The Ghosts of Christmas Future
December 14, 2014 § Leave a comment
Barrelhouse is celebrating the Christmas season with a special Ghosts of Christmas Future issue, in which writers revisit characters from their favorite holiday specials and stories and see how they are holding up in their later years. Featured so far: Gina Myers on the Wet Bandits from Home Alone; Alissa Nutting on Della and Jim from “The Gift of the Magi”; Dave Housley on the Peanuts gang; Erin Fitzgerald on Flick from A Christmas Story; Tom McAllister on Karen from Frosty the Snowman; and my favorite so far, Ravi Mangla on Hermey the Elf from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer:
For Hermey, those snowy, lamp-lit evenings had lost their luster. Once, as a younger man, he would frequent the queen bars in the Village: bottomless glasses of bourbon and crushed up Klonopins. But he was six years sober and Karim could sense when he had been in the proximity of liquor. (He didn’t mind the nannying. Besides, those bars had been bought up by uptown carpetbaggers and stripped of their louche decadence.) He was supposed to call Karim when he finished with his last patient—an injury attorney with an impacted molar and low threshold for pain—but had forgotten to follow through on his promise.
Neil Serven 
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