'Tis the Season (almost) -- your favorite Nativity photos here!

[Rev. Rye]

Well, here's one I ended up writing in the last paragraph of a story I wrote:

There is a photograph of what happened that day. If you see it, you'll see Mary lying in her hospital bed, Mom on her left side, Dad on her right, and, on the other side of the frame, the doctor standing next to the two nurses, hands on a tray containing, dead center in the frame: a jar containing a dead, fleshy octopus.

It might not sound like it, but I did everything in my power to make sure that there were parallels with this story, from the eclipse that sets up the action in the first half of the story, the impossible pregnancy, the characters' names (I went so far as to look up the names Catholic tradition gave to The Virgin Mary's Parents, Joachim and Anna), a creepy evangelical neighbour whose strange attempt at blessing her is mistaken for an act of pedophilia, also the cruciform pattern the neighbours went into as they tried to get Mary ready after she had a concussion (leading to the discovery and removal of the octopus, the real cause of her condition.) In this light, I think it would be natural to see the parents as Mary and Joseph, the doctor and his nurses as the Wise Men, the Octopus as the Christ Child, and Mary perhaps as the Holy Spirit, because why the fuck not?

Also, as a strange note, this was the first paragraph.

While Bing Crosby was dreaming of a White Christmas, Mary was kneeling at the throne of her porcelain god. What was wrong with her, she thought? She couldn't be pregnant. She'd never gotten past first base with a guy. Certainly not since the time she spent with Joey in Florida.

Kind of reminds me of this:




For the record: No, I did not lift this from Stranger Things, and could not have done so, since the first draft (and this was always the opening image of the story) was written in mid-2013, a full three years before the series dropped on Netflix. And, for the record, I don't think the Duffer Brothers went to Columbia, either as students or teachers. Also, the initial impetus for the series came from watching a film that only premiered months after my story was initially finished. I guess a youth vomiting in the bathroom while a Bing Crosby sings "White Christmas" is just one of those universal storytelling motifs.