"Gruesome Carol"

It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas, yet all I felt at the moment was complete distaste for everything I saw. The blinking Christmas lights wrapped around a house with such delicate precision. It appalled me to find people being so obsessed with a holiday that they'd happily waste their time for a single, average night of the year.

The Christmas music was another thing that bothered me tremendously. Why must so many people do so many covers of Christmas songs we've heard a million times? There is no single version of the songs that stand out over the others. It's just one thing I wish so dearly the world understood, there's no reason to go all out for a single holiday. Well, besides Halloween, that's the one holiday everyone should celebrate instead.

The night of Christmas Eve, I was working toward falling asleep in my bed when I heard a knocking at my bedroom door. I checked my phone to see that it was ten at night. Who would be here at this hour? And who the hell let someone into my house?

I ran to the corner of my room and grabbed a wooden baseball bat before calling out and asking who was there. There was no response, only another knocking. I slowly approached the door. I turned the knob and pushed the door open. I jumped back and braced myself for swinging my bat at the person at the doorway, but I stopped myself. I saw what I could only explain as the ghost of my dead mother. She had died so long ago, the extreme pain I felt in my chest when I saw her.

I went to embrace her in a hug, but she simply phased through me. She moved to the middle of the room and turned to me. She told me I would be visited by three ghosts. My soul was crushed. Someone had taken the image of my mother, made her speech and movement all robotic, and made her say some ridiculous line from some Christmas story. I ran to my living room and swung my front door open, searching for the culprit. Instead I was greeted with another ghost, this one I didn't recognize.

The ghost told me he was the ghost of Christmas past. But before he told me some dumb story, I asked him what was happening. He informed me that the small group he was apart of, they would greet a new scrooge like person every year and take them on a journey to reawaken the Christmas spirit. I told him there's no way it would ever work on me.

The ghost grabbed my hand and suddenly everything went black. When I woke up, I was flying high above the clouds. I recognized the town below, it was the town I grew up in. More specifically, the street I grew up on. I peered down on the streets below before I felt my hand slipping from the ghost's grip.

I began to fall and hit the ground hard. I stood up to find that not only was I in the middle of the road, there was a car, my childhood car, headed straight for me. It hit me and the child sitting in the backseat was flung from the car. moments later, the kid was sitting in a pool of his own blood. That's how I ended up here.