieved, she rose to outface the wind.

Into the restless surf she strode. The undertow ate at the seabed on which she stood. Her palms lowered to the churning surface, straightened toward the horizon, then swept about until her thumbtips touched her navel. Again and again, as sheets of rain whipped at her cheeks, she repeated the movement, chanting words of summoning.

In an instant, the waves vanished, the wind dropped, the rain relented. It fell about her in a gentle mist, pelting the calm sea with the muted sound of hundreds of herons taking flight. Long before her drowned sailor surfaced, she saw him rise from the ship, blink his lidless eyes, look down in wonder at the tattered remnants of his body. The force of her lust had drawn his manflesh up into the crude semblance of an erection. That same lust now made what was left of his limbs thrust and kick stiffly through the sea in a mockery of swimming.

Thigh-deep in water, holding sea and sky at bay, the Tooth Fairy watched his approach, skin and bones breaking the surface not fifty yards away.

Closer, he rose to a lurch. Two things about him drew her attention. The first was the ragged column of flesh at his groin, nibbled here and there by small sharp teeth but serviceable enough, she judged, for one last tumble in surf and sand.

The second was the seductive gleam of bone. The nearer he came, the more aroused she grew at hints of the stuff peeking out coquettishly from behind curtains of flesh: a succulent patch of skull, a long curve of rib, the lower half of one femur begging for the viselock of her jaws.

Above all, the teeth.

They grinned across his skull, a full set of them, molars, bicuspids, canines, incisors, laid out in logical array like a mapped sampler of chocolates. All hers from crown to root, from enamel to pulp.

When he was six feet away, she released storm and ocean, letting them fury about her once more. Then she grabbed him, dragged him to the beach, and straddled him, filling her hungry channel with raw dead flesh. As she rode him, she prised apart his jaws and sucked seawater from his incisors.

By the time orgasm seized her, her mouth was stuffed full of dead man's teeth. Yet even in the high delirium of gustatory and clitoral ecstasy, part of her mind leaped into the night ahead and fixed on the jolly old elf in his bright red suit, remembering the generous gifts that hung beneath that shiny black belt of his, behind the large red buttons of his fly.

She knew what she wanted for Christmas.

I. Betrayal

Give me chastity and continency—but not yet.

—Saint Augustine

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

—Oscar Wilde

A lie is an abomination unto the Lord and a very present help in trouble.

—Adlai Stevenson

1. Seduction in Three Acts

With Anya's kiss tingling warm upon his cheek and her grandmotherly smile of devotion dancing in his eyes, Santa Claus bounded through cheering throngs of elves and lifted the worn leather reins of his sleigh. He loved their heft, how they took to his hands like tendons stretched from his snorting stamping team straight up through the brawn of his arms to his shoulders.

As far off as his eyes could see, elfin hands lifted lanterns high and elfin voices—strong, high-pitched, and spirited—beat back the silence of the night. "Farewell, Santa!" they shouted. "God speed! God bless!
Auf Wiedersehen!
"

"Merry Christmas to you all!" boomed Santa, to which his elves cheered and sent their caps jingling skyward. The whip cracked smartly over his reindeer, whose powerful bodies responded as if to ravenous hunger. "Into the sky with you, my four-footed wonders!" came Santa's command. "Let's not keep our beloved little boys and girls waiting a moment longer!"

Random snorts and stamps assumed order and purpose. Nine antlered heads drew a bead on the stark silhouette of treetops pasted against the sky above the skating pond. Nine harnessed bodies, taut with sinew and muscle, surged forward. Like a blare of sirens, the fiery effulgence of Lucifer's antlers split the dusk in twain. Eighteen pairs of hoofs beat soundless against the night breeze, tossing up divots of wind.

They were away.

Shifting the reins, Santa raised his right hand for a final wave to his friends and loved ones. His wife beamed up at him from the porch. In her eye, a tear. In her hand, a handkerchief edged with bobbin lace. For an instant, he saw only her, felt only the love that bound them in wedded bliss.

Santa knew their holiday separation took its toll on Anya, she delighted so in his company. He missed her too, working Christmas Eve with no one but the likes of Comet and Cupid to talk to. But he loved the world's wee ones with all his heart, and he knew that Anya loved them too. For the sake of the children, then, a loss of consortium, bitter though it was for them both, had to be endured.

Behind him, his wife and fellow workers grew tinier. The stable, the workshop, the cottage itself became as miniatures folded into the night. Santa leaned forward into the jingle of bells and the busy haunches of his team, feeling the sleigh's dip and rise in his testicles.

"That's the way, pretty ones! Straight on into the night!"

A wrist-snap. The impulse traveled the length of his whip, stinging the air over a forest of antlers. Lucifer, his lead reindeer, scattered a guiding white light in all directions, and the delicious aroma of vanilla dipped and rolled along the backs of the remaining eight. Overhead, stars huddled into the depths of night like millions of impulses eager to be acted upon.

As always, and thank God for that, the winter world which opened before him kissed the hem of perfection and the children were his to bless on this most wondrous night of the year.

*****

The first time Santa encountered the Tooth Fairy was barely six million residences into his rounds, in a modest ranch house on Elm Street in North Merrick, New York. He had just finished setting out gifts for the Draper children—Bobby, ten; Davey, eight; Anne Marie, five—and had his face pressed against their Douglas fir, hung with lights and ornaments. Santa loved the hint of forest in his nostrils.

When he rose, she was standing there where the living room spilled into a long dark hallway, wearing nothing but a pair of yellow panties, her necklace of outsized teeth, and a beguiling smile.

He drank her in, all of her carnality at once, glory enfleshed. Her necklace spoke boldly, its wide arc of glistening white teeth sweeping from shoulder to shoulder, large and canine every one. Like rough surf, they slapped cruelly at her breasts, which thrust out full and defiant. Her nipples seemed forever aroused, pointed and prominent as constellated stars, with fire to match.

Her eyes flared seduction.

Santa gave a sharp cry as a shockwave of sensuality engulfed him. He had known of course that the Tooth Fairy existed, had even on occasion cast a kind thought her way. But her sudden appearance in the flesh set off ancient echoes in his mind, brought forgotten aromas to the fore, thrilled him in shameful ways.

"Santa Claus," she whispered. Her splayed fingers framed the bright stretch of fabric that hugged her sex. More discovering than covering was that splash of yellow, so guileful the gold silk, so tight its stretch from pubis to perineum. Santa, his mouth dry as gauze, watched her arousal darken the cloth from canary to maize to mustard.

He ached to look elsewhere, anywhere but there. But something told him he was staring at the true core of his life, long forgotten, and he couldn't tear his eyes away. He felt the Clausean kindness drain from him, turning him light in the head and pendulous at the groin.
Anya is not going to like this; nosirree, not one bit.

"What—?" His voice was thick as rope. "What are you doing here?" He sounded lost already and that stirred anger in him.

"Look at me," she commanded him.

"No. I mustn't," said Santa, but he couldn't look anywhere else. She hovered there over the carpet, beauty and terror wrapped up in one tantalizing package.

Santa's sack, which enroute from house to house grew heavy with gifts behind him in the sleigh, now hung slack and exhausted from his hand. In spite of himself, beneath the vast bulge of his belly, his manhood grew tightfisted as a skinflint.

She dipped a hand beneath the silk. Her body flexed. "Oooh, Santa, I wish this hand were yours." Her urgency gripped him like a fist of fragrance.

He shuddered. "You'd better stop that right now."

But she kept at it, burning the dark lasers of her eyes into him as her left hand joined her right, writhing this way and that with her passion.

An agonized inner voice warned him to shun the Tooth Fairy, to turn instead to the task at hand. But Santa chose not to hear it—or hearing, not to heed—fixing his ears on the immensity of her moans and gasps. Even the impatient jingle of sleighbells out on the lawn scarcely registered.

His lips moved.
Shame on you
, he thought he said, but the blood was pounding too loud in his ears to know whether he spoke at all.

Then she peaked. Above the exudacious swell of her breasts, her mouth elongated into a stretched oval and she unleashed the hell-hounds of passion from the depths of her throat. "Oh Jesus God," she gasped. They issued from her, invisible guttural mongrels nipping like flames of frost at Santa's ears. She clawed at the yellow silk, rending it, ripping it away. Her hipbones writhed into view, then the taut skin below her navel and a few stray hints of curls. The shredded cloth lemoned away like a streak of sunlight and flew across the room into Santa's face.

All sights vanished then, and all scents but one: the aroma of her arousal, fecund and fleshy, soaked into the weave of her undergarments. Santa snatched them from his face, greedy for the sight of her. But only a visual echo, fleeting as a phantom, hung in the hallway.

He starved for the sight of her, he wanted her in the woods, any woods, a copse of trees, hell a manicured backyard by moonlight would do,
Good God, what's come over me?
, he wanted her up against a tree, his hands locked around her shoulders, bark biting into his arms, his bloodpulse thrust up into her,
No I'm Santa Claus
, his muscular backlegs tense and tight as his hoofs struck sparks from exposed roots, channeling into her, feeling her thighs grip his flanks, feeling the rich spring air wash in and out of his lungs.

"No!" he screamed, more astonished than angered.

He pressed the torn cloth to his face and filled his lungs. It was a pure whiff of peace and joy, the lushness of forest and tidepool. It called out for procreation, for the rough and tumble of rutting lust, the insistent commingling of generous fluids.

Sobbing, Santa fumbled at the big red buttons of his fly. Out sprang his sex, its tip moist with pre-ejaculate. Silk tatters he fisted about it, rubbing as the bony hand of a science teacher vigorously strokes a glass rod to demonstrate the wonders of static electricity. Into the wet folds of silk the jolly old elf shot his spunk, voluminously, with great pitch and moment.