“You have never seen the like of me before!” exclaimed the Spirit of Christmas Present who resembled the very image of Jimmy Carter.
“Never,” Trump made answer to it. “Yet you somehow appear familiar to me, Spirit.”
“Touch my robe!”
There emerged from scores of bye-streets, lanes, and nameless turnings, innumerable people, suffering from injuries and diseases.
“Spirit,” said Trump, after a moment’s thought, “I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people’s opportunities of innocent health care.”
“I!” cried the Spirit.
“You would deprive them of their need for physicians and medicines, often the only way on which they can be said to heal at all,” said Trump. “Wouldn’t you?”
“I!” cried the Spirit.
“You seek to close off these persons from health care providers solely because they cannot afford health insurance,” said Trump. “And it comes to the same thing.”
“I seek!” exclaimed the Spirit.
“It has been done in your name, or at least in that of Christian charity,” said Trump.
“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know the Spirit of Christmas, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in Christ’s name, who are as strange to the true spirit of Christmas, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not Jesus.”
“Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,” said Trump, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe, “but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?”
“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. “Look here.”
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Trump stood tall with his best Il Duce expression of triumph on his face. Having the children shown to him in this way, he said, “They are fine children,” for Trump could think of no reason to not lie. “Spirit! are they yours?”
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city in the distance. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Trump.
“Is minimum wage sufficient to live on?” asked the Spirit, turning on Trump with his own words. “Will tax cuts of the wealthy few and the great corporations trickle down to the poor and needy that haunt our cities and towns?”
The clock bell struck twelve.
Trump looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it not. Lifting up his eyes, he beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him.
“Looks like the Spirit of Fake News,” said Trump.
To be continued...
Mary wasn’t your ordinary unmarried pregnant teenager. This kid had moxie and connections in extremely high places.
In Fulfillment, the secret concerning the baby in Mary’s womb attracts evil spirits, a woman-hating ancient Israeli monster named Lilith, a king, soldiers and a would-be lover all bent on destroying her. Mary’s journey, while steeped with betrayal and the foul stench of the ultimate demon, is a setup for an even bigger story. She discovers a lost love found, the promise of a newborn king, and a wealth of new friends from a dwarf with the heart of a warrior to the young mother who loses her husband and children in a bloody massacre. Laugh, cry and gain new insights into the Christmas story as you read Fulfillment.
“The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth so that he might devour her child the moment it was born.”
Revelation 12:4b
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Paperback copies make excellent Christmas presents, especially for those who enjoy an original horror story. Tell them it's like Stephen King or Frank Peretti visiting the first century.
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