Christmas is hers. They sold it to America that way. Every shiny bauble, every twinkling light, every melodic warble. All hers.
Backstage, she primps in the mirror. She tilts her face until her good side shows. She will not greet the hoi polloi any other way. She cycles through several facial expressions until she reaches the desired one—a smug smirk that’s somehow incredibly sexy. It’s the type of expression that might lead the public to guess what’s in her head, but that would be futile: She is somewhere else, a Potemkin Village of emotion.
The caterwauling of an alarm, impressively high-pitched but mechanical, startles her. Is there a fire? No, it’s just the sound of her own voice warming up, she realizes.
She steps on stage in a blood red dress sparked with spangly bits, strutting through the fake snow like she’s soaked in her own carnage and surveying a world she decimated. Her acolytes pick her up and move her around the stage. She is above such things as choreography.
As she opens her mouth to sing, she ponders the past—the gaming of the charts, the singles sold at deep discounts to get her to the top. All those necessary calculations. Tilting her face at the camera at the only acceptable angle, she smirks and seduces as she sings the greatest hits—a fantasy, a hero, a sweet day. The Christmas trees tremble with the blunt force of her ‘90s prom themes.
Then at the climax, she sings the first notes of her big yuletide hit, what the masses came to hear. As she runs up and down the first three octaves, the void yawns wide. It is like outer space—no light, no life. Just the endless emptiness of absolute zero cold.
Outside, the moon turns to blood and the sun turns to ashes. And the Queen of Christmas slouches toward Bethlehem.
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