R. Clifton Spargo is the author of the novel Beautiful Fools, The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (2013).One entry on his list of the twelve weirdest stories of Christmas, as shared at The Huffington Post:
Joyce Carol Oates, “Christmas Night 1962″Read about another entry on the list.
A young girl recounts a nightmarish Christmas. After a day spent at her grandparents, a scene of frenzied domestic violence ensues, the father attacking the mother for her sly laugh. Somehow in the fray the young girl and her raggedy doll (a present from Grandma) get tossed across the room. The Christmas tree topples, ornamentssmashing everywhere. The girl’s leg is broken, her raggedy doll bleeding from the head. The mother backs off the husband with a pistol and plunges drunkenly out the door, driving into a blizzard, inching the care through snowdrifts, slaloming on iced-over roads. At a hospital bright with Christmas decorations and a tree surrounded by beautifully wrapped presents that don’t have anything in them, a desperate mother without insurance information, worried that she’s been treated like white trash, draws her gun as she demands that someone, anyone, help her wounded child.
--Marshal Zeringue
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